4 of Wands

Dancing defiantly upon the ruins

Dear Wanderer,

I’m letting myself get this to you late this New Moon. I don’t know about you, but for me it’s time to slow down and be more gentle with myself and others (not my government officials, with whom I am still being quite firm). My body always tells me what I need to know and right now it is telling me to descend into the place where my deepest connection and wellness are possible, the place from which it is possible to act most effectively.

I owe the world that much.

If I’m honest with you Wanderer, the genocide/life balance has truly been evading me. How, part of me wonders, can I be well or have joy when another part of me—my kin in other parts of the world—are experiencing such horrors? Ought I not experience it with them as they are asking me to? In truth, part of me needs to witness, needs to let these stories into my blood so that I can hold more truth, more compassion, more conviction that a better world is both possible and necessary.

The truth is that everything goes in cycles. I recently learned that consumption (of knowledge, of media, of truth…) doesn’t actually result in learning. It’s the act of reflection that turns what we see into what we know. This message has been coming to me from multiple unexpected directions.

While I’ve been so focused on witnessing, I have barely given myself the chance to internalize, process, reflect and really integrate what I have been seeing; I am glutted on images and starved for understanding. My world fractures in result.

Global consciousness is awakening in me and this is something I will always choose. I declare and promise it before you and myself and the Moon and all the kin of Earth. I think of it as the red that has always been in the leaves but only shows itself when autumn comes. But, as my therapist pointed out to me, caring for my own well-being and wholeness is also in defiance of the forces of oppression, which use despair and hopelessness as tools. It has always been so.

Joy is defiance. Wellness is defience. Expansion is defiance.

Caring for my children and teaching them to care is defiance. Stepping back from the horror—not from taking action or grieving deeply or blazing with compassion, but from looking at violence and hearing guns firing and bombs exploding—is an act of solidarity as well because it means I’m building a lifelong capacity for care and change. It actually creates space for direct action and deep grief and EVEN MORE compassion. It admits that I, as an individual, can’t do it alone, am held by a collective that will keep the work going, and when I am well-resourced and ready to go, someone else will be able to stop and care for their own sacred being. That’s community!

I know this (head) but I am just now learning to know it (body, heart).

What I am doing now: Reading Susan Sontag’s essay/book Regarding the Pain of Others, researching Cynthia Dillard’s endarkened feminism for an essay I’m planning to write for you, reading Sahar Khalifeh’s novel My First and Only Love, which helps me to understand the way in which every aspect of Palestinian life has been informed by occupation and violence since before the formation of Israel—and the depth of the ties between the Palestinian people and their land. Reading the fierce, eloquent writing of Ismatu Gwendolyn which is pure wild nourishment for the anti-colonial soul. Doing Amanda Yates Garcia’s New Moon ritual. Going to the river. Still calling my government. Playing D&D with my kids. Not shopping. Still sharing and posting but limiting my engagement. Sleeping. Partaking of edibles (which help with the aforementioned sleeping). Tarot. Letting the tendrils of community find me.

And reflecting.

I need to turn in several pages of flash non-fiction/prose poem (really, where’s the line between those anyway?) for an upcoming writing workshop and to produce that in my current state I’ve been pulling one card from my gorgeous Solas Cartai deck and essentially freewriting. The other day I pulled the 4 of Wands, a card of celebration and joy. How can there be that now? I don’t know The closest I can come is the image of young Palestinian men dancing defiantly upon the ruins of their homeland. But I thought I would share with you what I wrote in case it helps:

4 of Wands:

One red flower is all it takes to ruin a field of snow. When white descends, frozen, to the ground, it is a call to the memory of melting and struggle and how they go hand-in-hand, snow and flower working together in a dance of ruin and thaw. But there is seepage also, for water, once it has lost its hardness, needs somewhere to go. Its acceptance back into the earth, after falling so far, after being so cold, isn’t even in question for a moment. Maybe it makes mud. Maybe sludge is the texture, for a while, of ruined whiteness seeping back into the dark, welcoming earth, but this isn’t in question either. It’s just a slower flow, a softer earth, for a while.

Once upon a time there was only one kind of wand and it gave forth the water that had once been snow in the form of springtime. The rising of the water again in the veins of trees makes equidistant the ground and sky for such a shapeshifting wanderer. There is no question that the water will rise and return as snow, for it has traveled to the frozen sky where the earth can’t touch it. And there is no question that the earth needs the water and the water needs return, but it takes one brilliant, unlooked-for, out-of-place burst of red life to break the ice, which somehow looks white, back down into water, which takes on the color and shape of whatever holds it. The flower is the snow as it once was, as it will be, bringer of its own ruin and grace.

In defiance and care,

Sasha