April 2021: Remembering How to Play
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- Outlawed, a heartbreakingly beautiful, vivid, brisk and visceral novel by Anna North
- The Battle of Manassas, composed by 14-year-old Thomas Wiggins in 1863. Wiggins, or “Blind Tom” as he was popularly known, was an enslaved person who became a touring musical phenomenon, reportedly earning up to $100,000 a year (well over $1 million today) and enough to make him among the best compensated performing artists of his time. I highly recommend reading a bit of his backstory before listening to the piece. Prepare to have your mind BLOWN. Yet another example of modernism before “modernism.” Interesting who gets enshrined as “founders” of artistic movements… Thanks, Mary B, for sending me this.
- The latest episode of Robyn Love’s Small Things Brought Together—this time with photographer Jaime Permuth. What can I say? Long-form artist interviews are my love language!
- The Bengsons’ Sovereignty Hymn. JOYFULLY!
- Big Vagina Energy
- Photographer Nicholas Bruno’s The Somnia Tarot series. The obsessive creative impulse breathtakingly executed.
- Manchán Magan’s Sea Tamagatchi series on IGTV. In February 2020 Manchán set out along the coast roads of Mayo, Donegal and Sligo seeking out sea words, maritime terms & coastal customs. In autumn 2020 he continued his search in Connemara & Inishmore. He gathers a selection of the words he encountered in this luminous series.
- Give the Divine Feminine Back Her Men: Lunar Kings, Flower Knights, Trans-species Magicians, and Hallucinatory Harpists—a series by Sophie Strand about re-wilding gender and the Divine Masculine. This series is FIRE. Here’s the introductory post; follow/friend her to read them all…or wait for the book!
- Cloistered nuns doing a viral dance to cheer people up. Not ashamed to admit that I WEPT watching this. Thanks, Dad, for sending!
This is Angel, a fourth grader who lives with his family in my little town of Phoenicia. Angel’s a big reader and a regular at the Phoenicia Library. He was diagnosed with leukemia the week before Christmas. Until we live in a culture that centers care for all to the same degree that it centers military defense and carceral spending, families like Angel’s need help getting through a harrowing situation.
We’re all going to need this help at some point in our lives. So if you can give, please give!
Card of the Month: Two of Pentacles
In this card, we see a figure, wearing an exceedingly tall red hat, red tights, pale green shoes, a cinched orange tunic and a fiery-colored blouse with puffy sleeves. What a character! They are holding two golden pentacles encircled in a pale green lemniscate—the figure-8 symbol of infinity. The ground beneath their dancing feet is smooth and gray. The sky behind them is pale blue and clear. In the distance, tall-mast ships with colorful billowing sails ride the curvy ocean waves. The figure’s face shows composed focus: serious play.
This is one of my very favorite cards of the tarot. One reason is because of its astrological correspondence: Jupiter in Capricorn. Jupiter is the planet of growth, expansion and abundance. It’s one of the planets that corresponds to the collective, Saturn (Capricorn’s ruler) being the other. As someone with a lot of Capricorn in my chart, this card invites me to expand those boundaries and structures that I find so comforting and necessary so that I can discover what surprises might be lurking just outside of my frame.
Tarot reader Joan Bunning has one of my very favorite takes on this card: “the feeling of being graceful and effective at the same time.” Ahhh...yes. Capricorn usually has no problem being effective, although its approach can be more hammerhead shark than graceful juggler. It’s Jupiter that introduces that sense of gracefulness, of play.
Juggling is the perfect embodiment of these two energies: concentration is necessary. But what is juggling if not a kind of play? Pamela Colman Smith, mystic genius artist illustrator of the Rider Waite Smith deck, could have depicted lots of different types of play, but she chose the one that requires a relaxed attentional absorption to convey the energies embedded in the Two of Pentacles.
Let’s talk about the suit of Pentacles—the Earth element. They refer to the Earth herself, the whole phenomenal universe that we can see and touch, and to resources internal and external. People typically think of work, home and money when they think of this suit, but it can be helpful to include the many other resources that comprise our life: time, space, relationships, stability, security, safety, grounding, rootedness, and our ancestors—familial, karmic, and the dead of the land and deep time.
The reach of the Pentacles extends from the magic of our food emerging from the dark earth, to the legacy we leave to future generations. Everyday magic is eternal magic. And in this sense, the generosity of the suit of Pentacles invites us to enter into an ancient relationship and conversation through the very everyday activities that make up the life we’re living now. Not at some future time, when we have it all together, all figured out, when we’re smart enough, compassionate enough. Just our life as it is now.
All minor two’s correspond to II The High Priestess in the Major Arcana. What kind of leap do we have to make to connect this playful card of the Earth element to the fathomless, watery depths of the High Priestess? One place to look is in those swelling waves in the background. The ups and downs of our emotional life, the slow climbings and steep descents of our soul’s journey through life. Our juggler is light on their feet, has their eye on the momentary priority, is exercising attentional flexibility within the flow of daily events. They invite us to keep our focus on what is in front of us as a way of grounding ourselves in a fast-moving life.
The tarot’s minor two’s speak to us about how we navigate choices. How do we choose? This card, and the High Priestess’s influence in it, suggests that the choices that emerge from our connection to the Earth, and to the High Priestess—our deep, ancient inner knowing—can be a lot more reliable and fulfilling than choices made from intellectual calculation.
The minor two’s also relate to XI Justice, as 11 reduces to 2 (11, 1 + 1 = 2). Whereas the High Priestess presides over the fathomless mysteries that cannot be spoken of, Justice asks us to articulate, through our words, but more often through our choices. What do our choices articulate about what we value? We can say anything, but our choices about how we attend to our resources—time, money, space, our day-to-day activities—say a lot more about what we value than mere words.
It can all sound so serious. And as a person with Sun, Moon and Mercury in Capricorn, I love that. Give me serious! Give me reality and all its constraints, which can actually be a fertile field of creativity. And: this whole entangled dance of infinite complexity and perplexity can also be a place to play.
This is what this card is teaching me these days. The Two of Pentacles is an invitation to recognize that things don’t always have to be so heavy, hard and serious, and that we are not doing any of this alone. And if it feels like we are doing it alone, to consider the possibility—how it might feel—to be surrounded on all sides by allies: plant and animal allies, rock and water allies, allies among the dead and among the elements of air, fire, water and earth.
Our pervasive sense of isolation is a story that the overculture has told us that keeps us estranged from these allies, from each other, and from our own hearts. It’s not a story that can be easily dislodged through the intellect. We have to practice—to enact—the truth of our profound interconnection and entanglement with life.
And the Two of Pentacles says: start here, now, in this moment, with whatever is before your eye, in your hand. Step into this fleeting moment until it expands to become eternal, and let what is before you be part of your intimate, mysterious, playful relationship with life. We don’t always have to “work” so hard. Try a little play, set the colorful ships of your heart’s desires into the swelling waves of beginningless and endless time.
Find out more about my tarot work.
Original Artwork
Remember friends: 50% of the proceeds from the sale of all original artwork is split between the Phoenicia Food Pantry and a mutual aid fund of your choice. (Does not apply to greeting card sets.) If you see something on my website that’s not priced that you’re interested in, please get in touch.
