Offering: February 2022
The space between death & rebirth, reflections on intuition & on intention
Image description: A rural Eastern Pennsylvania woods in the winter, full of bare trees and dead leaves on the ground. There are cut-outs of five characters from Pamela Colman Smith’s Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, from left to right they are Death, Ten of Swords, Judgment, Queen of Swords and The Magician.
Dear Friends,
Winter’s going by too fast if you ask me but I’m grateful for fleeting moments of excitement for spring where I think of all the eggplants I’ll grow and how much better of a gardener I’ll be this year. Just a few quick things before the Offering:
I’ve closed my calendar for one-on-one sessions. Maybe not forever but for now. I’ll offer appointments on occasion so do keep an eye out.
There are still spots in Tarot 101 on February 13. Tarot Reading is sold out but I’ll offer it again soon. Continually thankful for people’s interest.
If you like these Offerings and either a.) want more of them, b.) want to support my work or c.) both, I also make them weekly for paid subscribers. There’s a button to upgrade down bottom.
Lastly I’ve got a new visual thing going—see above—brought to you by my desire for place-based ritual, long walks, and having more time on my hands these days, thank heavens. Also to the glory of rural PA in winter.
Thanks so much for being here. I’m wishing warmth to you all.
Jessica
To listen to me read this offering aloud, click here.
On retreat for the coldest parts of winter I’ve been thinking a lot about direction and nourishment and feeling one’s place in the world and change. I’ve been noticing how conflicted I often feel, and wondering whether that tension is just something I’d better get used to.
Multiple times a day I’m with an obsessive yearning to pick a thing and go deep with it but then the ten thousand things stay knocking at the door. Somewhere along the way I learned not to turn them away, and as exciting as it is to make their acquaintance it’s also a bit overwhelming. I wonder constantly if I’ve given up depth for width, and if so what are the consequences.
I think about specialization and about academia, about peers and advisors, and I feel thrilled. But that excitement always comes with a haunting, too: Years of peripheral seeing gone screaming down the drain. A panoramic view hocked in exchange for a gilded microscope.
In the moment that I’m writing this, I’ve decided to stay right here. Which is to say that right now I’m choosing to live alone and play host to the constant flux of raucous visitors: trauma theory, theology, ecology, phenomenology and religion. I’m comprehending about one-thousandth of what they’re each saying, but choosing to believe there’s still value in public reflection.
For instance, through the ongoing internal procession of hens pecking hungrily at breadcrumbs I came across Shelly Rambo’s book Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. First of all, I love this subtitle, A Theology of Remaining. I think it’s gorgeous. If I read nothing else I feel like that arrangement of words on their own are an irresistible summons.
Shelly Rambo is a theologian at Boston University and in this book she critiques the ways that the central story of Christianity—of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection—neglects the middle space between death and rebirth.
For her, the experience of trauma “reconfigures the relationship between death and life” altogether so that the neat containers we have—this here is life, that there is death—are inadequate. She writes, “Death is not something concluded and life a fresh start and a new beginning.” And that to see death and life as in contrast to one another is to “fail to witness the experience of trauma.”
Rambo’s questions about that space between—which is held in the Christian story by the Saturday between Jesus’ death on Good Friday and resurrection on Easter Sunday—led me to Pamela Colman Smith’s Ten of Swords which I saw as an opening.
I’ve written a bit before about how this card—which shows a human body face down on the earth with ten swords in the back and the sun setting in the distance—is not really an image of death in the sense that the thirteenth major arcana, or the Death card, is. The latter shows Death in action, and we know that by the fact that Death is given a body and a horse to ride.
In the Ten of Swords, on the other hand, it’s pretty clear that the dying is done and there’s nowhere to go just yet, if ever. And it’s uncomfortable for me probably because I have no real story about what that period of time is about, or how to handle it. It’s not easy to witness.
—
I think because of the limited and extremely humbling experience I have doing clinical work as a graduate student, trauma always feels a bit beyond touching for me in my writing. Trauma is complex and mysterious, vast and diverse, and something I feel I know and understand very little about.
I try to step lightly when I write or speak about trauma because it’s so easy to trample and barge and get it wrong. I try to walk the line between getting too caught up in the belief that things I write should or can apply to everyone, and never wanting to to be hurtful or invalidating to the oceans of experience I’m not seeing.
