Life has a way of getting ridiculous. Or, at least, of accelerating until it feels ridiculously full. Driving home from my usual errands the other day, I caught myself feeling overwhelmed by the so-muchness of it all: the accumulated stress and chaos of the pandemic/world at large, a whole pile of personal events that have given each day a low-level hum of stress and anxiety, not to mention the daily tasks necessary to keep a household going.
I have a feeling that many of you know what I’m talking about. Living can be exhausting, glorious, and gratifying. But also exhausting.
I think that we often equate spirituality and intuitive awareness with a certain kind of bland, anodyne calmness. It’s the droning New Age music at the spa, the whisper-voice in the guided meditation, the endless talk of manifestation, as if all troubles could be willed away with the right attitude. In this model, I should be driving around peacefully, a knowing half-smile on my lips. But my best spiritual work, especially spell work, comes about in far messier ways.
Driving down the road, almost home, I’d spent the majority of my commute feeling mildly hopeless and uninspired, dangerously verging on teenage sulkiness. This started to transform into edgy irritation - why was I moping around like this?! I thought about The Wheel of Fortune, a card that had been showing up in readings recently, with its themes of change and unpredictability. Change, I thought, would be welcome just about now.
I’ve always appreciated The Wheel of Fortune’s presence in the deck and its impishly frustrating message: life is ever-changing, wacky, and out of our control. The Wheel may slow its spin, but eventually it spins again. Nothing stays the same forever. So much of what happens is unknown to us until we’re living it. And rarely are we the ones spinning the wheel.
There’s a rotary that marks the last stretch of my drive home. It’s in a section of the city where the downtown segues into a strange land of mixed-use and industrial establishments: tire shops, a place delightfully named “Perfection Motors,” a scaffolding business. As I neared it, I had a refreshing thought: what if I spun the wheel? What if I could try my hand at a consecrated action, a spell if you will, to call in the change I so desperately wanted?
I approached the rotary, leaned my body into the turn, smiling when I realized something appropriately epic was playing on the radio (Bruce Springsteen), and whizzed past my exit. Perfection Motors flashed by again as I took a second spin; two full turns around the rotary and the wheel was spinning again.