Dispatch from the Wild Interior: November 12, 2020

3 of Pentacles: Sometimes the wishing is the work. Or the work is to remember how to wish, how to hope a thing into being, or into starting to be. Possibility always precedes reality, as thought comes before form, dreams before daring. How can you imagine the stars into alignment? What forces do you feel coming to your aid, tethering your feet to the earth and lifting your chin to the sky, the limitless up? What can you offer them to enlist their gifts, to persuade them to stay?

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: November 11, 2020

Justice: At the center of your body is a river bedded with stones, magic in that it runs two directions. When you’re quiet, you can feel it and remember that balance is not the same as stasis, that the scales are always in subtle or overt motion as weight is added or removed. Yours is not to hand down punishment to or sentence anyone, least of all yourself, but to observe with loving detachment all that transpires and makes space for the truth. To watch with your river and let the upcurrent carry to your hands and your brain and your mouth what is accurate and real and fair and true, let the downcurrent wash back into the earth and its firy core all deception, misdirection, corruption to be made pure again. And repeat, because time is long and looping and no time is without its lies or its magnificent though occluded truths.

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: November 10, 2020

Page of Swords: Every impulse has a price but you have feathers to spare. If you move fast enough, time curls in on itself and you’re young enough again to grab life by the blade and never think to look back. What must you shed to achieve liftoff? To what storm shut your eyes to keep flying? What would an earlier, wilder, freer you do?  

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: November 8, 200

10 of Pentacles: Let what you love consume you. What’s on the other side of this complete absorption, this angelic surrender, can only be known by going. Every threshold presents three choices: through, back, or stagnation. For the temple-builder, the danger is in falling in love with the temple and forgetting that the task, the calling is to build. What is asking you to honor its completion and move through to the next? What light tips its hat through the doorway arch, inviting you to a bright unknown? 

November 7, 2020

For several years, I was in a relationship with someone with undiagnosed, untreated mental illness. I never knew quite who I would encounter each day when I came home from work, or when I came home from being out with friends, or when I woke up in the morning. I didn’t realize at the time what a toll it took on me to be constantly vigilant, constantly unsure, always trying to anticipate what might set them off. What I might be doing wrong.

The way I felt the day I arrived at our apartment and she was gone is the way I feel right now. I’m so glad that people are celebrating, that people feel like driving around and honking, that this one guy was moved to walk through the neighborhood in his sweatpants playing the saxophone. I love it. I’m moved by it.

But this is a note for those of us who are feeling another way. I too had a burst of excitement when the news hit and my phone started buzzing off the table. I was thrilled. And then, relieved, so deeply relieved. And now, I’m tired. Exhausted actually. For a minute, I felt bad about feeling bad – why don’t I want to take to the streets, bang pans and shout?

When I walked into the apartment that evening, it was a shambles. There were half empty moving boxes, clothes strewn around the bedroom, a door of the armoire torn partly off… I laughed, and then I cried, and then I laid down on the unmade bed and stared at the ceiling for hours. It was over. There was so much to do – figure out what to do with the stuff she left behind, get out of the lease, reconnect with people I’d been isolated or alienated from. But right then, all I could do was lay there and feel the weight of those years lift off my body, start to convince my system we no longer needed to be on constant alert.

I know my friends who are people of color feel this way, felt this way long before Trump and will feel it until we truly change this nation. I know my friends who are women, who are trans, who are queer, felt this way and feel this way. But for the past four years the danger and the violence was coming from the highest level, at the highest volume, and while we’re far from out of the woods, there is much to celebrate.

I’m going to go for a walk, because it’s a gorgeous day. I will doubtless cry on the sidewalk as I’ve been crying here on this couch. I won’t bang on a pot because what I feel is quiet, is more a window opening than a parade. And that’s OK too. We’re OK. It’s going to get better now. It has to.

