She hoods the falcon’s eyes the way you would sheathe a knife. The talons and the beak mean very little without the vision—many times sharper than a human’s and tuned to both our wavelength and that of the ultraviolet. This means their prey’s urine can be read like a map-layer on the landscape and to them some pelts and plumage have the iridescence of an oil sheen. Their third eyelid clear like a goggle so they don’t need to blink at even a hundred miles an hour. A flicker rate that gives human TV the chop of a flipbook. They miss nothing. They stand graceful as a statue, waiting on their ineluctable moment, and then they strike with a single motion like an arrow.

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I would not be the last person to pick for a zombie apocalypse team. I have kept fire in wet conditions and slept in lean-tos of my own device. I am resilient to discomfort and need less sleep than the average person. I can improvise well with tools and materials. I seem to have a certain amount of luck. If the solar flare cracks or the ICBMs gleam, I might just be able to eek out a living in some swampy margin. I’m probably wrong.

But I will hunt more like the chimpanzee than like the falcon. Let’s get real. I will not wear an elegant robe and I will not plant a vineyard. And that is the challenge thrown down by the Nine of Pentacles, to enact a paradigm so true that we’ve made it rhyme: not to merely survive but to live and to thrive. And one knows that they are thriving when their space-time is suffused with the beautiful like sunlight through stained glass.

To be a bird is to be concerned with beauty. A male falcon, in order to woo his mate, will perform elaborate maneuvers in the air. And many species, over eons, have developed extravagant feathers or learned to construct ornate homes that are as much aesthetic refuge and wedding gift as shelter. Still others sing so beautiful our own rhythms pale. A biologist will tell you that all of these energy expenditures are a means of broadcasting to females a capability for holding resources—despite, for instance, the self-inflicted detriment of the peacock’s tail. If he can build that bower and still find enough seeds to eat then he isn’t just surviving…you guessed it.

After college, I moved from Michigan to Idaho where I got a great job in a small satellite branch of a California firm. I was a technology consultant to government transportation entities with an office on the river, from which I once watched an osprey pluck a fish. My boss there, twenty years my elder, would become a lifelong friend. We’d climb Mount Kilimanjaro together and later I’d sleep in his spare room for months when things got woolly and much later I’d bring my wife to stay a few days on his sailboat in the Bahamas.

His wife, a good friend too, is a startlingly successful consultant for family businesses. A shooter of the kind of corporate trouble that is difficult to quantify. Her I first met when they invited me to dinner at their beautiful home in the foothills. A year before, I’d been paying less than $200 a month to live in the attic of a relic mansion in Detroit. I wasn’t sure where I belonged, in those days. I brought my best manners to dinner and they seemed to genuinely like me, I guess I was something enough to be of interest in conversation with these people way, way out of my league.

She is who I think of when I see the Nine of Pentacles. A beautiful woman whose many talents are buoyed by a certain charisma. She makes you feel important and special and she has an intellectual charm I’ve found in few others—she knows and she’ll let you in on the secret. And she keeps a lush garden. And she is a wonderful cook. And she knows exactly who she is and what she is worth. It may not surprise you that she loves wild birds.

When these friends of mine first met, maybe a decade before I knew them, she was a single mother of three living in a campground. She did not hunt like a chimpanzee. She sharpened her every faculty and scanned the landscape from her perch of grace and when the moment rose she struck as inevitable as gravity. You should hear her laugh.

In upstate New York, I lived with these same friends like a refugee for a few months—a story for another card, grateful for it forever. I had no money, but in those days the husband and I slept and ate in the sway of a million dollar business idea. Like all my plans till then, it would come to naught but of course I didn’t know that at the time. I was going to be okay. I was going to be much, much better than okay. Some mornings we’d sit in their solarium with a fine cappuccino made from the best beans, on the best machine, and we’d watch the denizens of her birdfeeder. The scarlet tanagers and the ruby-throated et ceteras living their lives among her flowers. One of these mornings, we watched a tiny falcon—a kestrel—swoop in and snatch a sparrow in a puff of feathers. The Nine of Pentacles. I saw it with my own eyes.

Think what your mother did while she waited to look you in the eye. The hope she must have held, like a piece of the thinnest glass, like a tiny ember on which she breathed and breathed come all rain and wind—you aswim in the waters of your lineage and who kept you from drowning in their tides. Several cards bear the mysteries of the Mother, but only the Star bears as well the mystery of hope—a radiant thing even far-flung, even if rarely beheld so much as rumored and invoked.

It may seem that we circumambulate through our lives, yet with a mere drop of faith we’ll find a gradual upward slope around the mountain. And the radicle of a growing plant ascends spiracular, and the galaxies spin themselves, and the course of evolution, in analogy at least, seems to turn and turn as life inches its way up into what it will be. Ian McGilchrist cites the spiral as a kind of metasymbol, a pattern in our heads and in the world and that’s one way we know we are a part of it.

