An Announcement!

Y'all.

I wrote a poem.

Now the poem is getting published!

If you don't know andi grace and the witch cabinet, I highly recommend you take a look. It's for "badass femme magic," and andi's healing lens is powerful and infuses everything they do. They've published several zines and posters, usually around femme healing on particular topics, and they also have a column over at perennial favorite Little Red Tarot.  I have andi's herbal abortion poster, and I look forward to collecting more of their work.

This month, the witch cabinet is publishing a zine called "soother - femmes grieving family and fertility." When I saw the call for submissions, I was stirred to work on a poem about my own infertility, and how it ties in with my gender and my body. I ended up with The Freemartin, a poem structured around tarot cards I found relevant. Just writing and submitting it was scary, but andi's approach made that vulnerability safe, and for that more than anything I thank them.

The zine will be published on Mother's Day. Consider pre-ordering it, especially with the consideration that ten percent of profits will go to a "community group that support parents in marginalized communities." It's pay what you can.

Thank you to everybody in this community who has made it safe to be vulnerable, and special thanks to andi grace for helping us use that vulnerability in service to healing.

Mourning

I have not posted about the myriad of tragic events over the past few weeks because I am utterly overwhelmed. I literally do not know where to start.  This blog was intended for me to be a sort of refuge, where I was not called on to do the emotional processing required of my work and volunteering. However, I'm realizing that trauma does not stay neatly packaged in one area of our life. People reading my blog can't assume that I mourn the loss of Black life in the United States, because that is tragically not a given. I have to state it, otherwise I am complicit in white supremacy.

I am mourning Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.

I am still mourning Sandra Bland and Eric Garner and Freddie Gray and Trayvon Martin.

As an U.S. American, I can list names of Black victims of white supremacy as easily as I can recite the pledge of allegiance. And I've only scratched the surface.

I have so little to give right now, and for that, I am sorry.  I would like to tell you, the reader, that your feelings of sadness, anger, frustration, exhaustion, and numbness are.... well, "normal" feels reductive. But they are all responses to unceasing exposure to violence. I see you. I see your sorrow. I see your pain.  I see your anger.

***************

For more on anger in the wake of injustice, especially for healers, see this post at Little Red Tarot.

***************

This summer has been hard for me. I've been very raw, and struggling to process both what I see in the news and what happens in my personal life. I've been watching wildlife in my backyard a lot, as it is one of the few things that brings me peace.  My partner and I watched a pair of Carolina wrens build a nest in the watering can on our back porch, watched them lay eggs, watched the clutch hatch.  I checked on them (discreetly) first thing in the morning and right before the sun went down.  The parent birds got so used to us that they would feed their babies while we had our coffee on the back porch.

Two nights ago, a snake ate the baby birds. They would have started fledging towards the end of next week. 

It was a loss that hit me quite acutely, at a time when I thought I had no space in my heart for additional loss. It felt silly to cry over it, in the wake of such greater tragedies. 

the last picture I got of them

But my grief over these little birds is all tied up in the mourning I've been doing all summer, and I just can't begrudge it. I often understand large experiences and feelings in my life by contextualizing them through nature and animals, and I suppose this is no different. 

***************

I have the nest, still. I am trying to decide on a ritual to do with it, to honor the four tiny lives. Small as matches, snuffed out as easily. 

***************

I hope that you are connecting with the ones you love, and resting within the comfort of your community.  I hope there is something in your life, however small, that is providing you some measure of peace.  I hope you are holding yourself with compassion. 

Court Cards: A Down Home Approach

Even if you're a beginner, you probably recognize the difference between the Major and Minor Arcana.  You might already have a decent handle on the suits, and their domains and symbolism.  If you're anything like me, though, the court cards still feel beyond your reach.

The first suggestion you will see for how to read court cards is to read them as literal people in your or the querent's life.  Some readers even go so far as to say that a court card can identify a person down to their eye color!  Now, if the querent notes that one of the court cards looks like somebody specific in their life, that is definitely something to pay attention to (I once had a querent look at the Page of Swords and exclaim, "That's my ex!"). If it occurs naturally (and it does), that's one cool permutation of a court card. But the truth is, that could happen for any character on any tarot card. I find trying to read court cards as specific people can feel cumbersome, and removes a lot of subtlety from the reading process.

Still, the court cards feel unique from the rest of the Minor Arcana; they seem to have somewhat more independent personalities.  I really like Daily Tarot Girl's method for getting to know the court card, treating them as their own unique actors in the deck. She isn't necessarily saying they always correlate to a real-life human, but they do seem more like fleshed-out characters than the rest of the Minor Arcana. I think her exercises are absolutely wonderful if you are just starting to get to know the court cards.

