New Year’s Day is a ritual day for me. I want to move, to do deep introspection. And usually I pull a card. A tarot card.
Last year on New Year’s Eve I attended a workshop hosted by Michelle Cassandra Johnson. She had this lovely deck, her deck, the Transverse Deck. We all pulled cards from that deck before the practice. I pulled the death card.
Now, before you gasp or think “how appropriate for 2020” – tarot cards aren’t good or bad, but simply a tool. Ask the deck something and use it as a guide to probe deeper.
The death card? Well, that is all about transformation, shedding, grieving, loss. The questions we might ask ourselves is – what do I have to shed? What is no longer serving me? What is it that I have to grieve and let go of in order to move on?
Ok. So 2020 was full of that. But it seems as though I am not done. I pulled the death card on New Year’s Day.
Maybe none of us are done yet. The way I see it, we are only half way through the portal. We are still shedding, grieving, growing. And we have an opportunity in the portal we are about to walk through.
News of the vaccine, a new administration, a “light” at the end of the tunnel has energetically shifted things. However, this really is the danger point. The liminal. The in-between. We have a choice to make. Do we leave certain behaviors behind? Do we choose, or demand, something different?
It is hard to keep choosing something different when you get tired. What I know is that the “before times” weren’t working for me. I was pushing to prove myself, thinking if I just worked harder, responded to everything, been everything to everyone – I could be of service, I could help change things. But really, I just became burnt out, so exhausted and hopeless.
If it wasn’t working for me – a bisexual, cisgender, educated, white woman with varied socio-economic status – the systems of racism, capitalism, sexism, etc aren’t working for a whole lot of other people with other identities. And these systems operate not only outside social justice movements – but deep within them too. We still have so much work to do.
I truly believe in liberation. It’s why I work for it. But in the last year I realized I was policing myself, feeling like nothing I could do was “enough” – that I was not “enough.” I wanted to be of service, but was sacrificing myself and what I got for it was burnout. It is when I realized that I needed to, as Sonya Renee Taylor says “dismantle the ladder of oppression within me.” Liberation is an inside out job. Perhaps there is more dismantling, more death, still needing to occur.
But damn. The death card? Again? Yes.
“It is never to late to be what you might have been.”
~ George Eliot
Somewhere along the way I lost myself. Perhaps this dying, over and over, is a way of returning. Before the “shoulds” and “can’ts” and “reasonable decisions” – a way to belong to myself again.