A few months back, I lost control of my most successful enterprise to date: a podcast that was mostly mine and might be, in fact, the (in)direct reason you’re reading here. Many of the towers you build will come crashing down. This is not a reason to leave them unbuilt. And there are fates so much worse I hesitate to even mention mine, but I flipped the Star in contemplation and here we are. The project was just no longer feasible for me. But I’d built and built and built one brick then the next until I was so slick with the trowel it seemed legerdemain. I wanted you to notice. And my long-chased goal seemed so clear— a career as a writer and a scholar of sorts—but now I have to wonder if that guiding star had only been a figment to begin with. In that same month, more similar than it might seem, I finished writing a novel after more than three years of work. Suddenly liberated of these two endeavors—tireless and enthralling and hypnotic—there was a void now in my days and my mind, as though the tension holding me together was suddenly released. In all fervor I’d been shoveling coal into that furnace and now there was no train or track. We were just howling and burning in the woods and in the dark.

The woman of the Star is in a gesture of restoration—the slow work of putting things back in their place. Or perhaps in new places where they truly belong. But what is in the pitchers? And on what principle does she pour one here and the other there? Per Tomberg, this card is one through which we ought to contemplate the correspondence between biological and spiritual growth. He says there is water, the flowing continuity of life, and there is Water: the divine gift of Hope. She pours Hope into the reservoir from which your thoughts bubble and she spreads the waters of our long humanity on the nascent land. Do you think we made it this far because we give up easily?

Usually, I write Tarot pieces in a kind of reverie, refracting memories through the present. This time, I’m pouring out these very pitchers as I work, naked as a nerve. Study long enough and you start to see a poetic resonance between your life and the cards. Follow that thread a little further and they might just show you exactly what to do. In milder catastrophes, one can wail and tear at their clothes and carry on the trauma—the fall can go on and on—but I thought about this card and I knew not to flail. You brace for impact and roll with gravity and when you find yourself wandering that strange-familiar grove, you scrabble up whatever potsherds and debris you find astrew, the burned scraps of old maps and the shards of lens-glass ground finer than dust.

Of a quiet night on the Great Plains, it is said you can hear the corn grow. And what little boy has not contorted the spring limbs of a sapling, knowing the mature tree will bear some unnatural line decades from now. And a broken bone heals stronger, though sensitive to the ache of distant rain. And when snakes are ready to unsheathe themselves, it looks as though they’re unwedding from their ghost all glossy now and dangerous.

All that is built is broken by nature, which shapes and refines the things that grow. Something like an idea, in the living thing, is articulated and this material form then folds and bends to survive its environment—the process of evolution writ in every moment and in all cognizable moments taken together. Life stirs its plan in the solution of the so-called real world and then the third and actual thing, You, say, is precipitated out like a crystal grown in peculiar air.

Have you considered that you are one of the world’s attempts to solve the riddle it’s been working since the Bang?

The information required to make your body is entirely encoded on a spiraling thread, six feet long and yet so thin it hardly even exists, can be bundled up inside a cell too small to see. In you, this spiral is twinned, a double helix graceful as any curve in nature, as if at each step there are two considerations and the third which arises from their conjunction, a reification of the deep old principle, a step into the next codon which shares its wisdom with the broader pattern. No one rung makes the whole and yet there must be rungs.

T.S. Eliot said “And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.” But this is not the eternal recurrence in which we witlessly relive our lives forever—unless we allow it to be.

I’ve begun again a hundred times. But unlike those other ninety-nine, encouragement came unbidden over the transom today. And as much as it felt like an end, many near-strangers reached out to tell me they appreciate my work, that they eagerly anticipate whatever I do next. I don’t think I really understood what we’d done until it was behind me. I’d been working in total obscurity for years and it is dizzying to feel reflected back a bit of that love I’d broadcast in all earnestness. A thing like that could go straight to one’s head, could rot out your pilasters like sugar on teeth. And it reminds me of a thing easily forgotten, which is the why beyond any dollar or accolade: some distant pinpoint way out there, brighter to my eye and more steadfast than the rest.

What I’ve learned from the Star is that after your tower is blasted, your ego blown to smithereens, you do not simply build up the same edifice on the stump of its foundation. Let it peel you down as far as it needs, then begin again with just the few little stones that are the things you now know.

The Major Arcana has 22 cards and the Hebrew alphabet 22 letters and there are no coincidences whatsoever. The Star has often been associated with the letter Tzaddi, the so-called “fish hook,” a representative of life and the hunt. In its shape, I see a spiraling single strand that wounds around and finally splits as if to present a diagram of its hidden structure, the ends aflame for connection. One on the path of Tzaddi is supposed to be true and righteous, though they may obscure their enlightened nature. And how could one recognize the truth or love without shaping oneself around the danger of lies and hatred. Without learning the ardency of cultivation their mother was showing them all that time.

