“perhaps we have come to expect that every new stage and opening will come with its price.” - devany wolfe of serpentfire tarot
time is so weird. spirituality is so not-linear.
i somehow just went nearly a month without pulling any tarot cards. my altar, a space i’d become accustomed to sitting at for at least an hour every morning, for some reason felt distant. i literally have not sat down in this space by myself without a client and connected in weeks. what?
i remember processing with a friend at some point during this time that it was helpful to remember that “the work,” as in spiritual growth, intuitive work, shadow work, overcoming, self transcendence, happens as much outside of our sacred spaces as it does inside of them. it is still happening when we are carried away from our rituals and our routines to tend to our lives and our worlds and our anxieties and our fears and our families and our friends and our responsibilities.
anyways, i sat back down in my space today. came back to my deck. asked the question, “what have i been avoiding while i’ve been choosing to stay away?” and pulled the ten of swords. 👀
i’ve been avoiding the finality of painful realizations. the “last phases of discomfort,” to use some more of devany wolfe’s words.
time away from one thing is time with another. everything is everything. there is pain, comfort, lessons, avoidance, to be found wherever we put our attention. go through it instead of around it.
shame is one of the things we often like to go around instead of thru. shame is very ten of swords. what can come after shame is most definitely a "one" - a new beginning. shame is not inherently bad. what if we were not ashamed of our shame? as individuals. as white americans. as a country. my friend Alejandro Salinas led me to this thought this morning as he summarized a teaching he shared with me by Zhen Dao. it’s called “Why Anti-Black Racism Endures in America: The Spiritual Necessity of Shame.”
inhale. exhale. may our moments away from our rituals continue to be as transformative & full of lessons as our rituals themselves.