lesson 48: letting go . . . and stuff . . .

​HOO BOY has it been a FEW WEEKS! Jesus Christ. July was not kind to yours truly, and I’m remembering now someone said to me back in June that “Cancer season was going to be rough for Leos.” Fuckin’ A. It was relentless. And somehow I completely lost the motivation to use any of the (expensive) healing tools that have been so central to my wellbeing the last few months! Why am I like this? 

Anyway, I thought since Mercury retro ends today—THANK GAWD—I’d do another post. It also gives me a chance to point out, too, that the form is ready! If you would like to submit interest in writing a post for this blog, you can click here! I’m really excited, although it’s been so long since I mentioned it to you all, interest has probably completely died down. But this is what it’s like living in my world. (You may not know this, but last month, after an unnecessarily upsetting interaction with my doc, I decided to go off the ADHD meds it took me so long to get on. I think it’s the right thing, but it’s not easy because I don’t think I realized how much the meds helped. Of course I went right from that to Mercury retro, and since I’m very mercurial and my Mercury isn’t that advantageously aspected in my chart (it’s oppo my ascendant—and my ascendant is pretty mercurial—so it’s like being opposed to my own nature; it’s got a semi-sextile with Mars, which I think is one reason I’m such a fuckin’ bitch sometimes; and it’s also in my sun’s sign—it’s often close, it can only be so far away from the sun, so it’s also got all Leo’s bullshit—and it’s almost conjunct the sun and venus—not quite, but close, so there’s a lot of feelings there), I’m awfully sensitive to certain retrogrades. And it always seems to be in retro in the weeks leading up to my birthday, which in soon, and so I also hate my birthday. I’m a mess. 

Further, I wanted to show off the gorgeous new Italian tarot, Tarocchi Italiani (AKA Matronua  Tarot) by Valentina de Luca! Wow-wow-wow! By the time you read this, there should be a video walkthrough and unboxing up on YouTube of it. It’s a stunning Marseille-style deck in beautiful hand paintings. If you’re afraid of Marseille because you hate woodcuts and/or primary colors, this is going to knock yer socks off. It’s not an easy shuffle, though; that’s the one down side. It can’t be riffled, at least with small hands like mine. It reminds me of Il Meneghello decks—that kind of thick, unvarnished card stock. But, like Il Meneghello decks, once you embrace the fact that it’s doing to be a long shuffle, and once you give into the sensory experience of it, it’s quite sexy, in fact. 

Thanks to the timing, I altered my usual question to be: What does tarot wanna tell us about tarot, coming out of this exhausting and demoralizing Mercury Retrograde? 

Here’s what we got:
Cavaliere di Spade (4), Seven of Cups (2), XIII (1), Nine of Cups (3), Re di Bastoni (5)
(As always, the numbers following the card name are the order in which the card was drawn and lain out.)

Death in the middle is perfect. It’s fucking OVAH! But if we’re paying attention it’s also saying, “well if you went through this, you might as well at least harvest what you can from it.” I love the Death card, or card 13, because he’s so practical—an inevitable. He’s the ultimate “this too shall pass” reminder, and I think that’s a more valuable lesson than the sorta memento mori aspect of death as a reminder that we will die. I dunno. The older I get, kind of the less afraid I am of dying, but the more afraid I am of suffering. Death is the ultimate reminder of suffering’s (anythign’s) impermanence. But a reminder to look around at what’s lying around in the detritus and taking what’s valuable. 

I’ve often said this card represents how our past fertilizes our present. I got that from seeing the Death card in the Wild Unknown Tarot. The sorta carrion carcass of the bird, there, reminded me that everything we are and will be us made up of everything we were. 

I think Death reminds us, too, that is so much easier letting go than we think it is. All it involves is just fucking doing it. Like, we create so much fuss and muss about shit, mostly, I think, born out of our ego’s love affair with main character energy. We all, or anyway a lot of us in western capitalist society, suffer with this notion that we are the center of the universe. It’s not our fault. Those of us who grew up in Gen X have the odd experience of having been half-heartedly told we can be whatever we wanna be but without anyone actually bothering to show us how to do any of it. We’ve been figuring it out on our own this whole time. But that makes us self-centered and less likely to think in terms of community. Actually, when we think of community we may be turned off because of what we learned form our parents about it: church. Right? Or whatever the local or personal equivalent was. In my case it was church. Woof. Anyway, I’m not going to get into the generational name-calling everyone loves, but as a weary late-stage gen-xer, I can see that the boomer individualism manifests in each subsequent generation in new types of entitlement and anger. Either way, we all view ourselves as the center of the narrative. Why wouldn’t we? Social media and Hollywood offer very little else. I remember when I saw a well-known queer magazine announcing that some gay couple had “hard launched” their relationship at some event, I had to comment, YOU UNDERSTAND THOSE ARE FUCKING HUMAN BEINGS RIGHT? We not only learn to talk about ourselves as main characters, but we also learn to think of ourselves and our loved ones as fucking products.