A different star and the different creatures it would grow. The blind probe of evolution is not so blind, there are stars beyond our own blasting us with light we cannot quite see. And yet it inveigles the spiral within us—when the strand is “damaged,” mutations arise. Sometimes, just barely often enough, these mutations are an answer to the question “how will we survive?”

I started a new novel. A new podcast. Perhaps some sage advice would tell me to find entirely new roads. But each of these, it seems, is merely a medium and it’s what I pour in that shapes them into their thing. And there are mistakes I made that will not be made again. And there are a few foundation blocks around for which I may have a use. And there is fertile soil on the old tower grounds—with a drop of faith, it might just home a seed.

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There are far more than two wolves inside of us. An entire snarling, stalking, yapping pack lives within. The old wisdoms are sometimes true and yet not true enough. I have the Dalai Lama wolf who revels in love, who can see through another’s pain without judgment. And the misanthropic wolf who wants the world to burn. The steadfast and dutiful wolf who will pull any sled—he domesticates himself. The slovenly and dopey-eyed, the moribund and feckless, the calculating strategist, the lone wolf and the litter’s runt. Each of them I have fed in their turn. There are always scraps—often stolen from the others—for the wolf who writes. Come glory or pointlessness, I think I’ll feed him the final crumb.

The wands, they say, represent intuition, creativity, instinct, knowing without knowing. The five-- symbol of the human, his five limbs and his five senses, the five forms of matter that conspire to make him—shows intuition at cross-purposes. This is to be mired in a fundamental paradox. It is a species of fight, but perhaps not bloodshed. The kind of rivalry and conflict that, left unchecked and rudderless, leads not to some violent end but a more quiet failure. A house flimsily assembled, threatened with collapse by every gust of wind.

+==+==+
I made sacrifices for art. No one can tell me any different. I didn’t track out into the hinterlands with my typewriter in a bindle, but I did break apart a promising career and tread carelessly over the pieces, walked away from an office on the river and a beautiful town I called home. It didn’t work. Not for long. So be it. Perhaps I did not truly keep the faith. Now though, I have to admit that there is a wolf in me who cannot bear to be useless. Who wants people, at one of these cocktail parties that only happen on film, to raise respectful eyebrows when I say what it is I spend my days doing. To be the expert invited to give a Ted Talk—or at least TedX. To be the guy who can only grant you a minute’s time to talk as I’m charging down the hallway to an important meeting. He wrestles with that other wolf, who cares mostly to seclude in dimly lit rooms and read the books no one else has. To slowly craft a work of arguable genius—just because I can’t doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try.

+==+==+

4:15am the alarm goes off, like most mornings, and 4:30 I’m caffeinated at the keyboard, my prayers prayed, working through this same novel I started now three years ago. In a life remembered like a television show. And it is a kind of epiphanic session, this ninety minutes of sleep deprivation I’ve scraped out like one might scrap the plumbing from their own walls. For a few seconds, I shoot the Divine Electric from my worn-out fingertips. I am Faulkner and I am Stephen King and I am the author of the Bible, all my words sacrosanct. Tomorrow, I will be an inelegant poseur once again.

8:30am I am lowered on a creaky winch down into a hole in the road someone built brick-by-brick a literal century ago. Below is raw and fetid sewage, a congealed world of archaeological filth, no expense spared to keep it out of sight. And this is part of the job I came crawling back to after the academy was done with me. An entry level position I was both overqualified and underqualified for, a picked-cleaned bone the wolves fought over.

They send down my bucket of tools and I trudge upstream. The roof two feet above me and the gray sludge to my calves, the gray flow to my hips. I come to a stretch where the pipe widens, flattens, where I have to kneel and drag myself through the muck with my face inches about the flow, my helmet scraping against a roof encrusted with god-knows-what. Seventy-odd feet to the other side where it opens again. Here I assemble my tools and drill holes in the implacable brick, the bit spinning off chunks of slime like wet scabs that spatter my face. The squeal a dozen claws on a dozen chalkboards. And I am useful, for a moment. The flapping butterfly wings of this tiny hole I drill . . .they matter. That is what I say to myself as I lean into the fourth and last, as I place the tiny gauge that measures the spread of a crack down here. If it were to fail—unlikely as a summer blizzard—then we would lose the road, an acre of our topside world would fall in on itself. I cannot remember a word I have written.

+==+==+

There is another wolf—long overlooked, small still and ill-fed. And this one listens, humbles itself to try and understand. What is left over to feed him? What wolf will have to starve for this one to become big and strong, for its fangs to grow long enough to sink through the fur. Jung said a million worthwhile things I plan to one day understand, but one I think I get is that enlightenment comes when all your wands work together. And if he didn’t, he should have. If you bring forth what is unconscious, you will know it to be part of you instead of thinking the place it steers you toward is fate. The card tells us this as clearly as a well-loved teacher.

It is 4:30 am. It is late and it is early. Inside, the struggle is quiet. The words have come to me, not all at once, but in their time. My boots wait beside the door without making a sound.

