Q: i am happiest when i'm … how would you complete this sentence?
I’m happiest when I’m coming up with ideas for new Tarot decks. Like this, the Major Arcana for The Three Grackles.
Originally it was going to be Three Crows, but the moment I added colors they stopped looking like black crows and started looking like something else. Actually, grackles make perfect sense for me, since I credit a grackle with resorting my humanity after I was psycho vac’d while in Peace Corps.
Sitting on a park bench in Washington DC on my 27th birthday, numb, bleary, having just spent a miserable 22-hour flight from Armenia after being sent home in disgrace, and there, in front of me, hopping about was this bird … this little black bird with an iridescent sheen to its feathers. The first animal in almost two years that hadn't fled at the sight of humans. At that moment, at one of the lowest points in my life (my first day in AA was also a rather low point), I was transfixed: I had never seen anything so beautiful. And then I remembered what type of bird it was and began to laugh … and with that I suddenly knew I was going to survive this. It was a grackle, a bird people dismiss as ugly and bothersome.
Even in books on ornithomancy (divination by observing the behavior of birds, such as their flight or cries) has nothing good to say about grackles. This quote comes from Arin Murphy-Hiscock’s The Hidden Meaning of Birds--A Spiritual Field Guide:
A casual collective name for a group of these birds is a plague of grackles, which suggests their unwelcome presence. If you see a grackle, examine how you’ve been behaving toward other people. Have you been taking advantage of them? Have you been riding roughshod over them, unaware of the destruction you’re leaving behind? The grackle’s iridescent plumage can also be associated with illusion and the capability of dazzling or redirecting people. You have to concentrate to see past the shiny reflection into the grackle’s darkness.
So this deck is a shout out to all us lovers of the unwelcomed out there, all of us who can find beauty and grace in places where others wouldn’t even bother to look. That’s worth rolling out of bed in the morning for.
