Thoughts. Ramblings. Notes on history. A generous sprinkling of tarot.
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Notebooks.
This little blog is just a place to keep track of my historical forays, developing tarot practice, thoughts on the craft of writing and teaching, observations, foraging adventures, book reviews, or general notes for myself and friends on various types of practice and little tidbits that catch my eye. Whether you’re just curious or looking for some ideas for your own practices, I hope readers will find something of value!
Unfurling
It’s the time of year that the ocotillo should be blooming, like fiery, lanky torches erupting from the desert. In the stark landscape, they beckon with their flamboyant burst of color, and if you keep a sharp eye out, you can see tiny hummingbirds dipping in and out of the trumpet-shaped flowers. One could be forgiven for getting lost in the aerial displays and missing the plants’ formidable thorns hiding under the stumpy leaves. Like most things in Texas, their spindly awkwardness and vibrant cheer are deceptive. So, too, the light touch of the hummingbird, disguising the deftness and skill of his maneuvers behind what looks like gentle effortlessness. To enjoy the ocotillo’s sweeter side takes a healthy respect for its edges along with a delicate touch.
Ancestral Work: Getting a Second Opinion
When I do ancestral work, I generally use a combination of tarot cards and pendulums for connecting with ancestors. I have one pendulum that I use for working with my own ancestors, and a separate pendulum that I use for working with other people’s. During this reading, my friend’s ancestors gave some advice that struck me as a little “off.” It wasn’t bad, per se, but it reflected something that she has been working through for a while — namely, that several of her ancestors had a lot of earthly power and accrued some karmic debt on account of that power.
Attention as a Blessing
If, as I have said, writing is magic, then it is also true that reading is magic. Writing cannot do its work by itself. That would be like saying that leading a horse to water is the same thing as making it drink.
Living in Interesting Times
The present moment is one of those that brings to mind the apocryphal curse “may you live in interesting times.” We don’t entirely know whether this was a real historical curse or something invented by a modern mind and falsely attributed to a mystical ancient wise man. Origins aside, though, the premise rings true enough that most people are able to accept the sentiment for what it is regardless of the source.
I’ve found myself thinking about this a lot lately for obvious reasons, but I wanted to sit and think about it in a more sustained way through writing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: writing is a form of meditation. And it is a magical practice. It can help give shape to formless thoughts by finding the edges and currents running through vague intuitions. It can find connections between different things and bring them together so that they have meaning. And then it helps sharpen, weave, whittle, and channel them into something distinct.
Writing as Honest Work
The benefits to approaching writing as a craft and not simply a final, black box of a product can’t be overstated. Not only do students learn how to incorporate feedback, take pride in their work and accomplishments, sharpen their thinking skills, and improve their own writing, but they also come to appreciate the ways that writing is crafted to do things. This makes them more attentive and savvy readers, ones who become more capable of spotting the ways that what they read has been intentionally designed to have effects on them. And that makes them more capable of deciding whether they want to say yes or no to the media they consume.
Fight Club
Longtime organizers talk about how destructive this dynamic is to building strong political movements all the time. New people with little to no knowledge come into an organization and rapidly derail their efforts by trying to grab the reins of power, imagining that somehow they know better than everyone else already there who’ve been doing the work for ages. “Well if they knew so well, they would have gotten somewhere,” becomes the justification, never recognizing that a better explanation is “If they didn’t have people constantly undermining them from within at every single step, they would have gotten somewhere.” And as soon as anyone with a long history of the group protests in an effort to bring things back around, the new people get their feelings hurt at being corrected and immediately double-down, turning what started out as a flight of fancy that came to them over a cup of coffee into a full-blown power struggle. Everyone ends up dying on a useless, stupid fucking hill that had nothing to do with anything.
Wild Edibles: Ditch Lilies
Ditch lilies are one of the first things I learned to forage. They’re easy to identify, prolific, and every part of the plant is edible depending on the time of year. Even if you think you aren’t familiar with them, chances are you’ve seen them all around you. Their orange blossoms are easily mistaken for tiger lilies, and you’ll find them growing wild along roadsides and streambanks (hence the name ditch lily).
Why are Hippies Dirty and Other Unanswerable Questions
Hidden behind some trees is a tiny, abandoned stone spring house that will make an excellent little writing cottage once I sweep it out and put in a desk and some string lights. It would be a delightful place to turn my dissertation into a book. The yard, meanwhile, is currently a holding pen for half a dozen uncompleted projects, rotting picnic tables, stacks of unsorted firewood, and overgrown garden beds. And yet. The stream that used to power the Mill burbles off to the side, its banks overflowing with a wild bounty of foraging opportunities. Wild grapes, day lilies, raspberry bushes, nettles, hostas, poke weed, and clovers spilling all over each other. Walnut trees and ferns off to the other side. A day or two of dedicated cleaning would turn the porch and yard into a tiny piece of heaven. The fireflies should be out any day now.
Touching the Sublime
I went to Israel once, to meet the family of a woman I was dating. She was mad at me for saying that the country was only as big as Houston (I was right, it turns out).
There are so many things I keep remembering. The way that everything was so carefully built so that you never had to see the ugly parts if you didn’t want to. The beautiful beaches in Tel Aviv. The pied crows. The fruit bats hanging from the guava trees. The ficus and the sabra. All reminiscent of home, but a world away, slightly out of place. When we drove the highway to the desert, you could just barely see the fences lining the hill tops, but only if you really tried.
Presidential
Today’s missive comes to you from the profoundly strange Wyndham Presidential Hotel in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which is decorated exactly how you might expect something called the Presidential Hotel to be decorated. I am not sure whether I am more struck by the cannon in the lobby or the fact that the carpet is covered in stars and Presidential seals, which I walk on with each step through the halls and even in my room.
Idiot
The mythology of science is that it opens the world by clearing away illusions and mistakes and that this frees us. In practice, however, what that usually looks like is an anxiety around things that don’t fit. It’s often in such a hurry to do its job and do it well that it speeds past understanding what’s in front of it and leaps to what to do about it. Instead of “it doesn’t fit, I must be wrong,” science rushes to “it doesn’t fit, it must be wrong.”
Persistence
Traditional ways of doing things persist. Constantly. All around us. If we do not see them, most of the time it isn’t because they aren’t there. It’s because we don’t think them important enough to notice. Another way to put it is that we’ve made them small or even invisible in our minds. And what do we do that with? Things we think have less power than we do, things that don’t need to be attended to. The invisibility of certain kinds of knowledge is often linked to power relations, bound up in things like class, race, gender, religion, and culture. It shows up as people denigrating traditional medicinal knowledge because that knowledge is traditionally feminine, or brown, or poor. It’s the “loss” of skills like metalsmithing that are in fact still vibrant and alive, passed on in industry and also through hobbies by people who are only a generation or two removed from having to do that kind of work for a living.
Messy Questions
Plato once had Socrates describe his hermeneutic method as approaching from below in such a way as to seem nonthreatening or even beautiful, because when placed in a situation in which one feels safe, one overflows oneself and thereby reveals their true nature. If I have understood it correctly, this is how revelation works. It is not the same as torturing information out of an object, nor is it the same as asking to what degree the object in question looks like you and then concluding how well it does or doesn’t measure up. When you torture something, all it sings back to you are falsehoods and nonsense. And when you measure others against yourself, all you get are dark shadows of yourself rather than any information about the object in question. This is what it means to see through a glass darkly.