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What separates man from the animals? A consciousness of death? A facility with language. A cognitive dexterity, a frontal lobe the size of a continent. Sure. But something else that stands out from our biology like a rock in a swamp. We humans aspire. Food and water and shelter, even for the little ones under our purview, are not quite enough. Are necessary but not sufficient. So, we chase after something else, most of us. We dreamt a little dream unbeckoned in our youth and while it morphs and reduces, expands if our soul is hardy enough, that dream stays dreamt no matter the horse-stall in which we are forced to sleep.

+ ==+== +

The Page studies longingly the end of his wand pointed to the sky. Imagines what could be done with such an implement. Thinks of the figure he’ll cut against this landscape—a desert, really, a blankness to be filled with his potential—once he’s mastered this tool. And a wand is the reified emblem of the creative intuition, the generative instinct, located in the spinal cord and the gut as much as the heart and the skull. And the Tarot tells us that those who elect to wield it must, as the salamanders on on his tunic suggest, be willing to withstand the fire—their own, the world’s. Our Page believes himself ready. Envisions the grandeur of the throne where he’ll one day rest—as though there is such a thing and he’d know it when it was time. Like the Fool, he has no idea what it will require.

+ ==+== +

We’re teaching our machines how to see. Not just to record, but to understand, to make decisions based on what it sees. Forget the consequences. A generation back, further, we thought the camera was the hard part. Copy the visual field and all else is detail. But the computer struggles to determine relevance. It cannot tell what is an 8 and what is a B and it stubbornly refuses to consider whether the adjacent characters are numbers or letters. It cannot tell the difference between a face and a picture of a face. It knows a low-light condition but not that the sun is setting. And how different that is than it rising.

Humans understand relevance. For now, this separates us from the machines. A little less than it did yesterday. We do this, in part, because we have a goal—whether we’ve chosen it or it has chosen us. Consider the beauty of a sweating glass of water when your throat is dry, the indelible soft-hardiness of bread when starved. The shape of your lover after long days untouched. The Page looks to the future with these sort of hungry eyes. Though what he wants is not so simple. Nothing is so simple as it seems.

+ ==+== +

They ask you time and again what you want to be when you grow up and there seems some perverse cruelty in expecting a child to have any idea. What do they know? From what experience can they draw? It doesn’t matter, so much, how the child responds. The point is to be pointed. To get the kid on some sort of track that can convey them into the future, and should they get distracted along the way—become an accountant instead of a theoretical physicist—the only heart broken might be their own. But it pulled them along, that aspiration. What bear-traps and pitfalls were avoided along the way. . .

A lot of my friends died before they turned thirty, forty. One or two would be a lot in peacetime and my count’s higher than that. And some others survived by the skin of teeth, lost their minds and their livelihood. Some could only be saved by Jesus—atheists take note. Opiates are a demon if we’ve ever known one. And it’s only a fool who calls falling under its spell stupidity. Trust me, you’re nowhere near smart enough to outwit it. But maybe—I pray it’s true—there is some catapult in your intuition that will fling you free of the confusion. An arrow in your gut that points out past the horizon. Because I was dissolute as any of them. I had all their anger and disappointment, maybe the only defect I missed was their boredom. I had the Word, its own kind of faith.

+ ==+== +

Take your time. Hold it to the light, note where it sprouts and where its gone hard as stone. Learn its heft and its length. Wear it smooth with your hands. And note that it will bear your weight when all else sinks into the mud. That you might pull yourself from pits on its strength, might fend off attackers with the sharpest of fangs and claws.

The human is alone on this planet because her instincts can be purposely trained. Some urge older than you, an artifact in the blood, to make honeycomb and over the years you make those octagons into a spiraling mandala, into a portrait of your lover’s face, into a map of the sky. The place you stand whatever it is that calls to you from beyond and don’t fail to notice that a Wand makes the best lever. And it can bludgeon or cast spells, it can pole your boat across the turbulent waters, be used to build the house or pry one loose from its fittings. It can be used to climb the mountain. In emergency, it can be burned to keep off the deadly cold.

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What’s the coldest you have ever been? Would it’ve made you warmer to know others have frozen to death?

2017, I found myself begging in the snow. I’d come crawling back to Michigan, where I was born, in hopes that here I could catch a loose favor. Coins were dropped in my alms cup and for that I certainly owe. An old friend hired me to work on boats–cleaning, scraping, painting, buffing their fiberglass to a laser-white shine. It was almost enough to pay for my share of the rent and my groceries and the gas to get to the shore and back. There was an insistent twinge, like a hunger pang, that I’d made far too little with my college degrees and my years as an Engineer. My life was a math problem that did not pencil out, and my tower had been burning for a long time; a story for another card.

