lesson 35: shake it up

I get to try out a new deck today (the Vintage Tattoo Tarot by Alyssa Wilson), so I thought, “why not use a layout I never use!” So I thought, what shapes do I avoid in readings? And I realized I don’t use triangles very much—so, what the hell?

There’s something interesting about this shape, not least of which is how unappealing I find it as a spread layout. Yes, unappealing. While I chose it, I wouldn’t choose to chose it normally; this is purely an exercise in getting out of my typical way of doing things—because neural pathways can, if we get lazy, become ruts. And in many ways, I think the 2/swords can do that, too; especially when laid out in this way—with the two swords laid out side by side rather than balanced in a person’s hands. I quite like that this card has eyes on it. Swords are related to perception, seeing, even though we tend to think of them more as thoughts and words. Of course, thoughts and words are merely an expression of our perceptions, aren’t they? Not really much else, at least much of the time. And the eyes that appear at the tips of each sword suggest that perception can become damaged in a rut—the way these swords create kind of a road. And then the two moon crescents, sorta suggested arrested development—a term I tend to reserve for the Hanged Man, but that is appropriate wherever our perceptions are “arrested” (stuck). It’s almost as though the swords in this card want to pierce those eyes just to shape up this static. 

This is uncommon for a two, at least in my usual interpretation. That said, twos are magnets. They attract and repel. If they do both too well, it makes sense that we would get stuck in a state of suspended animation. The moon phases can’t change; the eyes can’t rest or even blink. And that makes us tired. Perceiving things the same way too long makes us bored. It’s like cabin fever. The more we stare at the same thing, the more excruciatingly infuriating it can become. I imagine this is similar to what parents feel when their kids are on their 12,000th watch of Frozen or whatever. (Hi, Disney! You’re sure showing your whole ass to us this month—fuck you!) Repetition or suspended animation can make us tired. Even too much rest. Languishing. Something I’ve been doing this winter. For multiple reasons. 

Too much of even a good thing can be infuriating.

This two creates a triad with the next cards: the 2/cups and the five/cups. 

The two brings the prior card “down” with it—when our mind is still, so are our emotions. Whether that’s good or bad depends a lot on context, but since I’m dealing with the topic of getting stuck in a rut, let’s say in this case it’s “bad.” Or bad-adjacent, anyway.  As our brain goes, so do our feelings and sensations. As our brains atrophy, so goes our feelings. I recall the Fight Club episode of 30 Rock: Liz Lemon has to go on leave because of an attempt to do “sexual espionage” to save her show from a consultant. She meets three wealthy divorcées who don’t work and have too much money, “mild lupus, and great insurance.” After weeks of daily massage and spay appointments, shopping, and mani-pedis, Liz discovers how the ladies stop their pleasure centers from shrinking: a fight club! (“I brought a role of quarters to hold in my fist!”) (Incidentally, this episode features three great theatre performers as those divorcées: Elizabeth Marvel, Kerry Butler, and Mary Catherine Garrison.)

The 5/cups? Well that’s the fight club, silly! In order to stop ourselves from spiritual and emotional atrophy, we have to mix it up! The fives always make people sad. We can thank the Golden Dawn for that. All those happy-looking cards and keywords on the GD cards aren’t exciting. When I say I generally prefer neutral decks for readings, this is why. And actually, here’s a card that manages a neutral affect. Sure, we’ve got some tears—but they’re artistically styled and in fact they show us what happens when we stay in a rut too long: those swords will stick you in the eye and the tears will start flowing. Just so your body can feel SOMEthing new! (Addiction works in a similar way, incidentally.) 

What this means, really, is: if you don’t shake things up—life will shake them up for you! So you might as well take advantage of the autonomy to do that while you have it, because . . . 

Here comes row three and The Tower! (Followed by the 7/coins and the High Priestess.) 
When we refuse to make changes in life, or to take action, life will generally make that choice for us and it won’t ask what we’d prefer it to do. At these points, we’re sort of at the mercy of the fates,  and all we can do is sit with what we’ve let life bring us and figure out what it means to us. That’s the 7/coins. The looking within to understand how we yielded the results we got. The High Priestess kinda keeps that from us, because we’re not in control anymore; we ceded that to the fates, remember. She’s not really that interested in helping us. That’s not her MO. Her MO is “that’s for me to know and you to find out.” 

Of course, there’s another way to read that row, too. Say the Tower is a stick of dynamite and you’re the one lighting the wick (the 5). This isn’t literal dynamite, of course; we’re giving the theoretical dynamite of fucking around and finding out—which is what the next part of this row re-contextualizes as when we read it in this way. The 7/coins says that you’re going to then have the agency (which we took back by making the change ourselves), you’re going to be more aligned with your mission or core—and that your own guidance will take you in the right direction, even if you don’t super know what that direction is. See, the HP can be a gatekeeper (someone else), but they can also be ourselves. When they’re us, they’re intuitive and they can feel their way through—but they have to rely on that, because they’re not going to be able to see the whole way. The card’s connection to Cancer and the moon see to that. We have to feel our way forward. But we can. The novelist EL Doctorow said that writing a book is like driving a car at night with the headlights on. You can only see a few feet in front of you, but you make the whole trip that way. That’s what the HP suggests.

