tarot by starlight

That I make myself sufficiently visible so that another poor young soul growing up all alone in this alien culture and alien landscape doesn’t have to struggle the same way that I did, and have, and will. If I manage to reach just one person, it would be all worthwhile. 

You are not crazy or broken. You have a gift. A gift that modern civilisation has wrongfully denied. They don’t know any better, and they will unfortunately suffer for it before they have a chance to realise otherwise. 

If along the way, I inspire others to see things from a different perspective, that is just a bonus. But I don’t want to convert anyone or convince anyone of anything. In our collective, human ancestral heritage it was often said that this is a path which chooses the person, and it’s just as true now as it always was. 

Being “chosen” today is lonely, painful, confusing, and even dangerous, in a way that is completely unprecedented in human history. I want to help lessen the pain and the danger. I imagine that if it is at all still possible, the closest two human relationships I would ever have in this lifetime would be 

Wow, I have been really impressed by how well the Sacred Earth Oracle works with reading pairs.

Don't those two cards look like they just belong together?

And...

YES! You can have boundaries (space) and attraction (magnetism) at the same time!!!

**

I told him that I am still disturbed by what was done and cannot be undone. The fragments. Do your fragments bother you? Am I just too sensitive, that I am picking up on other people's fragments though my own?

No, it's probably more like mine do not bother me because I am more ignorant than you, he said.

**

I have always been able to pick up on other people's fragments. Those fragments are not just their own, it is that of the Earth's. Fragmented watersheds, ecosystems, clans, families, relationships, traditions, histories, identities.

Since I became aware of them for the first time since age 12 I have carried this confusion and pain alone. In the beginning, it was just confusion. Now, it's mostly pain. Never have I been able to find a kindred spirit who understands what exactly it feels like to pick up on them everywhere and to always be unable to separate this pain from others, human or otherwise, from the pain that belongs to my own physical form. There were times when I thought I had found the others. But whether they were or not, to be in the company of others focused on this subject only magnified the largely undesirable effect. We were all confused, in pain, and angry. I didn't want to be angry.

I decided that I would still choose to love, despite the pain, despite if it would prevent me from being loved in return, since love is a capacity in such short supply nowadays.

**

If every human was born with a natural ability to communicate with the Earth as a living being, would all of this particular type of pain have been avoided? I have been convinced, for most of my life, that the answer is yes.

The more I look at this, the more I see that it is the story of every modern human ever.

Everyone who has ever longed for stability, despite knowing that it can be taken from oneself at any time, that true stability in this material world is a complete illusion.

Everyone who has ever had their perspective violently turned around, who has been forced to accept that the life they knew is no longer the life that will be because things can and do change, irreversibly, like the strike of lightning, before one is even aware of what has happened.

Everyone who has persisted in connecting with something they are passionate about, despite the pain and risk it carries, despite the pain and brokenness that has already been caused by innocently following passion in the past.

New decks for the new year.

New Era Elements Tarot and Sacred Earth Oracle

But I absolutely cannot say that I practice it anymore. I don't practice it, and maybe I won't for the foreseeable future. I'm not sure if I ever did, properly, anyway - or if it was just a purely theoretical affiliation.

The truth is that everything in life can be fluid - but they are not, because fluidity increases complexity, it increases the amount of time and energy we need to spend to process and maintain each thing in our lives - because our physical brains and bodies have limits, no matter what our hearts and souls desire, and think is right.

I don't see the world as becoming more fluid. I see increased fluidity in some aspects and increased rigidity in other aspects, as a counter - to keep the balance.

I see walls everywhere. I can't expect others to drop or modify theirs. The only place I can keep free of walls is my own mind. The relationship I have with myself. Fluid and alone.

Concretely speaking, what has been the biggest challenge in the past some years is that I have been drawn to connecting with places whose dominant or official language [various tiny European languages] isn’t one I already know “naturally” from childhood. I think this is a vital part of why I keep getting “confused” or “overwhelmed” or “more autistic” and this reason, unlike almost every other one, is not one that can be changed or evaded - probably ever. I have to accept that it will likely affect me for the rest of my life, and commit to working on developing a strategy to mitigate how it negatively affects my ability to function.

I like learning languages. I like reading, I like writing, I like analysing grammar. Learning the language of a place is also deeply emotionally fulfilling and necessary for feeling properly connected with a place - especially if I live there - because the language is part of how the place communicates. Super easy example: how disorienting is it if you can’t read any of the signs on the roads, in the train station, in the grocery store?

I don’t need to be fluent in [insert any tiny European language] to be able to communicate personally with the humans in that place, I know this, and I am so fucking tired of trying to explain for the 9000x time that this is not the point. I don’t care about whether or not I can communicate with a person, this is about communication with the place, with my environment, and oh yes, environments do communicate with us. More complicated example: when I look at job postings and search by location, more than 3/4 of them specify that because the language of the working environment is [the local tiny European language], all applicants must be fluent in it. Can each individual employee there communicate totally fine in English? Definitely yes. Will there be communication barriers with individual people if someone was hired who only knew English? Surely not. But that is completely not the point. Will that person experience some kind of vague barrier in relation to the office environment? Yep!