But I worked. On the boats and soon two or three other gigs until my normal day was fourteen hours out the door. Months I ran like this. Yet it still did not add up. It was a fine moment to learn humility and so every morning I balled up on my floor and said a prayer of thanks–simple, unalloyed gratitudes: that I had clean water to drink, that I had my health and my parents theirs. I never asked for anything.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

+==+==+

The fifth Sephira is Geburah or Strength. And in its riddle one can read a theodicy deep as any we’ve written. It says there must be suffering in this world, and thus your life, just as there must be heat to forge metal and just as the sun must explode perpetually to cast its warm light.

And suffering, as you well know, is a teacher nonpareil. What else but those burns and cuts and that depletion could excise the necrosis and scour down our cruder corners. All books say that pride comes before a fall, but that’s not just mathematics–that’s our excess meeting the band-saw. If it does not happen, it’s a story no one tells.

Perhaps I’ll say what happened next–it’s true, you know, that I sometimes miss that war I had with the world. A cornered animal is dangerous and panicked and its little heart rages nearly to collapse. But you have to think how alive it must feel. The salience in every detail, the vigor of each second. I did not sleep well or eat right or balance my humors or take contemplative stock: I went, I ran, I drove, as if I was, under fire, building the catapult with which I’d fling myself over the wall. Knife in teeth. Spliced by arrows. Fire in my eyes. I haven’t quite felt that same heat inside since, maybe it cannot long be survived.

+==+==+

And then there was a morning, a brutal day coming on and the one before hardly rested from. I couldn’t keep it up forever. I ended my prayer and continued on until I found myself asking God, humble as I could, that some dog I’d sent out would return with game. No miracles, just scraps proportionate to my efforts. But I asked so hard that I wept a little and felt some subtle thing in me burst, like a blister deep inside. I felt it pop and I felt it drain. A week later I was called into an interview and I was soon making double and I could breathe. What else am I supposed to believe happened? This mysterious equation solved for x when none other would.

+==+==+

The tarot was part of my wedding, just a few years after my sole prayer had been answered. The reverse of each guest’s seating card was one of Pamela Colman Smith’s timeless drawings–a deck without the Devil and without Death and I wonder sometimes at the wisdom of that. During the reception, a few guests asked me what theirs ‘meant.’

The five of pentacles is the only one I remember. A friend of ours from humble beginnings who has made herself wealthy through hard work and a few lucky breaks. Not as young as she used to be and sort of single and decidedly secular though perhaps she believes in God–don’t we all, really. And I needed to stick to a couple pithy sentences for each guest or I’d be interpreting for hours. So I said something like this: “No matter how overwhelming the hardship, you can always turn to the spiritual to help you through the long, cold night.”

I’ve seen her since then, of course. She stayed with us around the time her mother died, after a few relationships washed out. And she handled all this better than I might’ve, to be fair. Tough and smart and capable, no one would ever say different. But for all her triumph there is a piece missing that so many others have found. A simple thing, love, and beautiful and there is no treasure or pride worth its weight. And so sometimes, when I see her, I wonder if she’s brave enough to reach out her cup and ask.

They told us that please is a magic word. Is it not?

+==+==+

(author’s note: message me if you’re interested in a tarot reading for a reasonable fee)

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The pentacles speak, at one level, of what can be touched and seen, heard and smelled. The Earth and all that lay visible upon it. Now, see your body? See it as a thing that belongs to you if nothing else. And see that as a metaphor for any project you might undertake with it. The running of a marathon, the writing of a book, the careful beading of a long and resplendent gown.

The figure in the Eight is an artisan working out at the edge of the town. Six of his coins already chiseled into shape. One on his bench and another at his feet, discarded as inadequate, as requiring a few more steady-handed hours. To the untrained eye, each coin is identical, but, for the craftsman himself, each must be its own novel, its own ark, its own story and trust that he found a dozen wise lessons taking it from blank to symbol.

+==+==+

In Africa, there were once men—slow and vulnerable, without fang or claw—who would kill a single antelope over the course of hours. They’d spook the creature from its herd and one hunter would give chase across the flats. An antelope, of course, can out-run a man in any foot-race except, here we learn, the longest. And so the antelope will sprint to safety and the man will follow behind, pacing himself for anticipated miles. The antelope will tire and rest on the ground until the man comes near and then run again in an efflorescence of adrenaline, the ground covered a little shorter than the last. Rest again until the man approaches spear in hand. Repeated: the man ceaseless, barely out of breath, the antelope ebbing and grinding away until it lies down and cannot summon the energy to stand again. The killing then, the final punctuation, is no more difficult than plunging a shovel into the dirt.

+==+==+

After an interruption of several years to drink too much and carry-on with friends into the wee hours, I have worked my body into fitness on more days than I have not. Fifteen years now. Maybe more. A hundred thousand pull-ups, at least. Countless moments finding my grip in the knurling. Until my default posture has come to be either crouched above the keyboard or bent over my knees catching my breath.

