Offering: March 2025
Surprising encounters (plus 📯 a spring event announcement! 📯)
I have a few spots left for one-on-one sessions in March. To read more about sessions and what to expect, click here. To book an appointment, click here.
It’s been twenty years since my last New England spring and it’s just as enchanting as I remember. This was a really snowy season here, which is exactly what I longed for, and I’ve learned more than I ever bargained to know about winter precipitation, ice, and the magical properties of salt and sand.
Now the days are getting longer, the snow out back is still deep but without its crisp outer shell, the woodpile has dwindled, and the various beings that have washed up on the shore are disclosing themselves aromatically, so that a walk at the beach is once again a feast for the senses.
In the years since I’ve been gone I’ve developed a deep affection for winter, but this time of year on the coast is too good to resist. Amidst a lot terrifying changes, I’m feeling miraculously receptive to the surprises of spring.
I’ve been working closely with the Tuan Mac Cairill story for a lot of the winter, which is an Irish legend that I read as being to do with loss and transformation. I plan to keep working closely with Tuan, but now that it’s March I’m also making room to dream a little about my favorite spring tale, The Grail Legend.
The grail story starts with a life-changing encounter, a surprising event that exposes the protagonist Perceval to a future1 that he is excited by but unable to make sense of until he goes on to live it. Spring feels this way to me, too. There’s a sense of impending bloom2 that brings excitation but never certainty. In all its shooting and bursting forth, springtime feels like a description of being hospitable to the strange and—having given oneself over to that strangeness—allowing oneself to be carried beyond what is given.
It’s spring in Perceval’s Barren Forest at the start of the tale, and his heart is leaping with joy. The conditions are ripe for the sort of event that will burst through the newly thawed ground that he stands on, seizing what’s been, carrying it away toward something undeniably other. It’s there in that spring forest that Perceval has the encounter that changes the course of his life.
I’m being intentionally vague about the disconcerting surprise that philosopher Alain Badiou says is the basis of love’s starting and flourishing3. I’m doing this because, admittedly, I’m hoping to entice you toward an event I’m offering later this month. But what I will say is that the encounter Perceval has in the forest that day is a lot like falling in love, in that for him it “unleashes a process that is basically an experience of getting to know the world.” Perceval had never left home before that day, but leaves forever soon after.
I’ve often thought about “The Fool”—the major arcana numbered 0 in the tarot—as an event like the one I’m describing: A sparkling moment; the stranger who comes bearing life-changing news; the arrival of an unforeseeable future; something that changes the ground it arrives to. A rupture, for better or worse.
As is often the case with tarot cards, “The Fool” can be seen as both an image of something—in this case the surprising encounter—and an instruction on what to do with it. To better understand “The Fool”—or maybe more accurately, to remain open to its many possible and indeterminate meanings—I’ve thought about the grail as a relevant story, with Perceval in the role of the fool.
He experiences a number of surprising encounters after that first one, but he also is the surprising encounter at times. When he strolls into King Arthur’s castle, for instance—a complete stranger in a weird outfit his mom made—he demands to be knighted, despite knowing nothing of knights and then is offered a spot at the roundtable. Infuriating some, bewildering others, and from the rare one, drawing a laugh. There are of course many ways people respond to surprising encounters; fury, confusion, and amusement are only three.
One of the things that makes the tarot cards so interesting to me is that they are this perfect combination of cohesive and strange. They are images of course, not narratives, but in some sense are somewhat parabolic. To an extent, they’re controlled by those who narrate their meanings4, but nonetheless invite us in as participants. By offering an excess of meaning that resists any fixed or single interpretation, they have the potential to open up new ways of seeing.
On parables, philosopher and religious studies scholar Luka Trebežnik writes:
“The Kingdom of God is not ‘what happens’ in the story but how we do not understand it: a misunderstanding that the parables provoke despite the completely coherent narrative…This form of metaphorical process opens an otherwise matter-of-fact situation to an open range of interpretations and to the possibility of new commitments.5”
Whether a story or an image like a tarot card retains that capacity to open possibilities through misunderstanding seems a matter of discerning those odd moments, which are easy to miss when the smoothness of a narrative is enticing us toward that intoxicating sense that there’s one fact of the matter and it’s all really quite simple. The meanings of most stories I know—parables, or not—seem to be at least somewhat contingent on whether the teller leaves in that conflicting detail that might pop the core dilemma out of its socket, casting the whole thing inside a new light.
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