If I for an extended period of time do not communicate with a single human, well, I’ve done this lots and it’s been alright. It causes some practical problems due to that I start to forget I actually still have a human form and how to function inside of one, which is primarily annoying and frustrating and takes a lot of energy to “get back out of”, so I very much do prefer to avoid this. In contrast, if I for an extended period of time feel like there are, for any number of reasons, significant and unresolvable communicative barriers between me and my spacial and geographical environment, I will become extremely depressed. I will feel like my soul is rotting and slowly slipping away. I might know how to function in my body and in front of other humans but there won’t be anything inside of the shell and I can’t find words strong enough to indicate exactly how torturous such a condition is for me.

So language ability is necessary to feel connected with the only kinds of places that I seem to be drawn to anymore, and this is to establish or strengthen communication with the environment itself, both the “physical” environment and the “cultural” and institutional, not for personal connecting with individual humans. But in order to attain this ability to a truly sufficient degree (something I absolutely need) I am completely dependent on practice from fluid and informal personal interactions with individual humans (something I cannot do). It is not enough to read or listen or write blogs or write essays to the teacher or write for exams. With your native language, you could get away with having a total of 2 humans that you ever communicate in a fluid and informal way with. In a second language, if you want to improve within a reasonable amount of time, then that limitation will really hurt. 

This fact is the cause of so ridiculously many problems. It may well be the primary reason why all of the coping and adaptive mechanisms I had developed between being a Very Dysfunctional Autistic Child in primary school and eventually perfected in early adulthood, do not work anymore. Without the base mechanism around maintaining certain kinds of boundaries and distance with other people (because I need people to practice the language with, I really cannot afford to do that) I will very quickly get confused and the amount of confusions I encounter in interactions will build up to a point of overwhelm which results in decreased ability to tolerate sensory stimulation and oh look, here comes all of the physical symptoms. 

What would maintaining my original boundaries look like, then? It would almost certainly involve just accepting whenever people switched to English on me and took that as a sign to never try again. The key here is that I look to others’ behaviour to tell me what is desired and acceptable social interaction, and when words contradict behaviour I have seemingly learned somewhere that behaviour speaks louder than words. People tell me “oh you don’t need to learn this tiny language, we like to speak English”? Ok, I won’t learn then, you just told me you don’t prefer that. People tell me they are willing to practice with me but then switch to English the moment I seem to struggle for words and then don’t switch back after I find the words? That’s behaviour contradicting verbalisation and I’ll interpret your behaviour as telling me that practicing with me is not your true preference, which I very much would like to respect. Is this how I prefer to interact? No, but that doesn’t matter. Will I be able to feel seen, heard, or connected with in a genuine way if I just let the interaction continue the way the other person prefers? No, but that doesn’t matter. Except for with established close friends, the primary focus of any unstructured (obviously, if the interaction happens in the context of a structure, like work, then the focus is also on that, in addition to ->) social interaction is to just get through it without annoying or offending the other person or triggering confusion in myself. Letting the other person guide the interaction seems to be relatively speaking the safest way to avoid annoying them. Having no hopes, desires and absolutely not any “personal” agenda for the interaction prevents getting confused as a result of them somehow being in conflict with the other person’s intentions.

Prior to adopting this strategy, I was a quite annoying child. People bullied me and honestly I probably asked for it because I didn’t “stay in line” and behave in a way that kept the bullies satisfied. Nowadays I carry 100% of the burden of uncertainty in social situations as internalised confusion and self blame in a frantic attempt to try to not annoy or offend the other person. 

For fucks sake I just want to feel like "me" again and not the ghosts of thousands of other people all at the same time

I know you had bad experiences with them, I know it wasn't nice for anyone and it probably still hurts in some way somewhere, but can we just... go to sleep for now?

"Using cards to process emotions" in practice :)

I always tell people who are totally new to tarot (and may possibly have certain preconceptions) that it is really just like a language built from a very limited set of symbols - mostly visual, sometimes also with a few words. These languages are designed as a way for your conscious and your subconscious to communicate with each other - whereas other languages were designed to communicate with other people.

So I had a deck of cards in hand - it's actually just the least boring one that isn't currently taken up by my "altar project" (might post a pic of that tomorrow) - and put them in this weird formation without any conscious thought. Once all the cards are out there's usually some time (or a long time) where I group things or move them around, that is about processing different cards' (or rather whatever they happen to actually represent) relationship to each other, and moving closer to a clearer and stable-r understanding of the entire picture.

It takes time,

and stillness

Extended stillness.

Letting everything come up, giving it space to exist, acknowledging its validity, and then letting it pass through. Trusting that the right things will return and the not-right things will leave me be after they've been allowed to be released.

I swear that some of the weirdest things ever have appeared and disappeared randomly, I had no idea there was that much to work through!!

Well, there is I guess. The contents may not be important, but the amount, the richness, the depth, the fact that if I pay a little bit of attention and slow down just a little bit I will keep finding things - this is important. The things that are scattered, dotted, hidden... everywhere, even during all the times I intentionally turned away from them.

I feel like I'm standing in the eye of the storm. Immensely grateful for this moment while deeply aware that it can only be for a moment.

And start to notice the first sign of something - mature, grounded, dependable, but also at the same time open to intensity - growing from the most core place of my spirit - inside of myself - that I don't think I've ever known before, and probably never will again.