But that’s not an innate human tendency. There are lots of annoying things we do that come from our build, but not this. This is just a way ego finds to make our lives more difficult when it gets bored. 

It’s as simple as . . . not doing it. Which I know sounds odd, but. Death is like, just . . . don’t do it. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether the things I buy want to be bought by me. Which, again, sounds nuts—and I don’t do this every time. But the other day I saw a tarot deck that I’d been thinking about buying in the bookstore. I groaned, because I’m broke, but I picked it up and held it in my hand and tried to do the grownup thing. And instead I said, “If this deck wants to come home with me, it will; and if it doesn’t, it won’t. It’s as simple as that.” And I held onto it for a while while I looked for the book I’d actually gone in for, and when I needed to move on from that section of the store,I put the deck back without any fuss or muss or longing or FOMO or anything. I didn’t even think about it; I just did it. 
Letting go is so much easier than we think it is. 

Maybe it’s about asking the thing if it wants to be held?

You might know, because I won’t shut up about it, that I’m offering tarot+reiki readings. Each deck that I chose to work with for these sessions arrived with the idea that it would use it for this purpose. Each one, though, I thought to ask before I began working with it in that way. I did a reading with each and got their answer. The first was a hard yes. Really into it. The second offered rather a strange and circuitous answer, one that went in different directions and seemed to offer lots of different branches of thoughts. Exactly the way I do. This has been the primary reader. Another arrived in my hands when I was in a bad mood and I already wasn’t sure whether it was for me. I should have put aside until I was stabler, but I didn’t and I looked at it and didn’t like it and then did the reading—and it gave me a hard, I don’t think we’re into each other. I don’t trust you and you don’t like me.

A few days later, I remembered that and went to look at again. I saw in it everything I’d missed the first time and read again. This time the answer was (a qualified) yes. 

Main character energy makes us huff and puff and blow our houses down over things that could, like, easily just be put down.

13 reduces to 4 (1+3), which is The Emperor. These cards don’t—seemingly—have anything in common: Empy is stolid, stoic, rooted, perhaps conservative; Death, anything and everything else. The Emperor fears Death, Death shows he’s got reason to be afraid. But it’s because the Emperor’s ego is activated by his place in the world. He thinks that he IS the Emperor. He’s not. He’s the person holding the title right now. Leadership author Simon Sinek tells a story about a famous, five-star general in the military who was high up in the rankings of the government, here. He was used to limos and doors being held for him and special treatment and fancy dinners and the special mug with his branch’s logo and his rank on it. 

Then he retired. And gone were the limos and the doors being held and the fancy dinners and the special treatment. Speaking at an event with with this general, Sinek pointed out that he’d been served his coffee in a paper cup—not the special mug. “The mug wasn’t for me,” the general said. “It was for the job.” 

The Emperor is the guy who doesn’t understand the difference. Death is the general who got it. (Putting aside whatever feelings we have about international militaries, he’s absolutely correct.)

This makes me think about the way that main character energy makes us yearn for success and prestige. But the Emperor’s got both, and he’s terrified he’s going to lose it so he clings, he gets conservative, he holds on—that’s when we get him at all his worst qualities: that’s were we see the misogyny, the racism, the colonialism that we we typically hate about this card. Because he’s clinging to the idea that his role is who he is. But it’s not. It’s just his job. He’s an emperor, but not the emperor. There is no THE EMPEROR, except in tarot. It’s just the job. He may have it until he does—but he might have it until he’s deposed. 

We get so tied to main character energy, we actually lose the plot of our own lives! We get so stick holding on to what we have, we forget to think about what we might gain by letting go. Especially letting go of things that simply aren’t for us. (Please allow me to point out that I’m not talking about politics, here; politics belongs to everyone because we co-create our reality every day. We co-create society together. No one is exempt from it, even or especially if they are a “spiritual” person.)

Wow, deep, eh? It is, though. We are not what we do. What we do is just our task in the moment. That could change at any moment, whether through our desire to change it or because something happens that changes it. 

