Hi, hitting the heart button is a really good & free way to support these Offerings. Thank you! <3
Next week is the twenty-second Sunday Meeting which marks the completion of our sojourn through the major arcana sequence with The World. I actually can’t believe we’ve gone through them all. Back in February meeting every Sunday morning for the next five-and-a-half months felt like a huge commitment. But the meetings have been such a delight to prepare for, facilitate, and participate in each week. Thank you to all who’ve attended.
Since I’ve been trying to rest my hands and arms as much as possible, I’ve swapped out my morning journaling with coffee for reading instead. This week I finished Ami Harbin’s book on disorientation, and started Kathleen Higgins’ very different but adjacent Aesthetics in Grief & Mourning.
One of the ways I’d describe what we do in the Sunday Meetings is that we sit with strange images and orient ourselves in un-usual ways. I’ve always felt like there’s an important capacity that is honed by sitting with the tension of ambiguity in images and stories. It’s a capacity that I like to think could be useful when faced with something bizarre or uncertain in life, allowing us to glean some sort of meaning and to trust that discernment.
Higgins writes about this, and how engaging artworks often involves the invitation to navigate both at-times unresolvable tensions and challenges to one’s typical orientations.
In grief—which can be full of tensions and disorientations that either seem or are unresolvable—it may be helpful to remember that to the extent we identify as aesthetically-oriented beings who love art, we may also be ones who “do not need to settle on a stable interpretation to make any sense of what is happening” and “can let divergent impressions arise within us without a sense of complete orientational breakdown.1”
In the case of artworks that unfold across time—as is the case looking at a sequence of tarot cards week after week, for example—Higgins notes that we are invited to “reconsider earlier impressions by the introduction of inconsistent material,” which may be helpful in honing these capacities.
Whereas grief can challenge the griever’s sense of competence in making sense of things and thwart the need for assurance that resolution is coming, Higgins notes that artworks “are often designed to make it somewhat challenging to monitor developments,” and a history of engagement with them can therefore remind us of our capacity to reckon with experiential tensions that are uncertain or not reconcilable.