Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, The Empress by Pamela Colman Smith. In the image, a person is lounging in a gown printed with pomegranates on pillows and cushions in the middle of a forest with a waterfall, a healthy grain crop, and a yellow sky in the background. She is wearing a crown with thirteen stars and holding a sceptre. Behind the card are several plants including two happy-looking succulents.
*Registration is now open for Deconstructing the Tarot: Toward Unusual Knowledges* on September 30.
During a talk at the Woman’s Board Lecture last year, artist Carrie Mae Weems described her daily practice of morning reflection. The practice involves “trying to understand where I am, what I’m making, what I’m committed to, and why it matters.”
I love these questions for so many reasons but what I love most is how grounding they are. They’ve helped me ground my own daily process of journaling each morning, where I’ve been stuck in a bit of a rut.
Sometimes I journal to convince myself of something that I am ultimately not convinced of. I write and I write and I stop when it’s settled but wind up back in that struggle the next day. Focusing instead on where I am and what I’m making has been helpful.
I’m reading the last two chapters of philosopher Grace Jantzen’s Becoming Divine. I love this book so much that I put it down for a while just to avoid being done with it. Throughout the book she wonders about what happens when we call ourselves natals instead of mortals. While mortality centers death and departure, natality has to do with birth, beginning, and coming into a body.
I think this is also what Weems’ questions have to do with. Where am I? What am I making? With these questions, we get to start where we are rather than with some big idea about what’s right or precious. The bigger questions open out from there. What am I committed to? And why does it matter?
When I read theologian Ivone Gebara’s Longing for Running Water, it changed my life. I started to think a lot more about daily conditions and how to center spiritual concerns around what’s here and now. I especially loved her invitation “to develop life options that refuse to put off justice and tenderness until tomorrow.”
Interestingly, Gebara’s eco-feminist theology helped along my ideas about what I could do as a psychotherapist. She helped me to see that no matter what grandiose visions I may have about my work in the world, to turn toward suffering despite so many temptations to turn away from it is a political and spiritual practice that matters.
I’ve been practicing therapy for a year this month. One of the most difficult things for me to reckon with lately has been how many of the people I work with are in therapy to unpack harms that were never properly accounted for with the people involved, and in a lot of cases never will be.
Sometimes the harms are interpersonal and sometimes systemic and usually they’re a combination of the two. Week after week we discuss them. We try to find meanings that might nudge us toward becoming other than what we had been with the earlier-made meanings.
People do incredible work even in the absence of acknowledgment or amends from those who participated in their pain. But I have to admit that sometimes it still feels really unfair. In this struggle with unfairness I’ve been given a benediction, which is Grace Jantzen’s gorgeous discussion of ethics in Becoming Divine.