I’ve been messing around with various potential posts for this blog because there are so many things happening inside me that are not getting written down anywhere. My tarot slump has continued, but two things happened yesterday that have rekindled my faith that tarot can help me with the changes that we are facing on Earth right now.
Yesterday morning, I found this post by Siobhan Rene on Little Red Tarot: Face Up Judgement: Trumpets, Grief, and Getting Woke. Siobhan drops some serious wisdom about the Judgement card and its relationship to waking up.
The Judgement card heralds a cycle of sleeping consciousness, its awakening, and resistance to the revelation. Nothing is static. No one arrives and stays woke forever to all things. No one sleeps forever. At least not without a ton of grief. We regularly face opportunities to awaken or resist reality again and again. The direction we move in the cycle depends on our willingness to wake up or our commitment to bury our heads in the sand.
Please go read this beautiful post. It puts so much stuff that I’ve been thinking and feeling lately into an entirely new context. I’m a proponent of the work of Joanna Macy, who points out that the grief we feel for the world–which others may try to privatize and pathologize as personal neurosis–is actually proof that we are inseparable from the world. When we hear the trumpet calling us to awaken from the sleep of distraction and separation, we actually awaken to several things all at once: our love and gratitude for the world, our grief at its destruction, the interconnection of all beings and things, and the need to take action.
As Siobhan points out, we go through cycles of sleep and awakening–it’s not true that we sleep forever or wake up once and for all. Instead, waking up is something that we choose over and over, whether it’s a self-prompted awakening from within, or a trumpet call from without. (And yes, I am deliberately playing on the fact that trump is embedded in trumpet.) In either case, we have a choice to either move toward waking up or to fall back asleep. I’ll also add here that what is usually translated as “enlightenment” or “awakening” in Buddhism is in many schools not seen as a permanent state. Zen in particular, which I study, talks about awakening as a series of experiences both sudden and gradual.
Anyway, I was pondering all of this when a package arrived at my house well after dark. Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, the Slow Holler deck!
In some ways, it’s hard to even believe that I now hold this deck in my hands. I wrote my first blog post about it back in March of 2015–over a year and a half ago. The creators ran a great Kickstarter campaign, keeping us all apprised of updates as the deck has progressed, and shipping it out on schedule.
Already, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this deck, but I think it will be a while before I write a review. Let’s just say that, in working with the Slow Holler Tarot, I have felt more supported and healed by the tarot than I have in months. I knew the deck was going to arrive soon and kind of wistfully thought that it might pull me out of my tarot slump, but I did not anticipate that it would be this powerful. The deck is true to its promise of diversity of all kinds, but I think what is making the biggest impression on me now is its orientation toward the collective. The messages behind the Slow Holler Tarot are about sustaining yourself by sustaining others, and vice versa. It’s clearly a deck that has been created by people who know the challenges and rewards of collective action.
It’s time for me to wake up and lean in–to keep waking up and leaning in–and the Slow Holler Tarot has offered itself as a compass.
Leave a Reply