To feel feelings deeply is a form of expertise: hard won, gained over time through practice and intention. This card has big emotions, thick like the ocean. And it has just as many gifts for us, just as much solace, just as much beauty.
Sometimes there’s an explanation to it and sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes death is just death. How do we incorporate these very visceral, physical, and deeply material experiences of literal death into the Death card when its presence greets us in a reading?
To cut off abusers is to be the Queen of Swords. To take care of ourselves by cutting off communication, and not necessarily dramatically. Sometimes there is nothing more to be said, and the most powerful statement is said with silence.
Are you romanticizing the not-home? What stops you from retreating at-home, or at least in your city or neighbourhood? What might it mean to retreat in daily life?
Sometimes what we need to mourn – really truly – is not an ancestor who is deceased, not a fleshy body made bone, but a version or vision of ourselves, a fantasy we held about ourselves or our future.