When I started to devise my own approach to the court cards, I was drawn to the idea of each position referring to a level of maturity; that is to say, Pages are children, Knights are youths, Queens are adults, and Kings are old and wise.  Aside from the implications about gender, this was a good starting point for me.  I decided that, for me, each court card spoke to a step in our journey of relating to the world (much the way the Major Arcana describe our path through life). Pages are just starting their journeys; Knights have more confidence, Kings are ready to make decisions, and Queens see the process as a whole (my Queens outrank my Kings).

So what does that mean for reading the cards?  Well, it means knowing the domains of each suit, so that you can see what each court card presides over. For me, it made sense for me to give each court card a motto, and I am not the first person to hear the court cards speak in first person!  You will find, within a spread, that each court card may have a lot more to say, but these mottos are a good starting point.

I've grouped them below by court level instead of by suit; this way, you can see what I mean by the progression in our personal story. We start out relating to the world as a new, wondrous thing; we gain confidence, begin to act upon the world and shape it, and ultimately gain a perspective of our experience as only a piece of a larger whole.  Our paths are not linear, either; we can return to a Page chapter of our lives many times, or we may feel like a Knight in one domain and a Queen in the other.

***************

Pages

• Cups: I have innocent trust in the validity of my emotions.
• Pentacles: I approach the physical world with fascination and wonder.
• Wands: My enthusiasm leads to uninhibited, spontaneous action.
• Swords: I am eager to learn everything about anything!

Knights

• Cups: I have confidence that my emotional compass will point the right way. 
• Pentacles: I have faith that consistent hard work will bring reward. 
• Wands: I strive to experience life in the fullest!
• Swords: My intellect will lead me to success.

Kings

• Cups: I balance my emotions when making decisions.
• Pentacles: Success comes through hard work and reasonable expectations.
• Wands: Passion, tempered by experience, guides my decision-making. 
• Swords: I use logic to come to just decisions.

Queens

• Cups: I have the intuitive ability to understand the important role of emotions throughout our lives. 
• Pentacles: Hard work is most noble when it serves not only your house, but your community. 
• Wands: Passion promotes growth, in our communities and ourselves. 
• Swords: Wisdom comes from the ability to evaluate experience rationally. 

***************

A Note On Gender

I could write a whole blog post on the fuckery that is gender representation in traditional tarot; I'm not ignorant that my beloved Universal Waite-Smith features exclusively hetero-cis-normative folks (though I do my best to expand my interpretation of those characters). When reading court cards, I remove gender as much as my colonized mind can.  That is to say, any individual court card is not tied to a specific gender, but rather speaks to a potentially universal experience. 

This is all well and good, but what we need is better representation on tarot cards. I am completely over the moon for decks like the Numinous Tarot, which features not only non-binary, non-cis folks (kings with boobs! queens with beards!), but does a great job of featuring people of color, too.  In other words, this deck actually looks like real the people in my life.  And if you're not already reading Cassandra Snow's Queering the Tarot, you should; it's a series of essays at Little Red Tarot that brings a queer lens to tarot card meanings, ultimately helping to shape a more inclusive and accurate practice of tarot. 

Does this approach to court cards resonate with you?  Are there other approaches you prefer?  How do you incorporate (or extract) the power of gender in your tarot practice?  Let us know!

Tarot Readings for Abortion Access

Hi folks, I'm writing today about a topic that is very dear to my heart.  I live in a state where abortion access is restricted, due to increasing amounts of state legislation.  This is tragic for everybody who might need or want an abortion someday, but it hits low-income and otherwise marginalized folks especially hard.  For some background into what the people of North Carolina face, you can check out:

The Guttmacher Institute
News story from Rewire explaining where things were last year
Overview from NARAL Pro-choice

For the second year in a row, I will be raising money for the Carolina Abortion Fund by participating in their Bowl-A-Thon.  My goal is to personally raise $1973, in honor of Roe v Wade, and to help me reach that goal, I'm offering hella discounts on readings! I wanted to give free readings to anybody who donated, but Etsy will only let me give you 89% off; SO:

By donating to the Carolina Abortion Fund Bowl-A-Thon, you receive 89% off a tarot reading!

To claim your 89% off, just follow these steps:

1.  Go to my Bowl-A-Thon page.
2. Donate $10 or more to improve abortion access in the state of North Carolina!
3.  Take a screen cap of your receipt and email it to downhometarot@gmail.com
4.  Wait for me to send you a coupon code, which you can then use to get 89% off any reading in my Etsy store!

This discount will be available through April 22; on April 25, I will post how much money we raised, and a picture of our bowling team!

I'm excited to help raise money for the people of North Carolina.  I encourage you to look at abortion access in your own state or country.  See if there are ways you can help improve access to this important part of health care!