And in all of this, there was no one dragging, sweating routine in the gym that made any difference you could see or measure. There was no day in which I looked any different from the day before. And so the enterprise carried-out on the faith that if submitted to today—and tomorrow and a month from now still, a year—the discomfort and time would be worth it. That you could chip away at the stone one flaking gouge at a time—and some day you would sit before a sculpture you could scarcely imagine when you began.

+==+==+
It’s within your birthright to do one impossible thing. Perhaps your father let his own expire. And his father before him. But if you were to find your project and lean into it—Sisyphus, smiling—you might, over years, top your summit. There is only one way to find out. We’ve filled the Earth with examples. Every memorable book you’ve read, every great album and film and invention. In each of these, the creator spent the time. They chipped away, a sliver closer at nightfall than they were at dawn countless times over.

Pentacles are knowledge, too, skills that can be honed from the crudest talent. And they are Money, says the RenFest psychic. And money grows, tended to correctly, laid open to the almost biological processes we’ve created for them—a mirror or something we feel about the workings of the world. Think of the stacking mathematics of an interest-bearing account, on it compounding every day and slipping a little in those that go by idle. Every day a little more and the next day’s push on that rock from a higher fulcrum, the weight a little closer to it. Where will you be a year hence. A decade from now you’ll be interplanetary, sending images of dimly-known planets back to your former self on earth. For now, sit on the bench. Feel the cutting weight of the chisel, test the heft of the hammer, see how clear and vulnerable is that blank and how long must you chase until it submits.

+==+==+

I wanted to be cut like Mr. Universe and as famous as Stephen King. I put in nowhere near the work necessary for the first and enough but in the wrong direction for the latter. It’s all okay. The Earth is the safest of the four. Look at the craftsman’s face. Not smug and not simply bearing the work, nor grim, nor suffering. He looks not at the work he’s done but at that in the doing. This is what we learn from the Earth: what glory is to be found—a glory of the hardest knock, the lowest center-of-gravity—is in the fraction of a percent between a second ago and right now. In the slowly swelling mastery that you can feel like gravel under your boots, like calluses on your hands. Perhaps one day there will be time to pause and reflect, to cash in and see what lucre or fame might be awarded. But they’ve little to do with right now.

You carve the line deep and true. And when it’s reach reached its vertex, you turn the tablet and you set the chisel. You squint your eyes and you purse your lips and with that hammer, the handle worn smooth in your practiced hand, you give a little whack. You watch the first flake curl and fall to the ground.

(this was first posted at bradkellyesque.com in 2022)

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In the beginning, so they say, was the (s)Word. The Logos. In the beginning, there was chaos, a void, a depth and its face. And it would have been this for all time if there were not a mechanism, a patterning logic—though that word has its blasphemies. Think like this, though it’s so crude to be almost meaningless: there was chaos and then a notion seeped in, began to crystallize, simple as this: one plus one equals two. So, two plus two must equal four. And four sets of four, that’s sixteen in all. And if there is more there must be less. And if more is valued then less is less so. And if there is a value of any kind it must exist here and not exist there. And if there are differences between one coordinate and another there must be some traversal—time and space—and if there is time and space and they are not the same there must be some means to describe each. And if…

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A sword is the fold-forged, sharpened shape of the Truth. An instantiation of a truth anyway—the kind one may arrive at through rationality and logic, through Descartes’ number and measure, through the faultless expertise of trial-and-error. Fair and due that its symbol in the tarot is a weapon that can defend with righteous ferocity, or cut down great swathes of the weak for their treasure or blood. That it is a tool which can scythe a path through the most prehensile of jungle. To master its heft and swing, its parry and feint, is to master yourself and another. And to have it sheathed beside you knowing well how to use it...that’s a word unspoken until it needs to be.
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She would beat me and claw at me and smash my belongings when she lost her mind. Once, long after the first time I saw a demon in her eyes, we made it thirteen days without attacks. And on the fourteenth I had to trap her in a closet so that she would not break a bottle over my head and gouge out my eyeballs with the edge. Or I had to press her face into the couch and sit on her back. It’s all one screaming, bleeding night in my memory now.

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And yet she was a therapist, a smart one, and so her sharpest weapon was her words. She might ask one night, sweetly and concerned: “what are you afraid of in this world?” and when I said, say, “becoming my father” that was filed away until the bugs captured her brain again and she screamed across the shattered glass that I was just like him. That there was nothing I could do except to be the son in his image, let me count the ways. And so, in words, I became many things: a rapist and a liar and a con-man—imagine what you might be if the truth did not matter. I towered over her, I could squeeze her into stillness—but you have no idea how immense and monstrous a few words can be until you’ve wrestled them in open water, battered by winds on the deck of your tiny ship.

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In the beginning was a hunk of iron pried from mother Earth with the blunt end of a stick. That Word ensconced like a meteorite. Pretend with me a moment that this ore—craggy now, a patina of rust—will be the Ace of Swords. That it represents the primordial ability to solve a problem, to put one next to another and see not a one and a one but a two.