Interestingly, Shelly Rambo’s book is kind of about this. Which is maybe part of why it feels so important for me to be reading it. Because this foundational story of Christianity fails to truly witness the complex experience of life post-trauma, cultures and individuals who have been born and raised by this story may also struggle to do so.
Reflecting on the early work of philosopher Jaques Derrida, Rambo writes that “surviving is not a state in which one gets beyond death; instead death remains in the experience of survival and life is reshaped in light of death—not in light of its finality but its persistence.”
And so, for Rambo, “To remain and to be one who remains is a central challenge in trauma…‘Witness’ is an accompanying term to ‘remaining’; it describes a way of being oriented to what remains, to the suffering that does not go away.”
For me this is sort of what it feels like to look at the Ten of Swords. Whatever it is that’s being witnessed here exceeds and defies any possibility of a neat definition and requires remaining. Further, unlike in the story of Jesus, our bodies do not resurrect after trauma, rather we are tasked with the labor of remaining in them, moving forward while carrying and bearing the marks of those experiences, all the days of our lives.
Rambo further notes that the linear narrative of death, life and resurrection fails to honor “the experience of survival in which life is not experienced as new, or as better…” She continues, “Insofar as resurrection is proclaimed as life conquering, of life victorious over death, it does not speak to the realities of traumatic suffering.” (Judgment)
There is so much beauty in this book, so far, and there are quite a few pages available to read on Google Books if you’re interested. I’ll conclude today's share with a set of questions Rambo poses that I also feel are a vibrational match with Ten of Swords:
“What does it mean that life is connected to an event of death? What does it mean to remain in the aftermath of that death? What form of life arises there, if any?”
—
Maybe because I’m reading Spirit and Trauma I’ve also been thinking a bit about the way I often relate to memory like it were some kind of deep freezer, like a cryogenic container where bits of time go to live and remain there unchanged. Which, I don’t think they do.
This way of relating to psychic life seems maybe an inheritance of rationalism. And I have a pretty limited philosophical knowledge base but what I think this means is that it has roots in a belief that we can know all things objectively.
When that belief is applied to our human experience, we start to speak about psychic things—like memory, the unconscious, or intuition—as if they are objects, like pieces of Tupperware. Containers where other objects live, fixed and relatively unchanged over time.
Isn’t it true though that psyche is living and breathing and moving and changing and foolish and brilliant and fickle and despairing and ecstatic, one at a time and all at once and in any given minute? It’s a philosophical and psychological question and also a spiritual one.
Aren’t there things we just can’t witness, name or know?
—
I’m also reading Phenomenolgy of Perception by French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty who was said to have spent his life asking the question “What is seeing?” I’m bringing this up because I want to talk about intuition, and seeing relates to intuition because the etymology of the word intuition comes from “look at.”
Unlike rationalism, which takes intellectual logic and imposes it onto life, Merleau-Ponty wanted to “begin anew from the brute experience…to reinterrogate the moment that the thought about seeing destroys seeing, turns it into its object, and simultaneously becomes lodged there.”
I feel like this latter part—about turning what one sees into an object—is kind of what we do when we later say “I ignored my intuition.” It’s like having a really compelling fantasy about a thing that doesn’t line up with the reality. And how the person or thing being witnessed in that process is objectified by it, and doesn’t get to be who or what they actually are.
And how it gets increasingly difficult from there, for the one with the story, to see anything to the contrary. The thought destroys the seeing and gets stuck there. A classic and common example of this is falling in love with someone or some thing’s potential.
I’ve fallen in love with apparitions more times than I can count and what I remember most about all of them is not the succulence of the fantasy—and there were definitely some juicy ones—but the very treacherous time I had making that rough trek back to the brute reality of what was actually there. And the reckoning required, to free my body from the sandbar where living in a dream had marooned me over time.
In hindsight—as one does—I’d look back and say, oh I ignored my intuition, again as if intuition were this omniscient force with all the answers. A Tupperware container with absolute truths tucked inside, and all you have to do is look. Seeing it this way is not realistic, which for me has meant it’s not been useful.
A couple weeks ago I wrote a quick caption on High Priestess for social media which said that the question of how to know intuition from anxiety is one that I think asks too much of intuition, as if its function is to make us all-knowing. I also asked, what if intuition is not a matter of absolute knowing but instead of receptivity to the revelation of new moments?
And I feel like Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about “the ability to begin anew” could be deployed, here. If intuition were processual—if it were about attuning to each moment and responding to that with a certain clarity of seeing—then it would be level to life, a thing to practice, and to hold onto.
