Hello Dear Readers,
I’m doing something a bit different this week, which is making this free monthly Offering in observance of Fall Equinox and then taking next week, which would typically be reserved for the October Offering, off.
I’ve had a really busy few weeks between starting a new job, glazing and firing my first round of pots at the studio, and preparing for the Autumn Equinox Open House at Open Meadows Farm here in Eastern PA, which was yesterday.
It was a glorious day full of firsts: My first time teaching in person since the pandemic; my first time presenting two new talks, Tarot as Ritual and Journaling Change with Symbols; and my first time doing a sundown telling of the Irish legend Tuan Mac Cairill by a fire for a group.
I do think today’s essay is plenty to hold you—and whoever these Offerings are made to in hopes of winning favor with—over until the second weekend of October when I’ll be back with weeklies.
It poses some big questions about ways of relating to wounds that are more processual than solution-focused and the perhaps “foolish” wisdom that lives in allowing wounds to live without always yielding to the (v. understandable) compulsion toward healing.
In questioning some of the basic assumptions of a myth that I know, love, and have told and written about often, my hope is that you might be inspired to question some of your own worn stories, as well. Seasonally speaking, it’s an opportune time for it.
Onward,
JD
Image description: A hand is holding Pamela Colman Smith’s Wheel of Fortune Tarot card in front of a beige-colored round placemat woven into a spiral pattern.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
Something about the cooler weather has me over-extending. Time has felt scarce, and my routines tough to maintain. When time is tight I get to thinking about cunning. My favorite definition of cunning is the one that says when you experience an undeniable truth you will beg, borrow and steal. You will re-arrange your whole life, forsake everything just to serve what is real (Deardorff, 2004).
When I think about cunning, I think of every trickster who is within and among us getting crafty with grief cause there’s no time to do it, but since it’s real it gets tended somehow. And all the artists getting creative about impossible tasks that have to get done, or working toward shapeless unnamed things in tucked away, stolen moments.
I think grief itself is a trickster, if it’s true that grief is a re-arranger, and I think that it is. I have plenty of evidence to back this claim but for now I’ll simply say that when a thousand darknesses wash over Tuan Mac Cairill he goes to sleep and wakes up someone else.
And I don't know about you, but I would be a lot more willing to dive head first into sorrow if I knew another life was waiting, just over that ridge of one solid night’s sleep in total acceptance. All that, grief can do.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about routines and rituals, which I wrote about some last week. And about how repetition—like a behavioral pattern or a story we tell over and over—can be a defense mechanism, a way to fly under the radar of the Divine, or to evade what might arise spontaneously in a moment, if we dare to go off script.
Maybe two days after I made that Offering I was revisiting Byung-Chul Han’s Disappearance of Rituals for some language to include in a talk called Tarot as Ritual. Han makes this distinction between repetition and routine that I think is really interesting.
Routine is more to do with what I spoke to last week—behavior that becomes automated to mitigate the element of risk. Routine regulates intensity, which is a useful thing about it when you’ve got enough intensity to begin with, and need something to temper it. Routine can take the edge off.
For Han, repetition is different in that it creates intensity. He writes, “Repetition discovers intensity in what provides no stimuli…The person who expects something new and exciting all the time, by contrast, overlooks what is already there” (2020).
The other night I confessed to a friend that I regularly judge myself for how often I go back to the same books and stories and even quotes, because somewhere I’ve taken a narrative that if I don’t have new language all the time what I do won’t have value.
This is wrong, and I know that it’s wrong. I know because I’ve been reading different versions of the same story—the grail legend—for two years, which is really no time at all for this sort of thing, and I don’t grow tired of it. In fact, it gets more and more interesting, more provocative and troubling the more time I spend.
I’d argue that repetition is actually full of new things since reality’s always changing. I think intensity itself has something to do with the tension between the expectation and what’s actually there. I say this in part because, as I’ve written about before, I’ve done the same yoga poses in the same order nearly every day for more than a decade and because my body is different everyday there’s an intensity to it, an attachment to how things could or should be. It can be quite emotional!
I also look repetitively at the grail legend, and each time something surprises me. Not something new, per se, but a hole opens up that wasn’t there the last time. Like right now I’m reading Chretien de Troyes version, and have been stuck on this one scene for months.
Perceval is getting inducted into King Arthur’s court—which is his ultimate dream—and then Cundrie, the tusked sorceress, shows up to tell everyone how unworthy he is. Why? Because he went to the grail castle and didn’t ask about the grail. Which was the one thing that would’ve healed the wounded king, and restored the land.
