Let’s Just Say I Grew Up in a Highly Controlled Environment

Through the miracle of WhatsApp, I had the luck to wander around cathedrals and narrow streets in Florence with my daughter on a rainy Tuesday. Well, sort of.

She’s making her way through Scotland now, raising a glass to the ancestors in Inverness. At the age of three, my Grandma (neé Skinner), my daughter’s namesake, came with her family to Canada from the seafairing village of Hilton, just north of the Inverness Student Hotel where my daughter lays her head.

So much is ‘off’ in the world and yet things can be so right at the same time—and the world is beautiful and miraculous too.

Of course it is.

This week, the positions remain the same, from left to right: ‘where we are as a collective,’ the potential ‘obstacle’ in the coming days, and some ‘advice’ to help us with the obstacle. But I took an oracle card to clarify each position (rather than using them as overall messages) and a surpising omen popped out.

For tarot buffs, you may spy the double 10 of Cups.

For everyone else, rest assured: this is good.

Where we are

I’ve been a bit of a downer of late where this position is concerned.

What can I say? Where we are is generally weird and scary, at least for those among us who don’t sit on the far right, and I’m not going to sugarcoat it. But the message for ‘how we’re feeling’ (and you can take that to mean: around the time you read this post) is powerfully loud and positive.

A writer I follow, Steven Pressfield—who wrote The War of Art, the seminal guide to overcoming the excruciating resistance some creatives feel when they attempt to become working artists—lost everything when his house burned to the ground in the LA fires a few months ago, and that guy is still posting to his blog every week.

This seems like a good illustration of what these cards tell us: 10 of Wands with the Phoenix.

The figure on the 10 of Wands, from the classic Rider Waite Smith Tarot, has to keep going, and we do currently carry an inordinate amount of cumbersome, heavy sticks (emotional and literal tasks that weigh more than our own body weight), but it just IS. And we can’t do much about it.

Maybe the push forward isn’t so painful; you’re simply moving through what you must because you already know the hard work is not for nothing, and this is where the Phoenix card steps in.

According to Wikipedia:

“The phoenix is a legendary immortal bird that cyclically regenerates or is otherwise born again. Originating in Greek mythology, it has analogs in many cultures […]. Associated with the sun, a phoenix obtains new life by rising from the ashes of its predecessor.”

Ten of Wands is a 10, so we’re actually at the end of a particular cycle (further reinforced by two more 10 cards later on) and the Phoenix, from Kim Krans’ Wild Unknown Animal Spirit, comes up when we realize we’ve been suffering long enough and we have to change. From the immortal words of David Bowie: turn and face the strange.

And there is a similar shape and colour in these two cards—which is so cool when that happens—suggesting that this poor sap pushing forward is 100% in the uncomfortable work of rebirth.

Although perhaps invisibly at this point, he’s working hella hard and, additionally, there is NO room, space, or excess energy to mindlessly give anything away. This means that you may be realizing that it’s time to use the all-powerful and targeted: No.

In a cordial call with my mom last week, I told her I may not make it to Easter dinner. Could someone else be responsible for the side dishes? I asked. My husband and I usually provide most of the food for these events. And could we leave it open as to whether I’m able to make it at all, depending on how much I get done that day?

Then, my mom said, Yes, sure. No problem.

Which was wholly surprising, and very appreciated because it’s hard work to grow beyond a previous way of being, and who knew that the phoenix was killing itself to fly upward with every ounce of its strength?

It’s not a comfortable flight.

The challenge this week:

In our previous advice, the Queen of Cups was reminding us to trust and let go, lie back, wave, and sip a cup of tea.

But this card is biting us in the a** this week. She’s showing up very differently—in the obstacle position—with a dolphin who looks friendly enough but signifies something tricky.

You may not love your sensitivity this week.

For highly sensitive HSP types, your well-attuned emotional intelligence and reverence for others, according to this spread, will feel inwardly contentious.

If you are an artist, you may wish you weren’t. If you offer healing services, you may wish you didn’t heed the call. (Sorry, no sugarcoating.)

But the main message here is that we may easily fall into the false crap about sensitivity being a weakness (welcome to my entire life) and fail to see it as a strength—underestimating our power in the processs.

From Krans’ guidebook:

“It’s easy for Dophin types to underestimate the impact they make in the world. These creatures play such an important role in the wheel of karma that coming in contact with a Dophin type will change the entire course of your day.”

