Venus Stations Direct: April 9th – April 16th Reading

As of today, Sunday the 9th, we are entering a zone of FIVE overlapping retrogrades. Heads and hearts will both be prone to confusion, but really, what else is new? Venus has put us through a lot in the last six weeks — you might think of this Mercury retrograde kicking in as the final push to cut off your head and embrace healing the heart, which operates with its own logic. Venus stations direct, sharing a degree with asteroid-healer Chiron, on Friday, April 14th.

Saturn also stationed retrograde last week right before receiving a square from Venus. This is a slightly more long-term (4-ish months) retrograde, Saturn’s last in Sagittarius, that serves to review and reinforce the lessons Saturn has been teaching us in the last year and a half or so. There may have been some truths revealed or uncovered that have required a fearlessness to face. The Saturn-Venus square connects this new knowledge to the ways we relate to the Venusian: love, money, beauty, comfort. When Venus meets Chiron on the very next degree, it’ll be be asking for healing on behalf of these traumatic truths as well. Thank you, Chiron. Thank you, Venus.

I’m not gonna spend too much time on the astrology this week, but I encourage you to think about what it means that Venus is the one delivering us to Chiron for healing/delivering Chiron’s healing to us. How is the Venusian healing in your life? What can you do to honor and thank Venus for undertaking this long and difficult journey?

It’s the moment of truth. This is where we can walk out into the light and never look back. This is both the ending of a long period of suffering and the beginning of a long journey that involves pulling ten swords out of our backs one by one. Because it’s better than giving up and letting them stay there. Because on the other side of that journey is a new life full of riches and wonders and comfort and adventure and discovery and spiritual awakening. We learn in Pisces to be open to possibility rather than rigidly clinging to our idea of what should be. Deep, intimate connection to spirit enables us to do this difficult work.

Swords are ideas. They are not themselves inherently good or bad, but for how they are used. The sword held by Justice exists to uphold a natural law; we might relate this to our personal ethics. We can make the decision every day to live in such a way that promotes equality and fairness in our relationships and the broader world — Jupiter in Libra has been working on this since last October. This decision matters, and is worth defending. That is a positive use of the sword.

Swords and ideas are also very dangerous. We must only use them with well-considered conviction and with certainty that we are causing the least amount of bloodshed possible. We must never use them out of fear or blind rage. We wound ourselves when we are so afraid of our own vulnerability that we cut off the parts of ourselves that most need defending. We wound ourselves (and likely others) when we hold too rigidly to any idea. Very few things are true in every single circumstance, but reason has a hard time accounting for this. It is necessary to think and speak with great humility so as not to invalidate alternative perspectives.

It is likely in this moment that we have been on the receiving end of our own or someone else’s misused sword, perhaps many of them over a period of time. It is appropriate to defend ourselves against these attacks, even if they come from another part of ourselves. At this point it may be that we are moving ourselves to safety in order to do the work of recovery. Pulling the swords out may be more painful in the moment than leaving them there, but it is only after we do so that we can heal. The first step is ensuring that we are safe from further attack — this requires functional boundaries. Some bodies are targeted for psychic and physical attack far more frequently than others, and so what safety looks like really varies from person to person. The goal is only to be both safe and resilient enough that we can be present with ourselves and our traumas and feel confident that we will not be destroyed. The second step is identifying those ideas we have internalized which are harmful to us. The third step is dislodging those ideas with strong, focused attention. This process takes time and will benefit greatly from the help of a neutral party who can hold space and help guide you through it.

What we access through doing this work is a mature and empowered sense of self, a confidence in our own capability and our inherent worth, and the ability to be flexible, to take what opportunities are presented to us with curiosity and excitement rather than anxiety and dread. From there, we are free to move forward in building the life we want to have.

Leo Lunar Eclipse Report Back: Ring of Fire

I’ve been away for a while.

I’ve been mourning, and fighting, and getting myself settled.

Tonight, I made the decision to stay at home. I spoke to someone I love for longer than we have spoken in years. I wrote a song. Earlier today, I got triggered in a meeting at work and cried while talking about my friends. How I was saved by a bunch of punks in an apartment above a laundromat. How a living room show was my first safe place.