And how is a sword made? The oldest and best way is to heat the iron molten, into a glob orange-hot and then white. Stir in a bit of soot to give it the subtlest flex, a paradoxical hardness, to make it workable. And then you plunge the steel into water to cool it. A great and mystical upwell of steam. And then you heat again, fold it and hammer it flat and plunge it once again. And again. Each fold adds to the final sword’s strength. Introduces a complexity, an atom-thin structure. Two and then four and then sixteen and soon in the thousands.

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I know why the abused stay—a dark secret for another card. But here’s how they escape: see, there is no way out through the heart, that organ in your chest is a labyrinth you may get lost in. And no pentacular weighing of options will break one free. And though the intuition may scream for freedom, it will scream too for return. So, I needed the hard cryptography and cutting edge of the sword. I needed the irrefutable computation, a one sentence result that I could carry with me, derived from much heating and hammering and plunging. “This situation will never change.” It was, as it turned out, quite a sharp blade. Once honed, it would not let me feel anything until I’d cut my way out of that clinging jungle and found a new creek to bivouac beside.

Train all you want, my friend, the lesson is in battle. And if you’ve paid attention, only one notch on the hilt is needed to trust what happens when you draw that blade.

At 15, 16, I wanted little more in life than to freely wander the roads and rails. And so I’d practice the hobo life. The walk to my job where I fried chicken was a mile, maybe two, along a five lane highway nowadays so busy it roars. Some sparse woods off to my left and along the way a bridge you’d hardly notice over a creek almost narrow enough to jump. I’d go crouching down below to squat beside the near-stagnant water and peel oranges and contemplate whatever counted as my troubles then, hide out from the ensuing future. And maybe I thought if I could hold fast there long enough I’d become a sort of ghost. I’d haunt all this concrete and flatness and the hardscrabble trees.

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+==+==+

While the three has its plunging mysteries, the 4 first strikes one clear: stability, groundedness. Four legs on an animal and four wheels on one’s cart. And the simplest of houses has its four corners, the foundation is four-sided, and so too your cell and your bed, your dollar bill, and the blank sheet of paper that is my highest called-to home.

And in one’s most entropic moments—the aftermath of a car-wreck, of a furlough, of a sickness unbeckoned and finally boiling through the unbeknownst—who wouldn’t want a few hours of peace and stability. Isn’t that, truly, what we’ve all made ourselves slaves to these past thousand years? To be able to sit quietly in the warmth, bellies full, strife little more than a story we tell ourselves.

Peace.

And then the boredom comes. Of knowing what is going to happen. Of having the same conversation again and again, the same meal. And how long before, as Dostoyevsky said, you begin to desire the most uneconomical absurdities just so something will happen, just so you can prove that you are a human being and not a piano key.

+==+==+

Our friend has lost interest in the three cups before him. Drank them up, perhaps, emptied them out. And whether their contents were stimulating or not, they now provide him nothing but a memory. He needs something new. Some call this the Hedonic Treadmill and it’s as much human nature as love and anger.

What you’ll see when you look carefully enough, when you walk away for a minute and then come back as our friend beneath the tree inevitably will, is that the whole commercialized world has put us hamsters on the wheel. The economy, the spreadsheet we’re all living in, has a requirement to grow at all times lest it fall apart under its own weight. See the Tower Card. See Babylon. See cancer. And so it needs its money-spenders to keep spending and the surest way to render this is to keep the treadmill turning. To make you slightly dissatisfied, to innure you to your stimulation. And so there is always another thing to purchase so as to juice that dopamine. Another drink to try, another pair of pants, another video to watch. And when you run out there will not be a moment of smug satisfaction that you’ve bled this world for all its worth—there will be a resentment of its boredom. And for some of us perhaps this is the route to the World. A palace of wisdom found at the end of the road of excess. But one must take all visions along the way as serious as a heart attack.

+==+==+

Tree of Life and Tree of Death. Yggdrasil, the World Tree. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The axis mundi. The arbor vitae. The Bodhi Tree where Guatama sat his world-weary ass in cosmic refusal to ever stand again until he knew. The etching of paired initials in a heart. Below the foliage is a place we can return to for rest and contemplation. And we know there’s some means of climbing it to our higher selves. There is some protection it offers from the wind and rain and sun.

My wife and I bought an enormous square of trees far from where I sit. There are black oak and sugar maple, hornbeam, white pine and birch and others I do not know their names. Untouched since the dawn of man, so it seems. And I took a long weekend away from my worldly life to cut a swath through these—an ax and a saw and a jug of water. They let you cut them if you share a few prayerful words, if you see them a moment for what they truly are. And the space I cut was so we could spend our time among them. Learn what there is to be learned, hide out from the ensuing future. One day we will build a home there among the trees. I hope they come to see me not as the man who killed their friends, but as the one who appreciates them the most, who loves them the best for who they are.

