Issue Twelve: There's Nothing Left For You
At the beginning of the year, I promised myself I would build an altar. For magical practice, I’m unsure, but at the very least a space for me, my tarot cards, candles, some flowers—changing them each month. Something to tend to. For the past year and a half almost, I’ve been diligently, writing down every tarot card I’ve pulled. I missed one day in January of this year but my practice has been consistent. Each morning, I gently slide my office door open and grab my stack of cards, the ones I’ve had for almost six years, and ask what is in store for the day. I don’t make notes but I notice. I look for patterns. A few months ago, I pulled Cup cards for more than a third of the month. Last month, Wands. I notice when another card appears more than once in a month. Recently, it was the Empress. Each card is noted down and tracked, given space in my journals that I have all but abandoned these days. I put them back in their spot on the table my grandfather made—the one that doesn’t go with anything else in my office, in my house. I have never outgrown it, try as I might.
I suppose when I look back at my journals in a few years, as I usually do with them, instead of all the ways I detailed heartbreak or a tornado of anxiety I will see my life in the cards. Symbols to decipher feelings I know I had. A sort of silence that felt right.
Today’s card: Two of Cups.
~
Something I’ve been turning over in my brain these past few months, nearly a year, is what it means to step away, to come back on your own terms, or simply to give in to the low of lows as a means of replenishment, nourishment.
I don’t write much anymore. My thoughts sit still in me, running through my mind like a film. There’s a deep love in me for soundtracking my memories as though I’m a music supervisor. To keep making stories out of what happened despite the fact that constant storytelling has driven me into an anxious state. These days there is no soundtrack. There’s nothing to listen to as I slowly metabolize what I’ve been through. What I didn’t see that I had gone through. How exhausting it is to see the sociopathic narcissist who hurt me years ago get propped up today as special, kind. That the bond I needed back then appeared to me finally and I’m no more solaced by it because that person’s hurting is immense. It becomes a gateway to reassess them all. To methodically go through the list of them and defend my pain but only to myself. It’s always only to myself. When what was dormant for so long gets drudged up again, something I wish did not happen, there is not much else to do but sift through the dirt, and quite often just sit in it.
In Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, May brings forth so many examples of the ways in which people and the natural world around us prepare for a “winter,” a period of inactivity or unproductivity. A kind of lowness that is, in many ways, more nourishing than doing it all at once. I’ve long supported retreat as a way to make sense of the world but this book gave me a new perspective on what growth looks like in that environment. After big life events, the winter comes. Even small events with big impact, the winter comes.
I know when I’ve wintered. I know why I’ve needed to winter. But I didn’t see the worth in a winter, especially recently, when it feels like wintering is indeed dreadful. Now I do. Rather, winter is bare, even barren, for a reason. To tuck away from the world and nourish, like bears or certain kinds of mice or ants, and certainly our flora, means to come back with the energy to move forward. How wonderful, yet again, that we ought to take a cue from nature! To work, arduously, in favour of a slice of brightness.
I’ve put daffodils on my altar. My ivy has grown so long that it might be my height now. I can’t even begin to tell you about how beautiful and sturdy my snake plant leaves are. But my hibiscus, my beautiful tropical, fruit-punch-red hibiscus named Gloria, is my greatest achievement of dormancy and light. She lives on my balcony now, finally, months after sitting in my office, absorbing the sun’s light through the small slates of my blinds. She bloomed three times over the barren months. Now, she thrives.
you could touch fire
Mary Oliver
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I think if Mitski never wanted to return as a performer, she ought to take that path. She didn’t though, but instead she gave us Laurel Hell, this musical gift for those of us who have similar conversations in our minds about what’s next. That moving on from a lover, a friend, a career, or even a feeling bears its weight on who you are. Or who you become. It’s a tender record, while being washed in synth-driven rock. However upbeat, decadent those notes may feel, underneath, her lyrics as always sting and pierce.
I don’t know if she ever answers the question in “Valentine, Texas” of “who will I be tonight?” Maybe not on this record intentionally, maybe never. As I sat down to write this first newsletter in nearly a year, I wanted to write entirely about such questions raised in Laurel Hell, and how a performer of Mitski’s magnitude can illuminate such everyday existential dread from working at a job that won’t love you back and moving on from someone or even yourself. Now I find I’m more concerned with wondering about all the ways we’ve swayed in the winds of this past year or two or three and how sturdy we feel or don’t.
I’m happier, maybe, for my own wintering. It was a brief winter. I went on antidepressants last May and I’m going to be tapering off them soon. I’ve started to see a naturopath and forged an even closer relationship with my therapist, one that, even though she said every session for a year she believed I’d bolt, has made me think about how that can ripple out to others. My nephew arrived in October and he’s perfect and every single time I think about him I start to cry. I don’t want to so much protect him from this world but rather be a guide in it, and hold his hand in a way mine never was. I never want him to feel the pain I felt. I want to hear what he thinks and sees and ready a new perspective shift in me.
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There is nothing left for me in the old ways of being and seeing. Today’s Two of Cups is a vision for what I yearn every day in my life: reciprocity. In both light and dark. In both joy and hardness. In giving and taking it in, uncluttered by past context. To be free and released from it.
It’s quiet now. I suppose I’m writing again.
I’ll have to learn to be somebody else
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Books from me for you
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
Misfits by Michaela Coel
Devotions by Mary Oliver
Tarot for Change by Jessica Dore
Bright Dead Things by Ada Limon
Wake, Siren by Nina MacLaughlin
Records from me to you
Laurel Hell - Mitski
Titanic Rising - Weyes Blood
In my Own Time - Karen Dalton
Glow On - Turnstile
Pang - Caroline Polachek
I Put a Spell on You - Nina Simone