lesson 10: plateauing and growing

LESSON 10: PLATEAUING AND GROWING
Cards drawn: A cross of Hanged Man (1)
Three of Swords/Sorrow (2); Four of Swords (Truce) (3)
The Universe(*)(4)
Deck: Thoth Tarot

For various reasons, I haven’t had the occasion to pick up a deck in a couple weeks. When that happens, though it’s often quite good to take rests—intended or not—I often face the fear that I’ve lost the ability in the meantime. Somehow, between last touching tarot and now, the ability I’ve spent going on three decades cultivating has somehow dissolved. That’s not really related to the cards drawn above, but hopefully interesting nonetheless. The mind is a tricky thing. (Note from future me: that wound up being exactly what the reading was about!)

As always, I never ask a question for these blog posts. I simply shuffle with the intention What is Lesson #? In this case, lesson ten. Today I felt the urge to ask something different, like “what is tarot?” or “what makes a great divination?” I didn’t, though, because the whole point of this experiment is letting the cards tell us what they want to say about working with them, rather than restricting them to things I might be curious about at the moment. There’s nothing wrong with using the cards to address current curiosities; in fact, that’s what I spend most of my time doing with them—for myself and others. But that’s exactly why I decided not to impose any questions on this particular blog. It’s really letting the tarot talk about itself through my fingertips, as it were. 

Either way, I wasn’t particularly thrilled to see our pal the Hanged Man today. If for no other reason than that he’s made an appearance in this little journey several times. More than several. I think I’ve seen the card more writing these posts than I have reading for anyone the last three or four years. And ironically, I was just thinking, “you know what the cards will probably say, because they’ve been saying it over and over from week to week.” The lesson I keep getting is “combine the spiritual with the divine!” Great! I’m attempting to. I don’t think I need the message again! Granted, what we think as diviners or seekers typically isn’t the goal of the divinity that makes divination work. So. 

Let’s not think yet about Hanged Man, then. Let’s leave him (ahem) hanging. Let’s actually begin with the fourth card, The Universe, the one I styled with a parenthetical asterisk, above. I did that because, unusual for me, I didn’t really decide on a spread before drawing. I drew the first three, sighed because I wasn’t really in the mood for this combo, and then—on a whim—drew a fourth. I do that sometimes, even though I always say we should know what we’re going to do before we shuffle and draw. What can I say? I’m mercurial.

When I think of The Universe, or The World, I think of “everything.” That’s typically how I read it: everything. a lot. much. tons. I don’t assign it a positive or negative meaning, because the reading decides that for me. Sometimes everything is great! Sometimes everything is carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, not unlike Atlas who is often depicted hefting a globe on his shoulders—an image somehow porno-like to the Randian political right. Having “the whole world” on your shoulders is heavy. But sometimes we ask for that. Sometimes we tell people, “ah! please allow me to carry all your burdens for you. please allow me to sacrifice my own load so that I might take yours upon me. For, you see, I am insecure and need to feel loved. Not be loved, you see, because to me the perception of love is more important than any feeling you have for me.” 

Whoa! He went long there, eh? OK, I don’t think the reading is going that deep, but it sure speaks to a part of me that has motivated my actions a lot of my life—and I’m sure many of you recognize it, too. What’s the burden The Universe carries? The Hanged Man. He literally rests on The Universe’s shoulders. So what are we doing here?

Not what I expected, actually. When I started down the path of people who beg to take on other people’s burdens, I thought this lesson was going to be about how readers need to avoid that tendencies with clients or friends. But it’s not about that at all. No, it’s about the importance of plateaus. Oh boy, right? Ah, but this is a rather special topic to explore, reader, for you see the plateau is a blessing and a curse in the life-long development of the fortune teller—as well as most spiritual practitioners. (For what it’s worth, I seem to be settling on “spiritual” as a catch-all for what I typically referred to, somewhat ruefully, as “new age” “woo-hoo” or “witchy.” Spiritual, a word with nebulous meaning these days, never attracted me. It’s the very nebulousness that makes me prefer it, now. It’s neutral. It lacks the kind of sneer I typically reserve for this stuff, but it also avoids pretension—which is a thing that really turns me off. For what it’s worth.)