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: November 6, 2020

3 of Cups: Abundance feels alien to some of us. We’ve been taught that more for someone else means less for us, as if the supply of whatever it is we need must necessarily be as limited as a single apple pie in the center of a massive and populous table. But our hearts know better, as do our bones, the parts of us that call across the divide with an offer to iterate outside what we are at the cellular level: joined, common, enmeshed, entwined. Here’s the truth: the only evolution left is co-evolution. Loving union is the only way we make it through. 

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: November 4, 2020

The Hierophant: Your link to the divine needs no intermediary, no translator, no king or priest or oracle. The keys you need are at your feet. The gesture that opens the gate is the gesture you make when you feel yourself to be a vessel of light. When the delight is enough to make you clap your hands or wave them in praise. Underneath the costumery is the body you inherited and made, and beneath that, the light that knows everything, is everything, and cannot die. How can you tune into it today, its vast internal, eternal amplitude, and let its singing guide your becoming?

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: November 3, 2020

2 of Cups: When two rivers meet, where does one end and the other begin? Your interior selves don’t have to be identical or fully merged to give your lion wings. Your ancestors live in the mirror whether or not you can see them peering back, spun into your marrow and blossoming ventricles. How can you invite them out of the background and into the fore? What patterns do they know and form, what codes do they hold? Something died and something survived to make each of us. The way the lotus grows from the mud we all emerged from some muck, some inglorious start, and also the stars.

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: November 1, 2020

Four of Cups: That story about Newton realizing gravity existed when an apple fell on his head is probably a myth, but it could be true. The answer to what’s stirring in your sentient guts is in the apple above your head, or in the stars just past that, or in the star in the apple or the seed in the star. Look up. What’s above you that you hardly ever notice? What happens when you tip your head back and the throat naturally opens? It’s a posture of vulnerability to offer the neck like that, the other side of the gesture of a head bowed or bent. Dissatisfaction is a contracted position, the shoulders drawn forward and down. What happens when you just for a moment expand? What light starts to flicker or get in? 

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: October 31, 2020

Page of Pentacles / Ace of Swords / King of Swords

Here’s what we’re looking at: the possibility that armed uprising, war, as a means to evolution is the equivalent of bathing in the water you just showered in. Do we not end up covered in what we just tried to get rid of? Is there a way to sink the sword point down in the ground and move into a striving era where we call back past our colonializing, dehumanizing, capitalistic ways of knowing and being into indigenous, interconnected ways that while imperfect (as humans are imperfect) simultaneously value all humans and move people out of the center of the equation? Can we do this while acknowledging the ways we have NOT done it and engage in reconciliation, reparation by those who have benefited, and rebuilding toward something altogether new drawing powerfully on something altogether old? A way of being that allows us the fullness of ourselves and reconnection with the full spectrum of the more-than-human?   And might we in this way save ourselves and be a selves worth saving? 

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: October 30, 2020

Four of Pentacles, reversed: Nobody is who they think they are, nor is the world what we think it is. The sky is only blue because of the ocean. The mountains are only stone to give the gods somewhere to sit that would not collapse. To draw the blood up from your toes, hold your breath lightly for a very long time or hang upside down from a bar by your knees. The storm and the rollercoaster and the high velocity gyroscopic trajectory of this moment are tests of your core, checking to see if what tethers you at center will hold through what’s next. To see if you can keep your balance now, before things get truly windy and weird. 

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: October 29, 2020

Four of Pentacles: The known can only carry you so far. Abundance can also smother. In what ways have you made yourself a tower to stay safe, only to find yourself staring out from your dim, comfortable room at a world lit with possibility? Is the stronghold your body, your job, your romance, your solitude? Good news: the keeper of this gilded cage is you. 

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: October 28, 2020

The Hermit: Wherever you’re going has everywhere in it. This is particularly true of the inself destinations, your lantern illuminating terrain stranger than any you’ve traversed or imagined outside. Every writer knows there’s a difference between fact and truth, both mattering in their own contexts and times. What truths wait for you deep inside, where your personal everything links up with the universal totality? There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to follow the unmarked paths and mysterious staircases of your interior landscape, to let them emerge in the quiet and dark of your heart, your gut, your hips, your knees, the tip of your spine where it meets the skull, the dip of bone between the eyes, wander and wonder there a while. 

