The sixes, sevens and eights from all minor arcana suits (left to right: cups, pentacles, swords and wands) arranged in a grid of 4 x 3, from the Morgan Greer tarot deck.
Transcript
Hello friends. I hope this finds you well wherever you are. That’s never a given, and moreso now in this time of great insecurity, uncertainty, danger, and anxiety. I am thinking of all of you.
I know I’m not the only one thinking about this, but I have been dwelling on the whole idea of “being okay”. Specifically, the kind you tell people about when they ask How are you? Binaries are flimsy in the best of times, what more when our current human experience has really been forced far beyond all of our comfort zones, into the realm of the collective, the connective, the true abundance of this blue space marble we’re all on. There’s no good or bad or okay or fine. I’m finding these days my moods change like water, but they are moving through me like breath. People get scared of things like “moodiness” or “feeling too much” because they fear being at the whim of their emotions, losing control. Like the waves of your feelings will carry you right out of yourself and everything you know. On the one hand, if you reposition yourself here as the water the currents move through, you’ll realise you have every ability to continue being, as different, repeated feelings pass through you. On the other, what’s so wrong with being what you don’t know?
I’m thinking also right now about the story arc in the minor arcana that comes after the Fives. Fives as midpoint in a minor arcana suit can indicate a disruption in our paths — a hurdle, challenge, barrier, conflict, lesson, initiation. It’s the terrain changing and calling you to apply the tools you have or to learn new ones. I did a tarot reading recently, and a lot of sixes and sevens came up. And when I was thinking of this newsletter, my current experiences, I thought about the Seven of Pentacles, the Six and Seven of Swords, the Six, Seven, Eight of Wands, my current stalker card the Eight of Cups. There’s a sense of charged change in these cards, the kind of change that has a long shelf life before it kind of settles, the kind of change you undergo where you kind of have to accept that for a little bit, you’re not always going to know who is looking back at you in the mirror.
Recently in therapy, I admitted my desire to break down. I felt that I was doing everything right when it came to dealing with grief, with taking care of myself, with giving myself space, time, kindness, gentleness. Friends would tell me they admired my level-headedness, my grace, my stability through turbulence. And within all of that, within my gratefulness that I was coping and coping well, I yearned for a level of destruction. So far in my 32 years, I’ve not been a person that falls apart. I’ve been the person that’s there when someone else falls apart. Or that’s been the story, anyway.
So the very idea — of being a person that goes on a bender, that actively wants and chooses to lose themselves, lose control, and succeeds — it’s seductive and heady, a very Seven of Cups vibe. I almost feel desperate for it at times. There’s this leaving behind. The figure sneaking away with five swords, leaving behind two like getting away with whatever you can carry, throwing your six swords in a boat, turning your back on your impressive cups collection and getting the fuck out of dodge, to someplace where the water’s different, where you maybe get to hold different shapes in your hands. I told my therapist, I have this burning desire right now to find something new, and along with that a cold fear that I am not capable of that finding, because I feel and fear the fibers of never letting go of control is too woven into my very structure.
My older sister and I discussed — also recently — our shared talent for compartmentalising, the ability to portray strength in the different rooms of our lives so long as the parts of us that felt pained or weakened was locked away somewhere unseen or unknown. Our childhoods were very different — there’s 10 years between us — but they were branches of the same tree. The cards I meditated on in the final months of 2019 were the Five and Six of Cups, and that feeling of a bittersweet nostalgia has lingered with me well into 2020. Rifling through memories that are photocopies of photographs of photocopies, thumbing through cracked spine diaries and softening the papers with repeated handling. Wondering if this new thing I want is answered by something very old inside of me.
I’ll wrap up, or hope to, with one last conversation, this one with my beloved friend Dhiyanah Hassan. She offers tarot reading and energy work sessions, and I decided to try out the latter with her — something I’d never experienced before. I’m dealing with heartbreak on a lot of levels right now, and after I tell her about that, we set on a path of me working on a better connection to my own heart. In the golden sacred space Dhi held for both of us, my hands on my chest, my eyes closed, she used her voice to guide and ask me to go down into my own body, into my own heart. I imagined it a little bit like that Inception elevator scene but you know, way less stressful — no dead wives. This in itself, the intention and movement into myself, was powerful. The doors opened to a kind of rose garden, that morphed into a lofty greenhouse, part Glasgow Botanical Gardens, part Paris’ Grand Palais.
