Card of the Day: Mother of Cups

She’s something of a sister to the High Priestess, ruling the watery realm of emotion and intuition. Not only has she realized the inner maturity of her suit, she also embodies her wisdom in her actions. She knows when structure and containment are useful, but she also has the courage and insight to bend the rules, to activate the (sometimes painful) process of healing self and other.

The capacity to compartmentalize can be super-useful in certain situations (I’m finding), but it can also be an indicator of a big blind spot. In my experience, the way this tends to become known to me is painful, sometimes humiliating. There’s a reason certain things hang out in our subconscious and unconscious mind; when they break through, it’s a ripper.

I think as a white person, one of the biggest barriers to reclaiming my full humanity is the idea that I’m a good person, and everything I think that means: I meant well! I would never hurt anyone. There must be some other explanation for…, Let me just clean this up before anyone notices. I would never do that. I’m not like that. You must be mistaken.

For me, to be engaged in anti-racist work as a white person means being constantly reminded of what Ta-Nehisi Coates said in an interview: “There’s no immediate action that I can do to get out of this. What the realization is, is that me and you are here trapped together—that you’re as trapped as I am, that once you are aware, you’re in the cage too.” There’s no getting “out” of this—the pain, the shame, the grief, the rage. Once I accept that “trapped”-ness, what becomes possible?

As much as I’m committed to my own self-study and work as a white person, that work also includes relying on the painful mistakes I make to flush out what I otherwise can’t see. Years of practice have made me willing to use as much of it as I can, to not waste anything, to look for how leaning in to deep feeling, humility, vulnerability and repairing relational harm can open a path to my own healing and liberation, and (Goddess-willing) the healing and liberation of all beings.