On our learning journeys, we will reach extended periods of time where what we thought was the peak of a mountain we’ve been laboriously climbing turns out to be an endless-seeming flat table of land, arid, treeless, no oases, no birds—not unlike the aridness we see in PCS’s Emperor card. Very that. Very deserted. Very demure; very mindful. (I couldn’t help myself—and allow me one more tiny digression: I love that meme, because it has enabled the trans person who said it to afford gender affirming care—and social media so often is so cruel to queer people, that this is a joy and I celebrate it.) Anyway. We arrive at these plateaus and, despite our inner devotion to the lifelong journey of learning and honing our art, we suddenly find ourselves in the same places for a long time. 

Perhaps we feel uninspired, apathetic, or like we’re going through the motions. The physical sensation of joy that came from doing divinatory work yields to a sameness that can eventually extend to much of life. This is the combination of The Hanged Man and The Universe in this reading, at this moment in time, in the mind and fingertips of this reader. Let us pull ourselves away from the act of divination for a moment and note that the earthiness of The Universe and the wateriness of the Hanged Man (it’s the major associated with the element of water) don’t matter here. Their combination somehow creates the exact opposite—dryness. Why? Cuz that’s how tarot works! Smiley face. 

Actually, this is influenced by the cards that form the crossbar: the three and four of swords. This is a reading about learning because our pal the suit of swords has arrived in force and reminds us that the crazy expansiveness of a mental growth spurt (learning and activating learning) gives way to . . . not that. That’s the feeling we feel when we have climbed the mountain only to discover we’ve reached not the peak but a plateau. That four-ish bleh-ness. That stupid, static lack of progress; that wandering without a map through an unchanging, unyielding, unpleasant landscape of blah. Feeling suddenly not special, not cool, not gifted, not good; feeling stalled, stuck, stale. We want to forge ahead, god dammit; we’ve just done so much, discovered so many new-to-us worlds! How fucking dare we not be constantly ignited with crackling, sparkling, glittering, gorgeous revelations at all times?

Because, and I’m about to drop one of those revelations on you right now, if that went on all the time, we’d go mad. 

In Amadeus, a movie I’m stupidly fond of, the petulant and arrogant little Mozart, huffs after the Emperor reviews his latest score as containing “too many notes.” Wolfgang is stunned! “There are just as many notes, sire, as I required. Neither more nor less.” But, and for perhaps the only time in the story, the Emperor has said something that makes sense: “There are only so many notes and ear can hear over the course of an evening.” Now, of course, that’s not literally true. The ear can hear as many notes as there are. It doesn’t stop after it has achieved its maximum melody intake. But we do get taxed when we stay in the same state for too long. In those days, an opera could be four or five hours long. Even in a world with no TV or smartphones, that’s an exceptionally long time to remain in a state of active listening. 

While the learning process isn’t quite as intense as five hours of opera (for all my love of musical theatre, I cannot really get behind opera—alas, because the opera world is scandalous!), we do reach points where our brain can only handle so much information. We reach a saturation point. Think of it this way. If you have some salt or sugar in your kitchen, take a glass of water and add a spoonful of either to the water and stir it until the grains dissolve. Repeat this. Eventually, the water will no longer be able to absorb the granules, because it will have reached its saturation point. Our brains are like that, too. This is especially true of those of us with ADHD and other neurodivergences. We are prone to hyperfocus, which—while exciting in the moment—can leave us spent because of the amount of energy this takes. But even neurotypical people will reach saturations points. It may take longer, but we all get there. 

This is the plateau. And it makes us feel like we’ve reached the top of the mountain only to discover it’s merely an endless mesa—with implied additional mountains beyond. 

This isn’t quite the same as burnout (my favorite topic—can’t go a week without using that term), because it’s not so much that you’ve spent all you have to spend. In this case, it’s that you’ve consumed all you can consume. You have cleaned out the buffet, so to speak, and you may be feeling a bit bloated—mentally. 

This is totally OK! Unlike burnout, this is easier to recover from. All that’s required is nothing. By which I mean, take a break! Go do literally anything else. It doesn’t mean you can’t do divinations, but stop reading about the tarot—or stop writing about the tarot (or whatever else you use). Go learn about, oh I don’t know, the school to prison pipeline or the process of designing oyster farms. Literally anything else so that your mind can digest all the delicious food you’ve forced fed it, like some poor goose in France about to be made into rich people food (rich people food? rich people food? rich people food? — food for people with too much wealth). Just take a break from cramming the old noggin with new divinatory details. Make like Elsa and let it go.

