Card of the Day: Six of Cups

This card is typically associated with a return of good feeling and community after the isolation and grief of the four and five of cups. It symbolizes a connection to childhood and innocence. Today, though, this card is making me think about the karmic root systems we’re socialized into—white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy (among others). Speaking as a cis white woman, I can identify with the strong stately evergreen tree above the surface: I am “good,” I’m doing my work, I’ll know how to identify my racism and sexism what it arises. I’m doing all the “right” things.

It takes humility and an openness to painful feedback to become aware of the tangled, underground roots of my socialization. The fact that I am so often caught off-guard when I receive racial feedback, or gender feedback, is not a bug, but rather a feature of the systems we live within. It’s designed to be invisible to me, to make me feel intolerable sensations that translate into defensiveness, excessive explanation, and a strong dose of rationalizing my actions.

How much does a person have to be harmed for it to “count”? For the harm to be “believable”? For it to be worthy of sustained action and change within organizations and institutions that have historically and pervasively and unconsciously centered white men’s comfort and accomplishments over the harm caused to Black people, people of color and women?

As a white person, I can just trust and assume that there is a mess of white supremacist conditioning that I can’t see and that’s going to make me do, say and think things that harm and dehumanize not just Black people and people of color, but that harm and dehumanize myself. And that if I want to cease from harm, I need to be willing to take that in and live through the pain of it instead of defending myself or other white folks.

Feeling tender today—for myself and for friends of mine and for all beings who hurt over this. In all directions. May my life be an ongoing act of healing the harm my socialization has done and continues to do to self and other.