Leo, ruled by the sun, is all about how we are or aren’t recognized. Leo wants to be seen, known and valued. Leo is the baby’s cry, the teenager’s slamming door, the fierceness that accompanies real self-care. Leo is the place where we can never abandon ourselves.

Have we felt abandoned recently? What have we done about it? How have we held ourselves in honor, in light? How have we been bathed in fire and cast in gold? Living in an increasingly horrifying future-past, how have we made and demanded that others make space for our selves? How are we even living, right now? Keep your head up, Leo says. Roar.

It’s an uncomfortable sign for a lunar eclipse; the sun’s light, already having undergone the process of reflection, is blotted out for a moment. Joy does not come easily these days. In this long night, Leo means to break us open: there is a crack in everything / that’s how the [sun]light gets in.

Tonight’s eclipse welcomes us into a triangle of fire, bounded also by Saturn in Sagittarius and Uranus in Aries. Frankly, I’m frightened by it, but that’s my issue. I know I’m not supposed to say that, because if I’m writing I’m supposed to act like an authority, which means being objective and invulnerable. I want to not have to be an authority in order to write. My fear has value. Fire has value, and it scares the shit out of me. You have value, even if nobody recognizes it.

Fire is impulse, and impulse is very, very powerful. And like any element, fire untempered can be very, very dangerous.

While I shuffled, these words came up: difficulty, you are ready for it.

With the recent retrograde station of Jupiter, our yearly trajectory may feel a bit stalled. Underpinning that feeling is a need, an impulse that is unaddressed. We need more time to learn how to address it. That’s why we want to slow down. We’ll begin again in the summer, in June. At the end of this month and beginning of March, an event will change our circumstances. We will learn how to address it, and move from there.

We must humble ourselves to our impulses. We must recognize that they have power over us, and we must learn to communicate with them respectfully. We must not fear nor lionize, but collaborate with our impulses. People have and carry out impulses that cause great harm all the time. People also have and carry out impulses that cause great joy, beauty, justice, and love. We must recognize that all of these impulses are expressing a need which we must address from within the bounds of our ethics.

As a society, our ethics are currently in chaos. They are in chaos because we are desperate. We have not gotten our needs met, or even recognized, in a long time. We are doing what we feel we must, but it is not and will never be enough because we lack a system, a root. Without a clear ethic, a bounded sense of right and wrong, true and false, we merely react to stimuli. Our most immature impulses are in control, the ones that tell us to kill, eat, fuck. They tell us that the stranger is an enemy who will compete for our resources and must be destroyed. There are other forces within us than these. A conversation between all of them: body, mind, spirit, unnameable, will be necessary in re-forming our ethic.

Truly opening up this conversation will change us irreversibly, and for the better. It will require experimentation, a form of very serious play. We will try different methods of combining the elements which make up our beings, and some of them, many of them, will fail to produce our desired result. But we will reach it, and all of the experimentation and all of the experiences that felt like failure will have been necessary when we do, and we will see that it was all part of the recipe all along. What we will find at the end of this long process will be the thing that is required of us to move forward; it will be a thing that we are required to leave behind. An impulse, perhaps, or a relationship to an impulse, that has been driving us, that we will see the inside of, see the need it masks.

Come May, something will begin to solidify, possibly forced by circumstance. The goal is the maturation of the impulse that started us off, and an approach to it that is informed by all of our experimentation and learning. However, when the shit goes down, we can only do what we can. Old habits die hard, and the things we cling to in crisis are more often dreams than realities. We can’t help that. The best thing we can do is remember it, move slowly, question everything. We have entered a period of review that will last roughly a year. There will be many false starts and back to the drawing board moments. At the end, we can hope to walk on the hot coals. I, for one, will be facing my fear.

