Image description: A hand is holding a tiny, handmade Tarot card made with ink and watercolor by Sam Spetner. The card is The High Priestess, #2, and features two pillars—one black and one white—with a moon in the center.
I’m teaching Tarot for Change and Deconstructing the Tarot next month! Check out dates, details and fees & register here.
“You think killing is hard? Try healing something. That is hard. That requires patience. You can break something in two seconds. But it could take forever to fix it. A lifetime, generations. That’s why we have to be careful on this earth. And gentle.”
— “Beatriz,” from Beatriz at Dinner
I write and think about the same words again and again. Good words are good for deep waters, and for tending old unmet needs. I am in it these days. From the deep I can hear the perpetually-tossing-their-heads-back-laughing saying oh boy, here she goes again. I listen hard for the thrum of the thing that I know: Real healing takes time.
Grief can be a chance to change everything for those who can stave off the instinct to rush. Lately I dream a lot about a world that has long-term, deep grief space. Devotion and presence and wailing, all woven into the daily. Earthy friends who have been there. Old women whose one speed is slow. Long nights with no deadlines.
The particulars of loss will give way the cosmic if the will can give way to the cosmos. A zoomed out view may be tougher to take but might also be far more life-changing. In the hardest times I think of Tuan Mac Cairill, whose life as a fish was his favorite. Lately, I also think of this quote from Peter Cramer via Catherine Keller’s On the Mystery:
“On the sea the storm rages, the winds scream out, but the fish swims; he is not swallowed up because he is used to swimming. To you, this world is the sea. Its currents uncertain, its waves deep, its storms fierce. And you must be this fish. That the waves of the world do not swallow you.”