"Throw everything out of your mind. Read a little, sleep. The world will still be here when you wake up, and there'll still be everything left to do." James Baldwin
TAROT: 10 of Blades / LENORMAND: Dog, Anchor, Book / ADINKRA: Okuafo Pa
My partner and I were both sick last week, so I took James Baldwin’s advice and read a little, slept a lot, and threw everything out of my mind, including my weekly intention to write something here. Now that we are recovered, sure enough, what Baldwin assured was correct: everything is as it was, and there is “still everything left to do.” It is good to be back at my keyboard.
Although this card did not come up in today’s reading, I thought I would post a photo anyway. Let it serve as my Valentine card to you who read my work. I am grateful and gratified, always, and I give you my Lenormand of Hope Heart:
Our cards today are considerably less sentimental, which is in keeping with the perhaps sadistic irony that Valentine’s Day happens also to fall on Ash Wednesday. For those not in the know, Ash Wednesday marks the first day of the period called Lent in the Christian calendar. Lent is the 40 day period (as Sundays are excluded) that precedes Easter. It is meant to be a time of contemplation and self-abnegation, and to illustrate the point, on this first day, observant Catholics, Episcopalians, and perhaps those who are members of other Christian denominations stand in line and wait their turns to have a priest make the sign of the cross in ashes upon their foreheads. As the ashes are…what….delivered? inscribed? drawn? the priest intones: “Remember, dust thou art. To dust shalt thou return.”
And…I mean…technically, YES. This is a fact that cannot be argued. Our mortal remains will become dust or worm food or whatever. And one has the rest of Lent to contemplate this grisly fate, which brings me to today’s cards:
When I pulled the first card, and the 10 of Blades appeared, I considered doing a redraw. I never do that for these posts, though. It would not be my preference to present you with “Whipped Peter” and his bloody back on Valentine’s Day of all days. But again, it is also Ash Wednesday. We are asked to hold two truths at once: that life is hard and short and ugly, on the one hand, and that love can and should abide, on the other. As human beings, it is our tendency to tell ourselves that it is too hard to hold both realities at the same time, and so we spend our lives constantly putting down one in favor of the other. That, I think, is a mistake.
For example, this is a culture that loves their Second Amendment. We also say we love children. But the latter cannot possibly be true. We have picked one over the other. Ask the parents of Sandy Hook. Ask the parents of Uvalde. Where’s the lie?
For example, Nikki Haley calls 45 a danger to the nation. She also recommitted to voting for whoever would become the Republican nominee. She picked a side. Where’s the lie?
For example, the metaphysical community, comprised of light workers, talks endlessly about shadow work, and yet refuses to address their own and the nation’s original shadow work, which I will always and ever identify as racism. Because they cannot hold two things at once, they purport to “not see color.” Is that not a putting down of one thing, in favor of another, because one cannot hold more than one’s idealized version of oneself? Okay. Let’s call a spade a spade, then, and not pretend a spade is a heart. (And again, if you CAN hold two things at once, or you would like to learn how, I recommend the brilliant new book TAROT FOR THE HARD WORK by Maria Minnis. It is a roadmap for how Tarot can be an instrument for learning how to balance who we are with who we might like to become in regard to questions of race, and age, gender and ability, and all the other isms.
The swords in the 10 of Blades card have done their worst. Whipped Peter is both dignified and done. Lenormand explicates this, with Dog, Anchor, and Book. During Black History Month, we (Black people) become visible for 28 days. Lovely that every four years, we get the extra day, no? We are asked to speak and write and sing and dance, but note what I said: Whipped Peter is done. He is done with petitioning to performative listeners, done with indulging cultivated, cosseted cluelessness. He is over the “This is not who we are” protestations every time we show exactly who we have always been. The Dog is the card for allyship. True allyship is holding the ashes alongside the heart, to recognize both shadow and light, to not ask over and over again for things to be explained, when the evidence is out in the open. To be a true ally is to (Anchor) oneself to the place of holding two things at once; to learn (Book) what you say you don’t know (start with TAROT FOR THE HARD WORK) without asking Whipped Peter to explain it all to you, prove it all to you, one more time and one more time and one more time again.
Adinkra concurs, with Okuafo Pa, the symbol for the good farmer. A good farmer cultivates what can grow. Ignorance (about racism, about Rafah, about Republicans…) can indeed grow, of course, but no fertile crop will result, just a wider wilderness covered by…more ashes. We are all both Heart and Ashes. The one we feed, will grow.
Amen and Ase
I missed your musings, but I sure am glad y'all are on the mend. The messaging in this post rings loud and clear down here to this white ally: It is NOT my Black friends' or even my Black husband's responsibility to explain things to me so I understand. It's MY responsibility to educate myself through reading, listening, observation, and so on. And I'm terribly eager to do the work. White people still have such a long way to go.
Thank you Erika. 💜 Powerful piece. ❤️