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I have this fantasy that each book I write will have a small hole inside of it, that opens out to the next one. I’ve known what the opening was in Tarot for Change for a few years, but it’s taken a while to coalesce into something sturdy enough to build a whole book out of. I’m in the early stages of doing that now which is very exciting.
The winter before Tarot for Change came out, I took a class with psychologist Mary Watkins on liberation psychology. We studied the works of psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, psychologist and Jesuit priest Ignacio Martin-Baro, and educator Paulo Freire. We also looked at Watkins’ own book—which she published with philosopher Helene Shulman—Toward Psychologies of Liberation.
I was starting to understand something about the limits of viewing the self as bounded and autonomous, but it was an altogether inconvenient time to be experiencing such a significant orientational shift. As I was putting the finishing touches on Tarot for Change, I began questioning a lot of what I thought I understood about life and being a person. (I’ve since come to appreciate that this is part of “evolving in public,” to borrow a phrase from educator Phil Agnew in his conversation with Prentis Hemphill.)
But I did manage to sneak some of my evolving worldview into the piece on the Ten of Pentacles. I noted the interspecies imagery in the card as perhaps signaling toward an ecological notion of soul that suggests “all are connected and because that is true, ideals like freedom and healing are inherently more than individual pursuits.” And I quoted an article written by Watkins on the work of psychologist James Hillman, which argued against the belief that the soul dwells inside the confines of the body.
For Watkins, “the hoarding of soul within interiority has served a defensive function, protecting us from the tragedies and travesties in our midst,” and if we are to relinquish that protection, “we will find ourselves feeling small, amidst many bits and pieces that do not seem to cohere.” Importantly, Watkins argues that “to accept a sense of being overwhelmed and inadequate to the situation is necessary.”
This construction of a self—that is relational, inadequate on its own in the face of shared struggles, and in some sense not enough by its nature—took its sweet time with me, unfurling and gaining momentum in the years and months since then. Looking back I can trace some of the ways it’s attracted, and tracked, and made itself known to me in all kinds of ways.
In the fall of 2020, several months before I took the class with Mary Watkins, I became obsessed with the Irish Legend of Tuan Mac Cairill and did not know why. But Tuan was a magician who lived all these lives as different species, forging himself anew depending on his particular terrain and relations. His was an image of a self that was nothing if not forged by the company he kept, whether on land or in sea. I also fell in love around that time, one of the most significant tracks of study I’ve done in relational selfhood to date.
In 2022, I enrolled in a yearlong narrative therapy training with therapists Jill Freedman and Gene Combs, who describe and work with the notion of self “not as a noun referring to a container filled with resources but as a verb referring to a project we are pursuing in active, ongoing relationship with other people across a wide variety of contexts.1” Here was a practical way of working with this budding notion of self as made up in relationship, always on the way and subject to change, and constructed through both the stories we tell and the tales that are told to us about who we are or should be.
While completing that training in 2023, I started heavily studying grief through a powerful combination of reading theory and living through losses, and the ways a self shifts, at times radically, when someone important has gone. I also became increasingly fascinated with and drawn irreversibly into interspecies relationships, and began to habituate toward putting my own self on the line through risky worlding2—a phrase biologist Donna Haraway uses to describe relational intimacy and “how worlds come into being”—with my horse and dog friends.
As part of my application to divinity schools last fall, I wrote an essay called “Grief and interspecies world-building.” In it, I considered the ways dominant technologies of grief work like the famous Kübler-Ross and Kessler five stages model can’t help but reinforce linearity and ideals of total recovery often conceptualized as “acceptance.” And how mourning could be reimagined toward something more eccentric, processual, and ongoing. A way of life, even.