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: October 28, 2020

Four of Pentacles, reversed: What if the source of your stability, the thing on which you and your life balance, were your wildest vision, your dearest dream? What would it mean for your existence to be a projection, an extension, the organic outgrowth of the hope you’ve been hauling around all these years, the thing you might almost dare to call a calling? Can you imagine turning everything on its head so that your life’s driver is what’s possible instead of what already is? Try it for just a minute. And then for four. And then forever. 

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: October 25, 2020

The Moon: Often, we don’t know what we don’t know until we know it. But there are many ways of knowing, just as there are many ways of seeing, many ways of hearing. What is trying to reveal itself to you, make itself heard or seen, beyond your normal means of apprehension? What nudges or approaches you in the liminal spaces, peeking around or wandering the edges of your awareness when you’re almost asleep or nearly awake, deep in meditation or resting under an oak tree? A path has been set for you on the water. If you look closely, you can see the guardians at the gate. Ghosts, guides, beasts of warning or companions – in the moonlight, the best way to see clearly is to close your eyes. Reach out your hands. Let what wants to arise, rise.  

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: October 24, 2020

Six of Wands: Some days it’s easier than others to believe that the riot will be a riot of flowers. That your magic will align with the plants’ magic, and the city’s magic, and the planets’ and the stars’. Your victories are yours, and they’re not all limited to survival, as much of a victory as that often is. What would happen if you were as visible in your triumph as you are in your vulnerability? Who might know then that you are the one to follow, or a one to follow, or who might you knight to lead in your stead? 

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: October 22, 2020

Sometimes brilliant manifestation requires a kind of blindness, a charging ahead without knowing what lies beyond the next hill, the next wall, the next minute. Go with the good horse of your gut, chasing whatever feels most like flight, like flow, like you are closer and closer to doing what you were put here to do – even if what that is remains as mysterious as the other side of the ocean or what’s behind the sun. When did you last feel that possibility surge through your body? Let it back in. Leave doubt for tomorrow. Today, go on ahead and run. 

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: October 21, 2020

Temperance: What would happen if you stood nearly naked in the fullness of your holy contradictions -- the way you are planted and winged, laborer and priest, how you long for the spotlight and invisibility, absolute union and absolute solitude? The sacred is never singular, except in the sense of its allness. What in you have you been told or decided does not belong, must be cut out or cut off, discarded in favor of more pleasant or commodifiable aspects? They’re not gone. They’re blooming around your feet or drifting around your head, waiting for the signal that it is safe to return. How can you make space for them, invite and welcome them home? What does this mean for the whole? 

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: October 20, 2020

Three of Rods: What’s next, now that you’re not drowning? What that you thought was impossible, even impossible to imagine, is breaking open? Imagining it brings about its beginning. The horizon opens like a torso, vast expanses forming in the limitless body, descending to feather, arising to the sparkling mind. The landscape in which we stand is only separate if we make it so – the us and it perception is a damage of language, and this disconnection hampers our manifestation. What seems to be “out there” is a part of you waiting to be welcomed in to your whole, to be called by your name.

Dispatch from the Wild Interior: October 19, 2020

Queen of Wands: The lion behind the smile. The flower that is also a fruit. On the ground a stick, in the hand a weapon. In what ways have you been taught that delicate is weak, that power means brute? How can you reconcile the might of your spirit with the vulnerability of the body? The lie, as always, is the binary, the either/or. The truth is always an and. You are tough and terrified, breakable and bold, beast and queen, exhausted and able beyond measure. What is possible if you let all your selves meet in this moment, in the hand that plucks the fallen branch from the ground, makes from it pointer, staff, baton, rod, wand?