13/Death is flanked by two cups cards, the seven and the nine. Big, heavy cards, in their way. The seven asks a lot of us: What am I really feeling and which of those feelings are actually mine to carry and resolve? Woof, right? How do I know it’s asking that? Well, seven is introspective and it’s introspecting (so to speak) the suit of cups. Given what we talk about, I make that interpretive leap. But this is another thing I’ve noticed, especially in the weeks following my Reiki training. I found that prior to that experience I couldn’t even go out, sometimes. Being around other humans left me feeling sick inside, actually nauseous, and angry—ultimately I would downward spiral into self-loathing. I felt raw all the time. And then after reading about and being attuned to Reiki, after giving it to myself frequently, when a feeling would float by when I was out in the world, I would sometimes ask myself: “Is this mine?” Meaning, am I feeling something I need to feel because something is going on inside me that needs addressing . . . or did I just walk into the mist of someone else’s feeling, and I’m absorbing—which I know I do with loved ones, but never thought about with randos. And often I would discover that my mind wasn’t focused on anything unpleasant, I didn’t have any particular cause for anxiety or anger in that moment, and then I’d say, “Oh, that’s not my feeling. Bye, feeling.” And . . . let it go. 

I think if you’re drawn to divination, this might be something you experience, too, and, like me, you may not realize you do it. I know I do it with people in my life because I’m a fixer. I blame my Cancer moon, but that’s not really it. Fixing and over-caring and absorbing people’s shit is really a trauma response. Yes, there’s a certain amount of that that comes from being an empath, but I think most people are empaths and I think that term gets severely misused and misrepresented in new age spaces to make people feel special about themselves at others’ expense. I like to make people dependent on me so they’ll love me and I won’t feel alone. Weeeee! Thanks, growing! Well, it’s not just that, but that’s part of it. It’s not the empathic part that’s the problem, it’s how I react to it. Because when I feel shit, I feel shit. And I immediately go into rescue-ranger mode. (Isn’t it weird that Chip and Dale Rescue Ranger was somehow just a cartoon version of the sitcom Wings?) Anyway. You see me doing it all the time; the way I think I can solve global issues with posts on socials. It is a thing I have to live with and work with—because some of that posting is necessary, and some of it is trying to solve what is beyond me but that my white saviorism makes me think is both my fault and my problem to solve. 

Collective problems demand collective solutions, I guess is my point. 

Individual saviourism, whatever its cause, is ego-based. We hang on to a lot of things we don’t need to because we feel special doing that. We do. For some of us it’s a trauma response—probably for most of us, I don’t think most cis het men realize how much of their behavior are actually trauma responses, and everyone would benefit if they’d examine that—for others, well, I don’t know what else it could be. I think arrogance is a trauma response as much as insecurity, and I think both emerge from the same fear: being unloved and feeling unneeded. 

How do we evaluate what isn’t ours to hold onto? (As the 7/cups asks us to?) I’m looking at the 9/cups to answer, which is asking of me something new from the card. None of my usual interpretations make much sense hear, including the idea that nines are overwhelming. I don’t think something being overwhelming is sign its not ours to hold; I think it’s sign we need to return to the idea of community and that we need teams to help us, and that we need to be part of teams so we can help others. Which might be one way of thinking about this card. One reason I love pip dicks is because they both free me from the images on other decks, but free me to recall them if I want to. 9 is 3x3–if we were to replace this one card with three Threes of Cups, with the RWS folks dancing, we wind up with a community of nine. We are able to put down more when there are more people to carry it. 

I find myself saying that a lot when people who have no interest in putting their social media following at risk, while criticizing how I say what I say. “A lot of people could do a lot less if a lot people people took on a little more.” 

That’s one way to interpret it, then. But that doesn’t feel contextually relevant, especially since we don’t, at least in this colonial world, have communities that think that way—and it’s going to take a while to build them, because people are even more likely to be pricks to each other today than ever before. The world is angry. 

What, then, is the 9/cups? I don’t think it’s answering the seven, but simply reinforcing its potency. “You have to do the seven of cups, and you have to do it a lot.” Meaning that we have to sustainably connect with ourselves and find out if we’re carrying shit that we can easily let go of or put down. (I find myself saying this in a lot of client readings: just because you put something down now doesn’t mean you can’t pick it up later.) We have to constantly check in with ourselves. Nines can suggest repetition, which is one reason why they can be so wearying. In this case, though, the results should not be wearisome, because we’re actually freeing ourselves from shit we never had to carry to begin with! This might, if you’re lucky, become rather a habit! (As long as it doesn’t because a naval-gazing excuse to avoid doing the work of being a person embodied on this earth right now.)

