Dear Reader,
Over the past six years, I’ve written quite a few “very special columns” where I’ve pulled cards for the collective about ICE, about the loss of Roe V. Wade, about school shootings, the insurrection, and the second Trump election. Those types of columns were written as a call to action, a hope that by applying the question to the masses, more people could feel helped and find a path forward.
What I don’t write about here is how often I myself turn to the cards. It isn’t very couth of an advice columnist to admit that she herself feels lost or overwhelmed with the world or frightened about the future, but to be honest, I do.
I have a fear about the future, so worried about a war that will devastate and destroy the lives of many. I am overwhelmed with the hatred and cruelty that is calcifying in this country right now, and how that manifests with mass violence, sanctioned from the top and carried out all around us—as shootings and beatings and gleeful spite.
And I feel lost as to what to do, especially when it seems others are feeling it, too. I hear people all around me start hedging their bets when they talk about travel plans, about job hunting, about plunging into credit card debt because fuck it, man, who’s to say we’ll be here in a year? There is a cynicism in the air, a tolerance for brutality, a feeling that we are all being scathed.
On top of worrying about the future and the present, I worry that cynicism will seep into my soul and stay there, a fate I am desperate to avoid for two reasons.
The first reason is that I have a curious toddler who needs to be shown the wonders of this world and needs a mother who can sing silly songs about whatever she discovers.
The second is that modern cynicism is tediously stupid and cartoonishly cowardly, and if I ever truly lost the ability to look at my fellow man and see someone capable of kindness, charity, and love with a spark of divine in their hearts, I’d probably throw myself off the goddamn pier.
So, in the interest of self-preservation, I turn to my Tarot deck and I ask: What can I do to avoid becoming cynical and maintain hope?
The cards I pulled were The Hierophant, The High Priestess, along with the Nine of Wands, and Six of Cups, both reversed.
I tend to secularize The Hierophant when I write about him in this column, talking about how he can be a symbol for many types of institutions, which is true.
But the Hierophant has always been a card of spiritual institutions, and when it appears for me, I know that means I need to be throwing myself into the minutiae of religious practice. It means I need to clean the floor and windows and doors, to light the incense and say daily prayers, to dress the altars and dust the shrines and pray, pray, pray. It’s the workings one would do in a cloistered life, a “chop wood, carry water” for the occultist.
The next card is also the spiritual High Priestess, goddess and guardian of the Other Side and the unconscious. When she appears for me, it usually means to write more fiction. That might seem like a mundane take from a pretty woo-woo card, but if you think about stories as coming through a writer rather than being the creation of a conscious mind, then writing is essentially just mediumship, with characters instead of ghosts.
What happens when you think about characters all day long is that you start to know them well. You know their complexities, their backstories, their decisions, their inner lives, and their subconsciouses. And when I spend the whole day thinking about the humanity of individual character—especially of evil characters—it becomes impossible to paint real humans with large brush strokes. There are no stock characters in this life; everyone has a story. It’s something I need to remind myself of.
The Nine of Wands is a hopeful card, one that feels a bit like the Serenity Prayer. Change what I can, accept what I cannot, but keep the hope alive that, one day, something will change those bigger things. Maybe down the line, maybe tomorrow. Work and hope.
The final card, Six of Cups, the card of childlike love and nostalgia, reminds me of my daughter and how she sees the world. A mentor of mine once said that to be naïve was “to have an untainted capacity for awe.” Maybe that’s the trick of it, to see everything like it’s the first time, to feel awe-struck whenever possible.
I take this theory out on the road when, an hour after starting this column, my daughter wakes up, and I take her and the dog for a walk.
My daughter points up and announces that the moon is awake, and I think about how that rock has sat in the sky and watched every civilization rise and fall, that it’ll still be up there a thousand years after I’m gone.
And then I think about all the people the moon has seen, since we became Homo sapiens, and I wonder who the first person to ever crack a joke was? Who sang the first lullaby, made the first soup, brought good news to a neighbor? Who was the first to pray over someone as they died and then dress them in finery for the hereafter?
And I think that even in the most brutal of times, we have always carved out spaces of tenderness, that those spaces still exist now, that they will still be there in the future. That cruelty is a choice many may choose but even more will not. That everything is temporary, even if I may never see it end. That prayer and writing and working with hope and standing in awe is a way to save my soul. How obvious that all is once I see it laid out on the cards in front of me.
Send your questions to oracle@cltampa.com or DM @theyboracle on Instagram. See more of Caroline and learn about her services via carolinedebruhl.com.
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