Making the audacious suggestion that mourning may be one of the most significant spiritual tasks of our time, I cited ecologist Carl Safina, who said in a Guardian interview on the recent extinction of twenty-one bird species that because the scope of the extinction crisis is too overwhelming for the human mind to grasp, the endeavor of stopping it is “more of a religious kind of experience than a scientific one.” I also cited theologian Catherine Keller who has argued that despite an intense historical focus on human relationships, our shared situation demands “a planetary practice which can find ‘face’ across the width of the world.3”
I was increasingly interested in how my emerging praxis around relational selfing could include more-than-human relations and social work in its broadest possible sense. When I wrote the essay, I was grieving relational losses, suffering early long COVID symptoms, and watching multiple unfolding genocides which is to say that I was more clear than ever the way grief involves losing whole worlds. And if grief involved losing whole relational worlds, I was curious about the ways mourning can be a creative and dynamic practice that involves the making of new ones. Maybe in unexpected or overlooked places.
I have since encountered philosopher Jonathan Lear’s language via philosopher Kathleen Higgins, who describes Lear’s take on mourning as involving “ongoing imaginative engagement that keeps the absence alive yet renews a sense of hope as one goes forward.4” For Lear, “mourning may continue on throughout life and, indeed, constitute our humanity5.”
I started to think about how mourning might be something eclectic, eccentric, and strange. Could it be tufted or feathered or hoofed, for example? Could it be clown-like, or carnivalesque? I began to imagine my self committed to a life of vibrant mourning, as a traveling horse person with a pack of wild dogs, some leading the way, some trotting alongside, and some trailing behind. My saddle bags would be full of strange—perhaps even outlawed—grief medicines. Tarot cards, broken shells, poems scrawled on napkins, dried bits of pine. I’d have lots of odd tales for every occasion of course,6 but mostly my gift would be listening.
My whole life would become an imaginational, traveling, world-making circus; a testimony to the kind of self that—through grief—I have come to believe in. One that is nothing if not on the way. Shouting out from a whirlwind “I’ll be there in ten!” and looking wildly different, depending on who all is there. Looking this way or that also depending on who was once there but has gone, and is not coming back. Transfigured forever in a way that’s ongoing, through loving and losing. Again and again and again. This existence would be a testimony. To a self that can canter and gallop on good days, but on others drags its feet so slow through the mud that it’s painful to watch.
My own mournings have been a processual grappling with this emerging understanding of the self as relational. Who I am today doesn’t translate so well in the context I’m in, which is the one I’ve been in for four years. A lot of the worlds I once had, I don’t have anymore. One of the main reasons for this is that the architecture of my pre-COVID life no longer feels structurally sound. Breathing heavily with others in a yoga room daily, eating in cute fancy hole-in-the-wall restaurants, intimate parties in homes. None of this feels safe to me anymore. Those worlds no longer make sense.
Catherine Keller’s call to “a planetary practice which can find ‘face’ across the width of the world” has helped me cast my net further out than it’s been, and reconfigure a new sense of what “social life” is and can be. I can’t see my two-legged friends in the usual closed-in ways, but in other locations far out from the city are open-air stables and barns and farms that are brimming with faces of wonderful future four-legged friends. And foes, too.
So, I’m going to Maine for the winter. I’ve been longing to be closer to horse riding and dog training on farms and fisherman and family and friends who have known me for two hundred years. And I don’t know who I’ll be there, but I’ll be working on a new book that’s bloomed out from that tiny opening on the relational self in the Ten of Pentacles that’s in Tarot for Change. I’m excited to see how it all feels, and I look forward to seeing some of you for the Sunday Meetings, classes, and one-on-one sessions this winter.
Thank you so much for being here as always,
Jessica
Hi, hitting the heart button is a great & free way to support these Offerings. <3
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
This quote if from Jill Freedman and Gene Combs’ article titled “Narrative therapy’s relational understanding of identity.”
From Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet
From Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep
From Kathleen Higgins’ book Aesthetics in Grief and Mourning
This is a quote from Jonathan Lear’s book Imagining the End
Few goals have stayed with me through all of these changes, but the one from early 2020 “to be an old woman with the right tale for every occasion” has only gotten stronger with time.
Incredible and generous offering Jessica.
“Looking this way or that also depending on who was once there but has gone, and is not coming back. Transfigured forever in a way that’s ongoing, through loving and losing. Again and again and again. This existence would be a testimony. To a self that can canter and gallop on good days, but on others drags its feet so slow through the mud that it’s painful to watch.”
These words are like a balm for me. I look forward to each week to read your Offerings; I learn so much about myself.
Thank you 💕