 

In a little over two weeks, the second eclipse in February will take place, a solar eclipse in Pisces. On that day, the 26th, I will be present at Psychic Sister in downtown Olympia offering one-on-one readings for $1/minute. That eclipse will be closing a cycle in Pisces similar in scale to the one that is just now being opened in Leo. It will be an excellent time to reflect on the wisdom that we’ve gained from our spiritual explorations and determine how best to enact that wisdom in the world. I look forward to seeing you there.

January 8th – 15th Reading: Mercury Direct and Full Moon in Cancer

 

Early this Thursday morning, 3:34am PST, the Moon will reach fullness in Cancer, the sign it rules. Cancer is the deep and the ancient creatures that crawl up from it, creatures with their skeletons on the outside and soft flesh within, who are both safe and vulnerable in ways that mirror the ways we mammals are, but are eerily unfamiliar to us. In the Rider-Waite tarot deck, The Moon card shows such a creature climbing up from the deep, and setting itself on a path. It symbolizes a sort of secret self, or perhaps an unfettered self, something formed within us the way a pearl is formed inside an oyster, a strong and beautiful self formed slowly throughout our lives as a means of staying safe and staying sane. The card symbolizes what happens when that self takes over.

We fear it, because we know it has the potential to derail us. We can’t let our deepest darkest parts drive all the time; they don’t tend to know much about how to survive in the world, which we must at all times balance with the drives of our inner monsters. But there are times in life when we need to set our human brains aside and give way to the strange and mysterious force within us, that part we might fear but which represents the manifestation of our deepest needs and soul desires. This is one of those times.

And with the recent station of Mercury, bringing an end to a year of continuous retrogrades, we know we can trust the path it sets us on. This has been brewing for a while. Think about where you were this time last year, how you may have felt stalled since then, what ideas and urges you’ve been putting off because you couldn’t seem to map them onto the world you were living in. All that is over now. Your maps look all wrong in the moonlight anyway. Your only choice is to go on without them.

For its first quarter of this cycle, the Moon was in Aries, the same sign as our friend Uranus, that big troublemaker, activating a T-square which Thursday’s Full Moon will expand into a Grand Cross involving Uranus in Aries, Pluto and the Sun in Capricorn, and Jupiter in Libra, with a little trine tendril reaching out to Mars and Chiron in Pisces. A Grand Cross is an extremely powerful challenging aspect (challenging in the sense that it carries with it a great amount of energy for change), and this one will be highlighted at different times throughout the year. Pay attention to your intuition, pay attention to your impulses, pay attention to the people who are showing up to support you and let all of these things work together to start transforming your life. You don’t have to know what it means or where it goes at this point, you just have to take the first step. It will be hard, but there will also be support and love and joy for you and moments of calm satisfaction when you imagine something you have always wanted, finally within reach. Where you get it. This is how life happens.

Healing work is work.

Don’t forget to drink water. Don’t forget to feed your body what it needs. Don’t forget to take stretch breaks and fresh air and thank your friends for taking such good care of you. Take good care back. We are lost without each other.

All of these cards came up reversed, which is worth mentioning alongside the fact that when this happens, I treat them as upright. The difference is similar to the difference between sunlight and moonlight; one is slightly diminished, having gone through a mysterious process of transformation via reflection. Don’t worry too much about it right now; suffice it to say that in this kind of astrological climate, nothing is quite so simple or straightforward as four upright cards, even these four, might suggest.

The way that we make the most of the depths we are being asked to plunge this week is through acceptance of what is. Fighting the Cancerian current will get us exactly noplace, but if we can manage our fears enough to let ourselves be carried, there is no doubt that we will end up somewhere new, in a position to reconsider and rearrange our relationship with the material reality presented to us.

This may involve loss, and grief. There may be a situation we find ourselves no longer able to rationalize maintaining. There may be a feeling of collapse in the infrastructure of our lives. We may find ourselves questioning what we thought we knew beyond doubt. The only thing to do is to move deeper into the confusion. Commit. Establish intimacy with your struggle. Life is not a built thing but a daily practice. Start thinking of the routines you’ve taken for granted as rituals — think about what you are welcoming into your life and expressing gratitude for with your least-considered actions. Be intentional about them. Now is a time to make choices, large and small, to give our lives over to our higher (or deeper) purpose.