+==+==+

You will grow tired of this world. That is in the way of things. You will see that every miracle modernity pulls out of the mud comes with a new layer of bureaucracy that snags your shirt and burns up your precious seconds. And the traffic jams will clip your soul like a bird’s wing. And people will need things from you that you struggle to give, try as you might. And there will always be expectations and a lacking. That is as much the human story as love and anger.

And, too, there will always be a tree you can sit beneath to simmer, at first, in your frustrations and your disillusion, the smaller of your failed dreams—because it cannot all happen the way you want and it’s not clear you would want it to. And maybe, if you are lucky enough, quiet enough, if you do not lament too much what was once in your cups...maybe you can sit quietly a moment and from the ether itself—from your boredom and your emptiness—will come a new reason to live. If even for a moment. If even for just as long as it takes for a single leaf to drop.

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(this previously appeared at bradkellyesque.com)
You have to choose. Ever since they ate the apple, that’s been the way. And the options proliferate like a field of tulips, like cancer cells or space junk, wise investments. The cool drinks are lined up in fluorescent, sighing banks at the back of the store and you want one without sugar, that will set your heart racing, one that tastes of a popsicle you ate as a child or one clear as glacial meltwater. Somewhere, perhaps dusty and expired behind all these, is the one drink that will finally quench your thirst. That you can live through and savor, that will not drain empty until you’ve had your fill.
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In the Seven of Cups, all possibilities appear. And so there is the kingly solitude and there is untold treasure, there is triumph in the world—note the skull etched into the chalice here—and there is a coiling dragon, a beautiful woman, the wise and deadly snake. And then there is the mystery, as bare as one’s visions will allow. A cloaked and radiant figure, arms spread wide. Emblems, each of these, for a choice you are free to make. But note their shared pedestal is no more substantial than vapor. Pick a cup, it says, and the others, the choices you might have made, will burn off like morning fog.

Notice the figure in the foreground: alone among the teeming Tarot populace, he lives in the dark, in bewilderment and awe—paralyzed by choice.

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There are now things that I could never become. There are more of these than those I could. I was to be, at six years old, an Olympic long jumper and a leathery rock star and a scientist of worldly acclaim. A writer too, in there, something born-in, like a defect of the heart. And later I was to be a hobo riding rails and cooking my dinner in an old pot hung over the fire, one step ahead of the law. And still later, I was to be a smokejumper, parachuting from old war-planes kitted out to fight fires and landing among the raging old growth with nothing but an ax and my wits. You have to choose or the thing will choose you.

Deer, as you know, will freeze in the beam of your headlights, stock-still with their eyes wide. And they say there are evolutionary reasons for this, though I don’t know. It might be that after millions of years, this high-powered light cutting through the well-known dark is simply too much for their reality to bear.

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The Tarot assumes you have Free Will. The cards make little sense otherwise. Maybe it’s a lie, an illusion. But if there is something to be learned from these strange objects, it’s that dichotomies are contrivances, glossings over. There must be a spectrum of will with every choice somewhere on it. Every person. And we’ve all known ghosts pushed through the world as if some reckless child were behind the controls. And we’ve heard tell, too, of men and women who’ve mastered themselves: monks who can control the temperature of each finger on their hand, can deprive themselves to starvation. What biochemical impulse would lead us down that tine of the forking garden path.

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What starts as a daydream can be extruded through the membrane and become real. What torture if it were otherwise. You’ll hear artists, athletes, business-people, and they’ll claim their enviable achievement was as accidental as stepping into a puddle. There are mistakes along the road, but I’ve yet to see an accident. There is always some hum in the pattern moments preceding, and to prevent the glass from tumbling to the floor it may require a return to the very moment of your birth. A million different choices than the ones you made without a thought. These victors we admire have done nothing by accident. What they mean is that their dream was ineffable, unclear to them until it was coming true. Perhaps the voice they heard sounded like delusion, though it matched the cadence of their own. Or they chose their chalice so long ago and clung to it through such wild vicissitude they no longer remember that first sip.

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As your tooth grows, the choices seem to narrow, harden—it’s a shuffle step to the left and no faithful leaps remain. This happens to the best of us. Your potential life as a child this branching and efflorescent tree and yet those furthest reaches now blown to ash. You’ll have to make peace with that. The choice you’re making when it seems there is none other. Is this misfortune happenstance or the world’s inherent malice? Is the subtle pattern hierophany or emptiness? Shortfalls as final failures or a footnote in your curriculum.

I would not have picked how I spend my days now, can barely trace the route. But choices still remain. And if the Seven of Cups is any guide, then to see this winding path as all regret. . .that’s to choose a door that does not permit return. Is to tiptoe out on branches that will not support my weight. So, I’m to be no smokejumper, no hobo or Olympian. But if I can keep a steady hand, perhaps in this next room—or the next, the one long after--I’ll find a little shrine of peace.