Tarot Translation
Shuffled by two ink-graced hands that I will trust forever, I found a mirror of such searing clarity in the Tarot that even my most logical, pessimistic aspects were eventually tempted to join the party. I sure as hell don’t understand it - but I will not look away. I am tantalized by this intergenerational ritual of poetics and symbolism. How it defies our neat grid works of logic, and spills rich gifts to stifled parts of me holding out quietly for those shimmers of magic that allow for truly deep breathes.
An herbalist and oracle, from where the rainforest meets the desert, once offered me the poetry that through the cellulose fibers in each tarot card, the forest talks. That thought ever reminds me of Ursula K Leguin’s 1972 historical science fiction work “The Word for World is Forest” which describes a people living in the embrace of a vast forest ecology, whose lives are deeply mediated by dreams.
Our brains and bodies are also shaped by living within vast coherent ecologies and social structures deeply mediated by dreams.
The Tarot tradition draws on a symbolic language that has gathered gravity and polish over many lived lives. How many hands and minds and pens and paintbrushes have contributed? It feels as if there is a winnowing down to fundamental shapes, colors and patterns of reality, existence, cosmic law etc. Inspired in 15th Century Europe, the images offer particular insight as to the needs and machinations of the shattered colonial psyche, a survivor of the eradication of European indigeneity, turned perpetrator of the same violence. As the reach of this archetype is ever more synthesized, globalized, universalized etc, the labor of clarity and repair is one that no human on this planet seems to be exempt from.
As I have gathered scars and come to know fear and despair, my heart is invested in sensations of freedom, safety and possibility. I care about your language with the exquisite and the multiplicitous nature of life. I am deeply invested in facilitating the experience of inquiry receiving response from The Tarot, and thus the (([{}]))
