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I’m teaching Tarot for Change: An Introduction to Using Cards for Spiritual Practice twice next month, June 1 and June 8.
I’m resting this week but have four things to share.
They might be related, but I don’t have the bandwidth to figure out or articulate how.
This is what I can offer today. There’s no audio.
1. C.S. Lewis’ grief journals—A Grief Observed—from after his wife Joy Davidson died really are stunning. I’ve encountered snippets from them in a number of philosophers’ writings on grief, loss, and disorientation this past year, and having now read some myself I see why.
Lewis, who is perhaps best known for the Narnia chronicles, was a devout Christian and brilliant thinker who struggled with his conceptions of God in the wake of Davidson’s death. He wrote that while his belief in God’s existence was never at risk, there was a danger he might ultimately conclude that this agonizing grief “is what God’s really like.”
I especially loved this passage on the difficulty of “learning” death:
“It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter. I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?”
2. A little personal thing I’m working on is letting go of the need to be afraid. I’ve noticed that sometimes when I rest or trust bad things happen. But I also know, on at least one level, that the relationship between my resting and being unsafe is not causal.
Horse riding is one of the ways I’m practicing this. If I am in a posture of mistrust when something spooky happens—ex. I’m hunched over, bracing against, trying to control, forgetting the natural ways of my joints—it seems I am actually more likely to get hurt and not less.
3. Ami Harbin’s book Disorientation and Moral Life is good. It’s helping me make sense of what I went through last year and how all the confusion and pain and topsy-turviness tenderized me, to use Harbin’s word. I actually do feel more sensitive and empathetic than I have in the past, which is hopeful; at times I thought I might’ve finally done my heart in with this last one.
Harbin’s thinking is not that disorientations transform us into beings who magically know the morally right thing to do in a final or ultimate way, but that they can prompt us toward “new ways of relating to, caring for, acting with, and relying on other people” in some situations. This feels true for me too.
Some of the most notable and severe disorientations I’ve experienced have occurred through expectations that care would be taken, when for whatever reason it wasn’t. On the other hand, receiving care from elsewhere during such times has sharpened my own sense of the transfiguring capacity of care. And that sense forms a value, which I now get to make a life with.
I often have dreams where I’m trying to convince people of things they don’t want to acknowledge. Usually I’m hurt and the other is more interested in proving they’re a good person than attending to that. And I’m trying to prove something too. There’s a sense of frustration in the dreams, for sure, but when I slow down I can see that it’s mixed with a renewed commitment to care, and checking in, and consent, and becoming real with myself and with others.