These are Cundrie’s exact words:
“Those who see their change but never grasp it, hoping for better, must suffer for their failure…What an unlucky fool! How wrong to sit there, silent, when just a simple question could have cured that rich and noble king of his suffering…” And she goes on to lament that the king will never be healed now, “all because of you” (1999).
I’ve encountered this scene in various tellings and have spent a lot of time thinking about it, especially when my book came out, or when I get a lot of new sign ups for my newsletter, or when I get chosen for things or given responsibilities that I don’t feel prepared for. Cundrie comes to me then, just like she did Perceval. The shame-bearer, always eager to take me down a notch.
I’ve been stopped at this scene for weeks, some guardian at the threshold, holding me up. I think about how, driving across the country two years ago around this time I heard Daniel Deardorff say in a recording that death is a point of transaction, like paying a toll, something has to be relinquished in order to advance on the path. I wonder what about my reading of this scene, or the story as a whole, needs to be relinquished.
Because there is a unique confluence of ideas and emotions and visuals in this moment that were not here before, a question emerges that I hadn’t considered. After weeks of silence, the threshold guardian finally asks me: What if Perceval’s not doing the thing that would’ve healed the wound is the wisdom? What if the popularly accepted lesson of this story, that everything will be well and healed and redeemed if you can just do the perfect, correct thing, is actually wrong, misleading, dangerous?
Myths can be wrong, too, right? Absolutely. What if everything that happens after Perceval’s not asking the question that would’ve healed the king’s wound is just reflecting a wound-phobic and solution-obsessed society with no tolerance for sickness or death, that hates deformity and lacks imagination?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. They need a lot more feeding. What I do know is that Perceval is a fool. I also know that fools are often wise, and medicine-bringers, and arrive as “glory cloaked in shame” (Deardorff, 2004). That means they are misunderstood by the dominant culture, and whether I like it or not I know that includes me.
What if Perceval’s simply allowing the King’s wound to exist without needing to fix or solve or make it go away, holds something sacred inside?
These are huge questions. They are space-making questions and they are thickening questions. They recognize that this story exists—was told, written down, re-read over hundreds of years, interpreted and is still being worked with to this day—inside a landscape that favors particular states of being as proper while marking others as wrong or abnormal.
What if on some level Perceval understood that “healing” wounds is not the only way to relate to them. What if his not doing the thing that everyone said he should've done was wise in a backwards way. What if Cundrie, whose appearance is described even by the narrator of the story in every manner of denigration and disrespect, shamed Perceval because she herself had been the victim of so much shaming.
These questions insist on the alternate. They take nothing for granted. They are daring, audacious, probably offensive, and definitely problematic in that they trouble something that is so settled it takes years sifting the landscape with a fine-toothed comb to even notice that it’s there.
These questions outdo themselves. They are much more than detectives gathering information, they stimulate feelings and new thoughts. When we ask them we become tricksters, making worlds. We go where one must never go, and become infatuated with something we would have been repulsed by last week.
But if there's a way to re-interpret something that would bring forth meanings that were more useful for our purposes, these questions intend to find it. No harm in just looking. We can always go back to the old way if we find them to be dead ends.
Besides, to entertain or even adopt a new meaning doesn’t negate the old ones. It adds texture and complexity and roughs up what we want to be smooth. Which is probably a more precise reflection of reality than any neat narrative that avoids contradiction could ever be.
And what better time than Fall Equinox to turn an old tale on its head. When every living thing is a chorus singing our change and release back to us, the sun a composer scoring all our transitions. I think it’s a perfect time for questions like these.
I’ll leave you with that, and I’ll see you in two weeks. Happy fall to all my northern hemisphere people. <3
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
You’re reading a free Offering for Fall Equinox, 2022. I make these Offerings weekly for those interested in supporting the effort with a contribution of $5 a month, $50 a year or a higher amount of your choosing. To sign up or to upgrade your free subscription, hit the subscribe button below.
Paying subscribers have access to the archive of weekly Offerings dating back to the seven-week exploration of the Cupid & Psyche myth that began in July 2021. We started making audio versions every week in October 2021, which you’ll get access to as well.
Sources
De Troyes, C. (1999). Perceval. Yale University Press.
Deardorff, D. (2004). The other within: The genius of deformity in myth, culture and psyche. Inner Traditions.
Han, B. (2020). The disappearance of rituals. Polity.
I found you through your book and have enjoyed how you have combined the art with the science. it speaks to me. Thank you.
Your reflections here remind me of the recent movie "The Green Knight". Sir Gawain spends the whole time trying to avoid that transaction with Death, and becomes an empty and selfish person while he wears the magic belt that protects him from harm. And then, it seems, he gets to rewind it all, and run towards the wound he ran away from. We don't know what happens next but it feels like an opening into possibility and freedom.