The ground we gain through this work will be invaluable to us in the coming months and years. We begin by becoming what we need in order to continue. Trust yourself to get there. You already know how.

2017, Saturn trine Uranus, and You

I’ve been giving a lot of New Year’s readings lately and, despite the unfolding horror show in the news, they’ve all been really positive. This is a big year for personal growth and major efforts to realize our goals. A year that opens up with Mercury retrograde is going to take a while to really get started, but after January 9th we’ll be back on solid ground and ready to get to work.

What we are looking at this year is MAJOR STRUCTURAL CHANGE. The defining aspect of 2016 was Saturn square Neptune — a conflict between spiritual idealism and repressive structure. In 2017 we have an aspect of comparable degree: Saturn, still in Sagittarius, trines Uranus in Aries. Unlike the challenging square, a trine means the two planets are working together in harmony. Saturn can still be a harsh mistress, stripping away extraneous comforts and niceties to reveal the beauty or brutality of the underlying structures of our lives. Uranus means change: big, sudden, potentially catastrophic change.

Everything that gets cleared away makes room for something else. But what? What will we be destroying this year, and what will we be cultivating in its stead? We know, at this point, how our government intends to use this moment. They seem to be working directly with these forces towards their own ends. But what about us? Don’t we get to afflict the comfortable? Don’t we get to rage, or flood, or tear it all down? We certainly do. How will we harmonize with Saturn and Uranus in our own lives to counteract the tyranny that seems to be feeding off of it at the very top? The answer will be different for each of us, but we can find clues in the houses that contain Sagittarius and Aries in our charts.

Saturn in Sagittarius is a structured, methodical search for the truth. Saturn in Sagittarius knows the truth is out there, and is going to find it. Saturn clears away everything that is not the truth; Sagittarius runs fast and far towards it. Tunnel vision can be an advantage at times, but this energy has a cruel and ruthless bent. Remember to stay connected to the humanness of yourself and of those around you. Yes, there is work to be done, but we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We are more than our ideologies. We are not infallible. We are all connected, so we must protect everyone who is vulnerable, not just those who agree with us.

Uranus in Aries is a revolution of self. Big changes in the ways we direct our energy into the world. Uranus has been in this sign since March of 2011, so think about the growth that you have experienced since then in taking risks, putting yourself out there, realizing your goals. What have you learned about how this works for you? Are there people and relationships that help you? Are there habits that hold you back? This is a year to start applying those skills to something larger than yourself, giving yourself to it completely. There is a lot at stake, but we can harness these same energies that are being used against us to protect and nourish the things that they would try to take away.

 

Hiding in wait underneath our wildest dreams of earthly success is wisdom, purpose, understanding and enlightenment. We are physical beings who need resources to survive and thrive, but the degree of wealth that is presented as desirable by our culture is merely a facade through which we are told we can gain true knowledge and power. But true knowledge and power of the sort held by the High Priestess don’t come through any dream that can be imagined manifesting in the world, any achievement that can be unlocked, any wealth that can be secured. It is only through following the paths we do not control and cannot predict with grace and verve that we can even glimpse her wisdom.

We will chase new dreams when our lives depend on it; and they will. It will take courage, self-knowledge, and self-control. It may divide us against ourselves. Instinct will overtake intellect. Underneath it all, like a pulse or a current, the thrum and clatter of raw existence persists. Human nature contains violence and horror alongside love and compassion. It is remiss of anyone offering spiritual counsel not to admit that sometimes bad things happen for no good reason, and that they are unevenly distributed along lines that have nothing to do with karma or the evolution of souls.

The core of all being is extremely volatile. The role of spiritual (and political) practices must be to mitigate and minimize harm, not to cast ourselves as creatures of infinite light while performing acts of oppression in secret. This will be a year to glimpse the underside, where joy and love and wisdom coexist with sorrow, evil and violence. They are inextricable. They are the pulp of which all experience is formed.

