Stuck Boat Tarot
A quick update, five weeks after the fact.
I had this title lined up to use because it seemed to express the state that I was in; I planned to write an update, having neglected this newsletter for a while; then five weeks passed.
The last few months have been exhausting, sometimes in a good way and sometimes in an undermining way. Mostly I’ve felt like a boat stuck in a canal. I enjoyed this lede from a write-up of the situation:
The congregation of tugboats and dredgers that freed a skyscraper-sized container ship from Egypt’s Suez Canal on Monday had help from an extremely foreign body over the weekend: The moon.
The moon! What can’t she do…?
They haven’t been entirely wasted months, though, as I have handed in the first 20K(ish) words of my upcoming tarot book. I signed with Scribe a few months ago, and the book will be out next year—and though I am really enjoying writing it, I had to get through some boat-sized writer’s block first. There is simply so much to write about, so much scholarship, art, history, politics, that it formed a bottleneck.
But! In a fit of pique, I drew a few cards; and as though the tarot read my mood, it gave me a particularly direct answer:
Just get on with it, Jessica; do justice to the things you actually know, and stop fretting about all the things you don’t.
Sometimes this is all I need to get out of my head. Consequently I’ve been trying to simply write to the things about tarot I personally find fascinating; I’m sure my editor (who is a dream) will make some rigorous cuts, but at the moment it’s nice to let it all flow out.
In terms of this newsletter, I’ve realised that I was also beginning to feel stuck in terms of the actual help I was able to provide. The tenor of the past year has been, ‘Will things ever change…?’ and it’s been hard not to feel crushed by the big structural factors that make doling out advice feel near-impossible; the cards keep saying Just hold on, but that advice wears thin after a while.
Did the liberation of the Big Boat help us all…? I don’t know, but the moon factor is promising—a sign that time will eventually release us from our man-made jams. In the meantime, keep sending your questions across—and as always, I will do my best.
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