—
So I’ve been curious about intuition. And there’s another word I’m curious about, too, which is intentionality. In my early days of reading Tarot I remember associating The Magician with intention-setting a lot, when I’d give readings.
For Maurice Merleau-Ponty, intentionality was not a mental process, where one takes out their sword and imposes a story upon the world—but rather a “skillful bodily responsiveness and spontaneity in direct engagement with the world.”
I love this so much because it seems to say that instead of imposing some self-generated idea on the world, I get to start with what’s here and see what in me rises to meet that. In this way, intentionality moves away from being this isolated and individual process and toward a way of knowing the world.
I think it would be easy to interpret this as a suggestion that we should be without visions or goals. And if it feels that way I should say that I don’t think that’s a good suggestion, really. I also increasingly don’t think making broad suggestions in a newsletter that goes out to thousands of people is a good idea, either.
But I do think the suggestion to let intention and vision emerge from immanence; from the fertility of immediate experience, of what’s actually happening, what’s truly needed, and of what might be required to respond well to it, is at the very least worth thinking about.
—
I was critical of rationalism in this offering because I think it’s worth asking about what we might miss when we relate to psychic experience as a series of objects—trauma, memory, the unconscious, and so on. But I want to also say that there are a lot of really useful practices that leverage a sense of objectivity in relation to internal life, in order to cope with it.
For example mindfulness is often really helpful in regulating emotions and tolerating distress because it’s a way of taking a detached, nonjudgmental stance (Queen of Swords) in relation to intense thoughts or feelings that you might mistake for facts and automatically act on.
Another example that comes to mind is practices that make thoughts into arbitrary, insignificant things. Like singing obsessive thoughts to the tune of the happy birthday song in order to take the charge out of them.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but if getting through another ten minutes without acting out a compulsion that I’m otherwise very clear I don’t want to be doing is wrong—philosophically or otherwise—well then I guess I don’t want to be right. :)
You’re reading the free monthly Offering for February 2022. I make Offerings weekly, in both text and audio format, for paid subscribers. If you’re interested in upgrading your subscription, hit the button below. And do share if you feel moved to.
See you next time. <3
Sources
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2013). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge.
Rambo, S. (2010). Spirit and trauma: A theology of remaining. Westminster John Knox Press.
"our bodies do not resurrect after trauma, rather we are tasked with the labor of remaining in them, moving forward while carrying and bearing the marks of those experiences, all the days of our lives. "
This is key in processing life after (?) traumatic experiences, something I am doing right now.
How to cope with the realities of the emotional, intellectual, spiritual and in some cases physical effects these experiences have had on us.
I understand now why escapism, in it's many forms, work best when they create masking experiences. I can ignore/avoid the pain I am feeling if I am engaging in this activity which overwhelms me in a physical/sensorial manner...
Unfortunately unprocessed trauma doesn't go away; it continues to develop further complexity by creating a murky stew that we're too afraid to either taste or throw out so we keep it bubbling away on the back burner of our conscious mind
We occasionally stir the pot when we're piling on some guilt and shame. These emotions stem from both the original trauma and the escapist behaviors we've engaged with and they add another layer of flavour to the stew
Ending now with a quote from Cranes in the Sky, by Solange, which I believe is to be an apt ode to escapism
"I tried to drink it away
I tried to put one in the air
I tried to dance it away
I tried to change it with my hair
I ran my credit card bill up
Thought a new dress make it better
I tried to work it away
But that just made me even sadder
I tried to keep myself busy
I ran around circles
Think I made myself dizzy
I slept it away, I sexed it away
I read it away"
"I’ve fallen in love with apparitions more times than I can count and what I remember most about all of them is not the succulence of the fantasy—and there were definitely some juicy ones—but the very treacherous time I had making that rough trek back to the brute reality of what was actually there. And the reckoning required, to free my body from the sandbar where living in a dream had marooned me over time."
This has penetrated my entire being this morning. I have been thinking about the process of walking the bridge between the two, what is it like when you are still in the middle, looking forward toward reality but still feeling and remembering what it was like to be on the side of fantasy.
And if practicing intuition involves "attuning to each moment," then every step on that bridge requires presence, in both mind and body, and interconnectedness with what's happening on that bridge - what the air feels like, what the bridge is made of, what animals or people or objects you encounter.
Thank you endlessly for this meditation, so meaningful and beautiful as always Jessica!