This year, we see what we are made of. Good and bad. We must be able to see and hold them both. Remember that you have agency. Remember that you are connected to a root system that supports all human and non-human life on the planet. Let this be the structure that you hold to, honor and abide by. It needs you. Remember that nothing anyone else does can tear you away from yourself. For many, the primary challenge of this year will be to survive and to locate joy and comfort amidst an intensification of oppression. For others, it will be to deepen compassion and empathy and commit to showing up in ways that serve the interests of the entire collective. Stay with the trouble, stay in complexity, stay with the feelings that come up. My hope is that by the end of the year we can work together against oppression more effectively than ever before, secure in the knowledge that we are all bound together in this fight.

So be it. So it is. Blessed be.

Venus Conjunct Pluto: Tarot Spread for November 20th-27th

When we exert our energies in ways that feel familiar rather than ways that are based on our true desires, we wind up manifesting more of the same. There is a strong urge to move quickly, to take immediate action, which may feel frustrated by unavoidable barriers, whether physical, emotional, interpersonal or logistical. If those barriers are large enough to prevent us from taking action, we stay in the rut, so it’s a good idea to start small if we wish to make lasting changes. The obstacles that arise are likely to feel less insurmountable, and we gain power from our small successes that will help us achieve our bigger aims.

There is also a drive towards mastery which contributes to paralysis. Perfectionism is fundamentally a rejection of the most vulnerable parts of ourselves. Failure is inevitable, not because we are incompetent or unworthy, but because failure is necessary to the development of the skills and competencies that will carry us forward.

Beware of taking on too many projects or commitments. This can be a way to try to cope with impatience or feelings of powerlessness. Better to give more of yourself to one or two things you really care about and are capable of doing (or areas where you are building valuable skills) than try to be all things to all people and risk exhaustion. It is wise to balance generosity with self-care. Not everything that must be done is your work to do. Your work will reveal itself, and deserves your full attention when it does.

The energy is a little panicked right now. The desire to exert control is a lie hiding in the shadow of generosity. If you work to control situations involving others, at best they will end up reliant on you and sap your energy. At worst, they will resist and possibly defeat you. It is a losing path for everyone involved.

Expect the unexpected through the beginning of 2017, and expect to be deeply challenged by it. We know that these are not simple times. This week and next, the challenge directly relates to what and whom we attract & welcome into our lives and what kinds of love, friendship, kindness and beauty we accept. Lessons learned early on about what we deserve from others and what passes for love will be spotlighted. Prepare to release and reset your heart’s understanding of how it can be with others. Remember that the one thing we know about the work ahead is that we cannot do it in isolation from each other.

September 24th – 30th: The Goo

First, some helpful Astro-Facts:

1. Pluto goes direct this week (Tuesday) at 14 degrees of Capricorn.
2. Waning Crescent Moon in Cancer opposing Pluto tonight (Saturday 9/24), new moon will be on the 30th at 2 degrees of Libra.
3. Mercury now direct in Virgo.
4. Venus enters Scorpio 9/24, squares the Moon on Sunday 9/25
5. Jupiter conjunct the Sun in Libra all week.

 

Tonight’s moon inhabits the sign it rules, and it will fall all week through water, fire and earth before reaching the air, Libra, into which it will seem to disappear. Tonight, at home in the Cancerian waters, it faces Pluto, which reminds us not to fear. The moon will be back, as will we, though changed.

This may be a tender moment. We may find ourselves passing the night in a particular sadness, something amorphous, a fear of dissolution, or perhaps the feeling of having been dissolute for so long and knowing that we must begin to reconstitute ourselves, and not knowing the form we are to take. The Eight of Cups reminds us to look to tasks failed or undone, not to shame ourselves or to justify hopelessness, but to learn where our efforts may be misplaced and where we must grow, to learn how the relationship we have with the materials of our lives, our work, and the various bodies we encounter, may not be serving us anymore. As children, we all learn lots of ways to garner our caregiver’s attention that are not appropriate for adult relationships. We learn ways to access a sense of security that don’t work in all situations, but not knowing anything else, we continue, almost compulsively.

