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Happy February, friends!
The topic of this newsletter may not at first seem like a nice thing, necessarily. But as I wrote into it, I realized just how differently I feel about sitting in my own space of uncertainty, and how glad I am to feel surprised and excited by life again.
Plus, most things can be reframed as positives if you’re willing to be a little annoying and earnest about it. (Tales of the eternally striving optimist, what can I say. 😌)
Sometimes it feels like I will always be a student. In many ways, that is a wonderful thing, don’t get me wrong. There are times, though, I wonder: will certain answers ever flow freely? I chat with my good friend David on the phone and we discuss the power and immense difficulty of shadow work, of the self-doubt that arises when in the thick of it. The voices that flood your mind to tell you what you’re working on isn’t good enough, that it won’t move or even affect people, that it won’t feel impressive. I tell him what I tell myself, which is that I feel it, too.
And that while it feels soul-affirming and gorgeous and meaningful to receive responses from each and every one of you, telling me when pieces do move you, telling me the topics that resonate and that I should consider delving a little deeper into, it’s also important to know that I write, first and foremost, to grapple with my uncertainty in a way that feels somehow definitive. Powerful. Transformative. I would be doing this without an audience.
And I am doing so, paradoxically, even when there is no concrete answer to be found.
I write to answer questions, and I write to pose them, too. I write to remember, to notice, to shift a perspective—my own. Yours, maybe. And every time there is a dance with the blank page1 I’m visiting with uncertainty.
The thing about working with the tarot is that there’s an art to how you interact with it, how you choose to ask questions of it. Sometimes it will leave you with more questions. Especially when you are beginning, which even after a few years of sitting with each of my decks, it can feel like I am. Again, the whole lifelong student thing.
This happens when working with new cards, and when working with cards that trigger me. (clears throat Ten of Swords, anyone? At this point I’ve removed it from my decks. Like okay, I get it, we’re working with the literal swords’ edge of anxiety here.)
Admitting that is not easy. I don’t want to admit, for example, that I don’t know what I don’t know.2
It also happens when working with a particular card I am familiar with—one whose energy I have met what feels like many times over the past few years. Since 2020.
In the tarot, the Chariot card is a symbol of completion. Of chapters closing, cycles coming to a swift and complete end. When I think of the Chariot, I think, too, of the Ouroboros—that snake destined, forever, to consume its own tail. I think of the fact that every beginning is another beginning’s end. It’s made it easier to accept that I’m normally terrible at endings. Or else they don’t sit well (although I wonder if they do, genuinely, for anyone?). Either way, the Chariot ushers them in. This card is the graduation ceremony. It’s the promise that more change is coming, yes, but first, we must see this through.
In January, it seemed I was firmly entrenched in the “messy middle”—the liminal space between one phase and the next. In conversations with friends, I reasoned that most of us are tired of learning the lessons. We’ve done the work: so, so much of it. The addressing of traumas, integrating, reparenting, the setting of boundaries, all of it.
The liminal space is prickly, it’s uncomfortable; the energy decidedly not buoyant.
But I’ve begun to, at times grudgingly, fill my pockets with bits and pieces of acceptance. What I couldn’t previously accept, I’ve attempted—and am attempting—to hold space for, a phrase and a concept I used to entirely loathe hearing and also something I’ve had to learn to allow.
Allowing myself to sit with that sensation, too—the resistance toward my resistance, even if at times I’m doing so with clenched teeth—has ultimately borne miracles.
Because something miraculous does indeed happen when you finally allow yourself to release the dead weight. To cut away some of the baggage. To surrender into the in between, the sticky middle, the good and the bad mixed in with the knowledge that soon it will change.
Something miraculous happens when you finally allow yourself to surrender…
It does just that—it changes.
Just when you think the thing is forever unyielding. Just when you want to scream into the void (okay, so maybe you already did a few times). It’s here in this space where I am reminded just how surprising life can be, and how terrifying and dazzling that can be all at once.
As we’ve entered February, I’m reminded that if we allow ourselves the grace to understand and fully embrace where we are now, even if it’s a place we may not have expected to be—indeed, even if it’s one we’d never have anticipated—we can move forward in a way that’s more open, more expansive, and more allowing of ease.
This is not something I’ve ever been able to do before. For a long time it felt like I was fighting entire wars just to allow myself to be seen. And to be able to let myself remain unsure, to be open to possibilities, change, and wavering not-knowingness? Unheard of.
Is it sticky, still? Sure. Absolutely. Perhaps it always will be.
But it feels incredibly good to give myself up to it, too. It feels as though I’m finally allowing myself to fall into something that’s always been there—silent, invisible, potent, and at the ready to catch me.
Do you feel that you’re in a liminal space in your life now? How are you choosing to sit within spaces of uncertainty? I’d love to know.
a few other nice things
Tarot for the Wild Soul with Lindsay Mack is one of my go-to podcasts, and February’s theme according to Lindsay is all too fitting. Deep wisdom here, and it definitely inspired parts of today’s newsletter: February is Uncertainty
Bookstores—notably Barnes & Noble—are expected to make a comeback this year, and I am utterly thrilled about it.
Loved this interview with
, who writes the astrology for writers newsletter, on why she doesn’t believe in writers block.Shervin Hajipour’s Baraye, which has become the social protest anthem of the revolutionary movement in Iran, won a Grammy last night. So moving, and so well deserved. I’ve had this Jan Blomqvist remix on repeat.
I wrote in this post about how much easier it is to start with something on the page than nothing. And though very often I choose to work that way (and I maintain that it is easier!), today I did not. Today I returned to the blank page with an urgency that sometimes only comes when I’ve left it for a little while.
My former manager said this all the time—“I don’t know what I don’t know”—and I loved it. I thought it was a smart and unassuming and wonderfully human way of bringing people in, giving them a seat at the table. As in: I can’t help you unless you let me.