The cards that are grounding me in this time of devastation and resilience are the Seven of Pentacles and Eight of Wands. The Spacious Tarot’s version of the Eight of Wands is eight beautiful fiery shooting stars in the dazzling night sky. The image of the gardener in the Seven of Pentacles standing amidst their greenery, contemplating their crops, the land and fruits and seeds they cultivate, is one that resonates with me a lot; I find it both aspirational and affirming. I feel beams of energy radiate outward from me — some days desirous and expansive, some days splintered sharp and angry, other days still dark and loathing. I stand rooted in repose, some days hopeful, some days frantic and fearful, other days merely still.
After I wrote the first draft of this newsletter, my friend Vlada shared an excerpt of a beautiful poem on Instagram, The Seven of Pentacles by Marge Piercy. And after I saw it, it was a breathless moment of happy, joyous coincidence. Marge writes:
“Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.”
The journey from the sixes through the sevens through the eights can take up all the space in the world. Having now known pain, having now known loss, all for having strived and tried and worked and bled and cried for what we once had, we are asked to continue, changed. Empty of the things we used to carry, that we maybe even liked carrying, or were at least used to carrying. There’s so much to figure out and work on, so much space to tumble through — daydreams, desires, determination, escape, departure, celebration, remembrance, fighting, stumbling, unshackling, doing the every day work that keeps our lives moving.
In the big sometimes it helps to hold on to the small. Me myself — I stumbled upon these simple words a few weeks ago, and my body-mind closed around it like an oyster and a pearl. They’re from Angelique Power, President of the Field Foundation of Illinois. Angelique tells us, “This moment is changing us. And so, let us be changed.”
Maybe that’s the best answer we have right now to that age old question of How are you?
Until the next newsletter. Take care, my friends.
Links
You can commission art from Dhiyanah or book a tarot reading or energy work session with her!
Fundraiser to support Malaysian trans people who are economically affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. If you can’t make transfers to Malaysian bank accounts and still want to help, email me and we can work something out
Seven of Pentacles keeps popping up for me! Found Pop Tarot via Danny Lavery, and loved this format (playlists & songs + tarot). On 7P: “It’s about actually doing the thing you always say you’re gonna do when you have a big choice to make. […] At the end of the day, ignoring your intuition because something seems more right on paper isn’t going to serve you.”
This beautiful read on learning to swim and figuring out queer identity by Jazmine Hughes
"How many centuries more do you have to live in a place before the line between them & us dissolves? That’s what many people in Malaysia are asking, as they list the sacrifices & contributions of their ancestors [online]. I refuse. I will not beg to live in my own country.” Firecracker read on mixed-race identity by Deborah Germaine Augustin
Thinking a lot about queerness lately! It is a very rich world of an ongoing figuring one’s self out. My friends Liy and Shafina recently rec’d this video by ContraPoints on Shame and it very gently pried my brain and heart open
My recommended coronavirus reads: “It was a coping mechanism, she tells me, that served me very well, and that I am now allowed to unlearn, as the threat has passed and I am a grown-up. Intellectually, I understand this, but I still feel that it is difficult in practice.” Jennifer Down and "It seems extra cruel to make time slow down when all we want to do is get through this time faster, but trust me: that we will get through this very slowly is only thing of which I’m certain." Esme Weijun Wang
Previously, the third installment of Tarot Letters. I answer 3 questions, which all (again) have this same thread running through it — all 3 querents are looking around at where they’re standing and asking “Is this right?” You can send questions for me to do short readings for here.
If you’ve been enjoying the newsletter and would like to support the work, here’s my tip jar. Comments, shares and likes are always appreciated! Thanks so much for reading 💌
Six, Seven, Eight