Mercury is now direct in Virgo; we are ready to do the work of opening ourselves any amount more to a new way of seeing the stuff we have to work with, the frustrating vicissitudes of contingency, the inescapable facts of injustice and trauma. You know it: Abuse of power comes as no surprise. We can rage blindly at the real, and when the real is an unimaginable and inescapable horror, there is no other choice. If we are allowed to escape, we can give up in despair, bury ourselves in shame. We can harden our hearts out of fear and take on the impossible burden of controlling everything. Regardless, we can hold fast to our faith that our paths are not linear, but one step at a time will carry us where we need to go, that we will weather storms, but one brick at a time will build our shelter yet.

The Three of Cups offers a celebration. Joyful, solar energy abounds this week in the realm of friendship now that both Jupiter and the Sun have entered Libra, where the object of that focused attention is the ways we connect with each other fairly and lovingly. I think they’re having a party here in these first few degrees, happy to take a break from the necessary, but at times grueling, work that was required of them in Virgo. Take the opportunity this week to join together with those you love in friendship and celebration. It may be a great time to start a new group project, but remember that what’s important about the work is the opportunity to come together with a common goal, not the furtherance of your own ego in the form of an exclusively-desired result. Perhaps we could all benefit from remembering the rules for relation in art and life which I learned from the poet TC Tolbert last spring: 1. Show up, 2. Pay attention, 3. Tell the truth, 4. Be open to outcome.

We need each other. We need to learn how to work together. It is absolutely imperative to our survival that we become able to prioritize the needs of the many over our own ego-agendas. We are not there yet. And getting there is going to take some serious inner and outer doing.

That is where Pluto comes in. That’s where Venus in Scorpio comes in. That’s where we must talk about the reversed Three of Wands, the feeling of depletion that succeeds all significant ego breakdowns and precedes all serious superhero comebacks. It’s there in the middle, not a prerequisite to celebration (we need our friends and communities; do not shy away from them now), but indicating a necessary moment of transition. I’ve heard Scorpio’s water described as the goo inside the chrysalis,  that mucky stage between caterpillar and butterfly that can only happen in the quiet, in the dark, wrapped up tight. Let’s go there, with Venus, ruler of Libra, drawing our transformation into the realm of relation. When Pluto goes direct on Tuesday, you may find yourself in a moment of clarity about how far you’ve come in your transformational journey, and/or about the ways in which you are being asked to grow now. You may feel any combination of proud, powerful, confident or disbelieving, dissociated, intimidated, frightened, ashamed. These are all natural and self-protective responses to recognizing the constant and inescapable fact that all living things grow. In order to change, we must leap, we must let go, we must let our selves be deconstructed and dissolved. We can and will survive this. We cannot and will not survive without it, just like we will not survive without each other.

Remember what we learn from Virgo: small, concrete steps. And from Libra: mutual, loving support. And from Cancer: cry if you need to. Some of us grow by leaving our homes to see and learn and struggle in unfamiliar ways, others by snapping shut tight and bathing ourselves in tears. Whatever method is valid, but I highly recommend not going on this particular trip alone. It isn’t about that. This is our moment to learn how to be together.

As always, thank you for reading. Take care of yourselves and each other. I’ll see you next week.

Self-Trust is a Cartoon Donkey: Ace of Pentacles Reversed / Queen of Cups / The World Reversed

Is your world feeling a little upside-down? That can happen in the water. Sometimes, surrendering to a current with perfect faith is exactly what we need to do, and sometimes we aren’t given a choice. How many of us would do it if we were?

There are times in life when we have to make the right choice for security, financial and otherwise. When we need to be masters of our destiny as well as our trade, but this is not one of those times. The gift that is being presented to us in this moment is emphatically not earthly in nature. But, there is a potential for greater security on the other side of this. That’s the funny thing about water transits. As profoundly unmooring as they feel when they are happening, they tend to get us, somehow, where we need to go. The lesson is primarily about trust. How do we trust ourselves and the courses of our lives? This world doesn’t make it easy. We live in a time and place that likes things to make a certain kind of non-sense, that rewards sticking to a predetermined path regardless of what you find there. Notice that the only one staying upright here is the Queen of Cups. Why is that? She already knows how to flow. She places her fate in the hands of the ocean.