For how long? Y’aint gonna like this answer, pal-o-mine, but: as long as it takes. How will you know? Because, like hunger tells you it’s time to eat, curiosity will tell you it’s time to learn. It always happens. After the four comes the five, which says, “hey four, you lazy old conservative fart—I’ve come to fuck some shit up!” This is the journey of learning: feast, digest, get curious, feast again, lather, rinse, repeat. And it’s quite easy to do!

Except that it’s not. Because you are passionate and you want to know more, do more, learn more! Why shouldn’t you? There’s a ticking clock and you want to go pro before there’s no more pro to go (whatever that means). But, dear one: No. This is not so. There is no time limit. First, you are already good at this. No, I know you know you’re not the “best”; I know you feel imposter syndrome and you envy the people you admire who seem to be doing what you wish you could be doing; I know you want the validation that comes from having reached the mountaintop, just as those names that line your bookshelves and social media feeds. But here’s the tea, sis: none of them have reached the mountain top either. And any one who says they have is lying and should be avoided because they’re arrogant. Show me someone who has finished learning and I’ll show you a corpse. And learning does require downtime. It is part of the process, as much as letting bread dough rise, babies gestate, and not hurrying love. We can’t have skill without the internalization of information. Most of us internalize important info pretty quickly, but of course that gets harder as we age. But when we fill ourselves to rim the brim, we can overflow—over saturate—and the info doesn’t have the time to work itself way into our brains. Because that’s what learning does: it creates pathways in our brain. Grooves. That make recall possible. It can’t do that if we don’t give the information time. Just like we can’t rush most of life. It takes however long it takes. 

Which takes us to this week’s spread.

A Read of One’s Own
We may feel anxious when allowing ourselves a fallow time to let our learning proof. Here’s a spread designed to help you find more helpful ways to spend your time. 

Position 1: How much in need of a learning break am I in?
Position 2: How long will this break likely take?
Position 3: In the meantime, what can I focus on?
Position 4: What can I do when I get anxious that I’ll never be ready to start learning again?
Position 5: How will I know it’s time?
As always, I recommend using three cards per position. As I frequently do, for the sake of brevity, I’ll only use one for this example.

A quick example:
How much in need of a learning break am I in? Card drawn: Queen of Swords. 
(For context, like last week, this is for an imaginary client.) The queen suggests you’re pretty well in need of one, in fact. Of course swords pertain to the mind, and queens are mature—so this suggests a long time (maturity) learning (swords). The queen’s chopped off some dude’s head, so they’re a little cranky. Nap time. 

How long will this break likely take? Card drawn: The Hermit
Ah! How delightful! Although, as an answer, somewhat frustrating. I think here the Hermit says, “as long as it takes.” Which is, if you recall, exactly what I said above (thank you, validation1). “Oh, he’s just justifying his own answer!” Not at all, dear reader, for The Hermit is associated with Virgo—which is the sign of the harvest. You cannot harvest crops before they’re ready. So, ha! (This could also mean “Virgo season next year” or “the duration of Virgo season.” Given the timing of writing this (late August, on the cusp of Virgo season), that’s not a bad answer! 

In the meantime, what can I focus on? Card drawn: Death
Oh how wicked; how delicious! Can we talk about the connection between the harvest season above and death literally harvesting here? I love when this happens. The card also reminds me that this question or spread position isn’t well-worded. It’s not specific enough to be easily read. Were I re-doing this, I’d likely make it something more like, In the meantime, what can I dedicate my curiosity to? Or something like that. Feel free to change it yourself! Anyway, this is saying that you can focus on how wonderful things will be when you’re ready to harvest all your knowledge—by which I mean, put it to use. It may also be a reminder to enjoy the transformation. Don’t focus on anything else, just don’t cram more food in your brain. 

What can I do when I get anxious that I’ll never be ready to start learning again? Card drawn: Six of Swords. 
Unusual for me, I think this suggests that meditation on the process of intellectual growth (six = three + three, growth + growth!). To spend time feeling what you’ve learned working with in you and creating the neural pathways you’ve laid the foundation for. It may also mean to relax, the process is beautiful, just go with the flow and remember that you’ll get there soon. 

How will I know it’s time? Card drawn: Ace of Swords. 
All the passion will come rushing back in a massive boner of curiosity. It will, reader, be totally irresistible and unavoidable. ​