Yes, it’s a bummer that unwavering inclusivity and compassion can’t be measured (yet these principles underpin our entire civilization, countering greed, manipulation, indifference, and arrogance).

So a heads up … if steady, intuitive support is one of your best gifts to this world, you may feel you’re losing your gusto temporarily.

If it’s any consolation, I’m diving back into the emotional terrain of my graphic memoir (it’s a comic book for adults, based on a not-so-fun story from my early life) after a few months letting it simmer. Ten bucks says—at least at first—that process is going to suck.

Luckily, the advice is really good advice.

The Advice

All knights in tarot are on horseback: full of life, CHARGING forward with everything they’ve got.

Adventurous Knight of Wands has a relentless stream of ideas, little patience for processing, and doesn’t clean up after himself either—and this is what we’ve been called to embody in the coming days.

Your brilliant, impulsive self wants to experiment with abandon, and ideally your approach should take the form of … play.

A few years ago I led a series of play-based writing workshops for kids at the Children’s Art Factory in downtown Guelph, Ontario. I stuck words with pictures all over the walls and we rearranged them into big poems, and my little writers wrote a short play together and performed it, and I just gave them gobs and gobs of encouragement and there were no rules.

I’ve tutored all ages, from the primary grades to seniors in high school, and I’ve seen up-close how much kids can hate English class, how scared they are once rules get involved, and how their innovative ideas disappear because they honestly just don’t think they can write something ‘good.’

It’s the saddest, saddest thing.

And we all feel this sometimes, even as adults—in areas where there are a lot of rules, and we don’t yet feel particularly ‘skilled.’

The play-based workshops were a labour of love for me (I ran them for adults too!) because I’ve had to find a zillion ways to fake out my own stupid mind. I’m no stranger to creative paralysis.

Let’s just say I was raised in a highly controlled environment :)

The Strength card further reinforces this too. Approaching any scary tasks this week with a sense of play is a show of strength. Even if you are highly skilled in the work you must accomplish, but for whatever reason seem to be wavering on confidence.

My binge-watch these days is a British series called Money for Nothing, where the host, Sarah, finds items of recycleable garbage and presents them to furniture restorers, metal workers, and designers who transform them. I love watching the personal process these designers go through.

They get so nervous right before our eyes, and it does seem authentic. They fiddle with the project components, and sometimes it doesn’t work and they have to start again, or alter their initial ideas, and they pull out their hair, and I’m like, Yeah, okay, this is universal.

Designers with mad skills, freaking out until they can catch a groove and GO. There will always be that goddamn twenty minutes every morning when starting the thing just feels so sh**. And then they go on to create the most jawdroppingly STUNNING tables, cabinets, sofas, and lamps.

But I watch it for their infectious excitement too. They’re like kids playing—and it’s definitely the only way they can do this kind of work every day.

So whatever you’re up against this week that feels like SO much work … if you had to do the same task and make it look like play, what would that look like?

Take that approach instead. (I dare you.)

The double 10 of Cups.

This is my tenth post.

A small but mighty milestone for which I feel proud. Even the cards seem to acknowledge that it’s something to celebrate—because these beauties fell out.

After drawing the first set of cards, I glanced at the bottom of the deck: 10 of Cups. And at the end, I said, Give us something that sums this all up. 10 of Cups.

So we’ll finish, then, where we began—

That my daughter is even in Scotland seems miraculous, in a place I can only imagine, a stone’s throw from a stretch of beach where my grandma was born. She is certainly among cousins she’s passing in the street. The area is still chock-full of Skinners, or so says the internet.

That there is a ‘rightness’ that is always with us, in parallel with anxiety, crossed-wires, and exhaustion, 10 of Cups is about the deeply profound in the ordinary, and the serenity that comes when all the elements strike sudden harmony. When you’re doing something totally normal and boring, and you suddenly can’t believe how grateful you feel.

Except double that feeling :)

You may not feel that feeling today, or this week, or even this month.

But you will.

Resources

Choi, Rome. Illustrated by Kwon Shina. Dreaming Way Tarot. U.S. Games Systems, Inc.

Krans, Kim. The Wild Unknown Pocket Animal Spirit. HarperCollins, 2022.

Pressfield, Steven. The War of Art. Black Irish Books.

Waite, Arthur Edward. Illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. The Classic Rider Waite Smith Tarot. Arcturus Publishing, 2023.