The good news is, you do not need to know what you are doing to reap the benefits of this moment — this Queen is an intuitive, not a ruler. All you have to do is let go. We might wish we could wake up two weeks or three months or five years down the line and see where we’re being sent, but the fact is we’d be missing the best part. Hiding on the bottom of all of that grief and fear and sorrow is a joy and a love and a light that is simply unknowable to anyone who hasn’t plumbed those depths. It’s the unshakeable security of self-trust, not only of having weathered the storm but of learning that you can follow paths you don’t understand and wind up somewhere beautiful and strange. The world is safer for some bodies than others, that is a deadly terrible fact, but your body is a safe place for you. Spend some time in it, noticing the feelings that arise there. If your feelings frighten you or seem like a burden, try thinking of them as characters, whether they’re terrifying demons or adorably irritating cartoon sidekicks. Give them names and personalities. Ask them questions. Like it or not, they’re along for the ride. You may even find yourself growing fond of them. The most frightening spirits can become amazing guides and protectors if you only look them in the eye and ask them their name.

The World card indicates a kind of unspeakable boundlessness. Ecstasy comes from knowing that we are intimately connected with everything that exists. But it’s also terribly confusing, not knowing which way is up or where your body ends and the air begins. That may be where we are right now, but another thing worth remembering is that nothing stays the same for very long. The world turns, the stars move, the cards are shuffled. People come and go from you. You grow and change constantly until you cease to exist. Thank goodness. This is what we can come back to, even now, for shelter. Boundless unity and boundless change. It’s only when we see this big picture clearly and settle our differences with it that we can get to the earthly work that is needed of us.

I wish you luck, strength, and flexibility. Thanks for reading.

A Fresh Start: Seven of Pentacles / Seven of Swords / Three of Pentacles

We grow weary. Everything we build gets disrupted, and eventually destroyed. Everything we grow will die. We have no choice but to work with the material that is present for us, but it begins to seem pointless when we face these inevitabilities. Sevens are cards of disappointment, faltering, finding that what we thought we were moving towards is actually impossible, unsustainable, or just unreachable to us in this moment, on this path. And there are two of them in this week’s reading: the Seven of Pentacles, and the reversed Seven of Swords. What begins as a problem with material becomes a problem with conception: there is a flaw in our thinking, or we are being deceived.

We are always being deceived, in small and large ways. We deceive ourselves. The precarity of the current situation extends to our very identities, our defining systems, and our emotional experience. We suddenly find ourselves completely untrustworthy.

The last card, the Three of Pentacles, will feel like a step backwards. There’s a humbling that occurs. It might look like a loss of mastery, a defeat, but the Seven of Swords in the middle is a card of transition. The defeat is minor, temporary, and moves us into a different relationship with the things we make and do as well as how we relate to others. Still a position of instability, the Three of Pentacles indicates, rather than any disappointment, the very first moment of stepping outside oneself and one’s simple attachments (addictions, even) to affect something else in the world. It’s a card of creativity, adventure, and a risk that isn’t answered here. It requires that we do the painful work of admitting where we are wrong, and starting something new.

This is the moment for that work. As a culture, we have committed ourselves to a relationship with the concept of wealth that results in steep inequalities that manifest in forms like mass incarceration in for-profit institutions,  daily assault and murder of black and brown people by police,  and violent xenophobia publicly justified by fears around scarcity. A change must occur among the people whose lives are most privileged by these systems. We/they must realize that the risk of scarcity only exists when we create it for someone else. In trying to be insulated from the fundamental instability of existence, people create conditions of danger for others. It is an imbalance. Those of us with this privilege, who have not been forced to do so by necessity our entire lives, must embrace this instability as a necessary condition of life by refusing to hoard wealth, by taking only what we need and redistributing the rest, and by consistently choosing courses of action that keep us on the edge of personal growth rather than in safe stagnation.

Grace & blessings to you on this path. Thank you for reading.