What, then, is this reading saying? “Try new shit before new shit tries you.” Or, to put in a better way, “keep playing and making divination fun, keep experimenting, so that you don’t get bored with it and find it suddenly give out on you.” This is a thing I’ve experienced. I’ll spare you the story; I’ve told it lots before. The thing, though, is we can all fall victim to it—if we keep doing the same thing over and over and never trying anything new. 

When I was in undergrad the first time, I had a teacher who in retrospect was pretty nasty to me—but who was also the head of the department. But he did say one thing I tell students in classes I lead, no matter the topic: Don’t just say you hate something. Figure out why. I find this to be essential in life for all kinds of reasons, and I think if more people did this there’s a chance this country may have avoided its trajectory. Just because you try something doesn’t mean you have to do it forever. Lots of women try dating cis het men and decide that they’re better off alone. You can discard anything that doesn’t work for you. But if you don’t try it, you’ll never know what you could have learned from it.

This is one reason I’m weirdly glad for my tenacious attempt to learn Lenormand, despite really finding it an unhelpful system (less so now, but I only use it for the GT). In trying to learn a system that really wasn’t working for me but that seems so popular with everyone else, I thought I was trying to keep up with the trends. Instead I was teaching myself how to read tarot better. I would read something about lenny and think, “Oh, I like that. How could that work with tarot?” Turns out, great! Much of my tarot reading technique comes from lenny—including some of my tarot card meanings, including The Star.

For what it’s worth: It wasn’t until I gave up trying to read Lenormand that I actually got good at it. And, as mentioned, I really don’t enjoy doing readings with it other than the grand tableau. That I find quite a fun exercise, and it tickles me to use a system where every card in the deck comes into play. But if you ask me for a reading and let me choose, I’ll usually pick tarot. I just really feel connected to it and partly because of the ups and downs I’ve had with it (including my oft-repeated story of giving it up). At the same time, my tarot readings grew and grew and grew! I just kept experimenting with stuff from Lenormand that I liked, even when I didn’t like the damn cards!

I’m a fundamentalist about very few things. One of them is the importance of lifelong learning and experimentation. That sounds like corporate bullshit. It’s not. We can so easily get stuck in divinatory ruts (or any kind of rut) if we don’t do that. You can feel it when you’re working with a reader who has. They often will sound much like a new reader reciting long-memorized card-meanings, but they do so with a disengagement and distance that shows they both know these in and out and also stopped caring ages ago . . . 

It’s sad. 

I once saw an Instagram post. I can’t recall the poster, but it was about Witchery and it said “It’s natural for your practice to wax and wane.” And I thought, “Oh, interesting.” But it makes sense, right? Because if you keep doing the same thing over and over, well, it just becomes . . . exactly like church. Which is the height of spiritual disengagement: a performative, mostly endured, rarely engaged liturgy of obligation with decreasing attendance. God. I think back to the days when the church had the priests facing away from the congregation and speaking in Latin. The parishioners didn’t even mumble the responses as we did when I was a kid. Or, I don’t know, maybe the fact of everyone facing in the same direction, speaking a dead language, held more magic, somehow. Anyway, the point is, when something goes on endlessly with no shakeups, no adjustments, no new experimentations . . . dust settles, atrophy kicks in, and the magic dies. That goes for jobs, it goes for relationships, and it goes for divination systems. 

Maybe this is one reason why lenny got so hot for a while. People had gotten tired of doing the same thing with tarot. I know I had. And now you have my books because of that! (YAY!) Now, I find tarot endlessly rich with possibilities. 

Even changing the shape of spread—even using a shape you find unattractive as a spread—can give you some insight. 

Before I wrap up, it’s also possible to read this spread from the bottom up, technically backwards. It might go something like this: Those whose spiritual practice (HP) are aligned with their true values (7/coins) will always be exploding [yes, NOT a typo for “exploring”] new worlds (Tower)—it is the natural state of the relationship to this thing (5/cups). In fact, they are most attractive spiritually (2/cups+swords) when they let their soul (HP) guide them, rather than their intellect (2/swords). Reading it backwards kinda gives the opposite answer, but says the same thing. Cool, no?

A read of one’s own.
This week, I encourage you to draw this triangle and ask “Where can I stand to mix up my practice, so that I don’t get stagnant or stuck in a rut?” See what happens. Have fun. Read from the top down. Read from the bottom up. Do all of it! Find as many answers to the question as you can, and then sum it all up into a quick action plan that you can put into practice you’re very next spread!

Lemme know how it goes. Til next time.
TB.