Panning out once more, we find two courts: Cavaliere (knight) of Swords and Re (king) of Batons/wands. 

This King of Wands cannot be bothered! It cracks me up. He’s looking off to the right, eyebrow cocked, as if to say—really? You expect me to do something about THIS? At first I thought he was being a jerk, but I see now that he’s realized there’s shit he’s carrying he can let go of. And because he’s conscious of his energy output (wands), he’s going to be aware suddenly that he’s been giving energy to things that don’t need his attention.

The knight, on the other hand, looks somewhat mournful—as he moves out of the reading, and, in a way, to the past. He’s rather handsome-faced, but sad. And I think he’s because he’s ignoring the rest of the reading. He’s going off to fight battles—probably all mentally—that aren’t his. Anyone else do that? I do. Jesus, I used to fantasize about breaking up with guys more than I ever fantasized about dating them. That’s him. The Don Quixote of tilting at windless he doesn’t need to tilt at. Quixote is actually a good example, here; the phrase “tilting at windmills,” which comes from his story, means that he’s focusing on something that isn’t there. Literally, Quixote thinks windmills are giants, so he keeps attacking them thinking they’re living creatures. He’s fighting not only battles he can’t win, but against an enemy that isn’t there. And in the process, he damaging some property in the process. (I used to have a deck in which the Knight of Swords looked a lot like Picasso’s famous sketch of Don Quixote—a piece of art I’m always moved by, for some reason. I try not to other think it. I suppose I recognize his struggles. Anyone creative and who has lived with mental health issues knows them, I think.)

There’s a lot here. To sum it all up, what we’re saying is: we have to let go, sometimes. See what’s worth holding on to, what can be learned, what is fertilizer for the future—but we have to examine what we’re holding onto and discover how much it “belongs” to us . . . at least at the moment. We have to do that a lot because we’re likely carrying around a lot that isn’t ours. It’s ego, we know, but we also know that we’re the only ones who reckon with our egos. If we don’t do that, we wind up sadly tilting at windmills; if we do, we’re able to flick the things away that aren’t ours and truly take control of our energy output. 

Huzzah!

A Read of One’s Own
Use the cards to answer the questions:

1. What is something I’m holding on either because of ego or something else that isn’t actually mind to hold?
2. What is/are the consequences of this?
3. How do I begin the process of putting it down?
4. How can I explain it to others (if I need to)?

Here’s what I got
1. Seven of Cups(!) + Four of Cups (added as clarifier, since I just read the 7 in the last spread). Wha is something I’m holding onto because of my ego (I know I operate from ego; it’s not something else) that isn’t mind to hold? I think changing people’s minds, weirdly. 🤣 Like, if I think about the 7 was I did being evaluative, it’s like “Oh, it’s not your job to evaluate other people’s feelings and try to adjust them.” The 4 seems to add “you just make them more stuck.” Which, I’ll be honest with you: . . . . yeah. Ugh. Now, recall, I said this doesn’t exempt us from awareness in the human condition. What I think this is saying, really, is, “you can’t expect people to be ‘better’ than they are (by your standard), and when you do they dig in their heels and become more what you don’t like.” 

2. The Devil! Well, as I’ve said many times, typically I don’t read this card in any way relating to the image of people shackled. The Devil is my favorite card! But, dear ones, recall that I also say that the cards don’t “meant” anything until they come into context with other cards, the question, a querent, and a reader. And in this case, the cigar is just a cigar: the consequence of my (we’ll call it) willful meddling is that I remain shackled, stuck, and not in fun congress with the dark daddy—but in league with the pits of hell. Which, also true. (I actually think this is talking about my job.)

3. How do I begin the process of putting it down? The Sun + 8 of Wands. This a tough one. I know it’s going to be an effort for me (eight) to really look at this (sun). I have to work hard to see when I’m doing this and see when it’s sapping my juice. Like the prior reading, I have to put my back into this one. I have to keep the lights on. I may need a partner (the children in this card are paired) to tell me when I’m doing it, so that I can see it. 

4. Seven of Wands. How can I explain to others? I’m putting my energy where it can do the most good. Sevens evaluate, wands are energy—where can my energy actually be of use. Or, as my boss has said to me, “Look, go where you’re wanted.” 

Boom. 

Lemme know how it works for that—and don’t forget to submit for to read a post! It’s fun!