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Do you ever find yourself in a literary rut? There were years when I was only reading nonfiction. Delightful nonfiction, of course, but this period also coincided with a huge and uncomfortable transformation - that awkward string of years after college when you’re just getting your sea legs in adult life. I’d moved to North Carolina, started a business, and found myself drifting towards the slow end of my first longterm relationship. I wasn’t in a space to dream; real life felt too demanding, and maybe some part of me felt like I had to be serious, to learn about the world “as it is.” There was no time for stories.
The past few years have been a similar phase of transition. I’ve only wanted to read about sea creatures, cave systems, the history of the Spiritualist movement - ways to find wonder in the physical world and its history. Lately, however, I’ve felt a shift. I’m staying up late just like I did as a teenager, lying on my bed listening to music, just staring at the ceiling and feeling it all. My bedside tables hold teetering towers of half-finished poetry and short story collections. I’m re-watching the languorous, longing Wong Kar-wai films I love with wide, hungry eyes.
These changes snuck up on me, a slow blending of colors, until I found myself in a completely different landscape and mindset - dreamy, subtle, poetic, and outside of the grasp of rational thought. Moony.
We’ve been talking a lot about the epic and catastrophic cards in tarot: The Tower, Death, The Wheel of Fortune. It’s no surprise. The world has been reeling. All of us have been facing these aspects of life, especially as we went through the height of the pandemic. Life holds many moments best encapsulated in these cards, and no matter where and how they show up, they’re obvious and need immediate attention.
But what about the moments of healing? What about when the dust settles?
In many ways, I’ve been “surprised to be surprised” by my experience of The Moon recently. Something about the acute nature of a crisis pushes us into a mode of practical problem solving that has its own brand of clarity. We just need to put out the fire blazing in The Tower. We need to survive first. Simple. The rest of the journey is decidedly weirder. Just look at The Moon! Is that a giant crawdad (or lobster??) emerging from a pond with two wolves howling at towers? What is even happening here?
I suppose what I’m getting at is that my recent experiences have me considering that an opening to beauty, art, and strangeness - stepping outside of the controlling realm of the rational mind - is a sign that I’m healing, and perhaps that I’m farther along my journey than I realized. You can’t open up to newness, be willing to venture into stranger places, while you’re in crisis mode. You can’t see the moon when there’s still smoke in the air.
I was not expecting to fall into passionate teenage reverie, lounging around listening to my record collection. And I’m also surprised at how much I missed it.
I see this in the sequence of cards we’re circling around here: The Tower (crisis), The Star (immediate healing), The Moon (emerging into the inspiring wilds of life). In The Star we’re tending to our wounds, and like the figure depicted here, we have to pay attention to ourselves - what hurts, where we’ve been exposed, how we can lead ourselves back to our inner wellsprings. But once we’re “spiritually rehydrated,” life starts to come back in. Except it’s stranger than before; we’re nude, tender - everything feels more vivid.
Beauty, strangeness, and, most importantly, seeking it out ourselves are the first signs of expansion. When The Moon shines its light on your life, you know things are changing; or, rather, that you yourself have changed and can let the light back in.
