Searching for Justice

For the past four years I've been doing the majority of my readings on line.  The way I read,  you have to shuffle the cards,  so people use their own decks.   In my recent readings,  with everyone using a separate deck,  so it's not a issue of shuffling,  the Justice card (or Justice Reversed,  even more pertinent) has show up disproportionately. 


The Justice card is often about a sense of fairness.  of things working out justly.  Pulling Justice into today's world  I interpreted as a sense of desiring fairness or justice,  or of things being not fair. Which is completely accurate.  Things are not fair.  Good work is not necessarily being rewarded,  chance encounters can lead to contagion,  life is strange.

In ordinary days when people are searching for fairness,  I warn them that life is not fair.  In fact,  living in the first world,  with running water and electricity,  we are so far ahead in the fairness stakes we are already on the wrong side of that ledger.  So instead of wanting fairness,  I tell people to seek balance.  If life isn't fair,  and you feel powerless,  then the next day you wake up and life is still unfair and what can you do?  But if your life is not balanced - then there you have some power.  You can redress the balances,  give more energy to one section,  take it away from another,  You have the power to allocate how to balance your time and energy and then the burning sense of requiring Justice can ease a little.

One client had three separate readings using three different decks over a three year period. .  As I was looking over his notes,  I realized that in each reading,  he had pulled the Justice card.  So then we had another conversation about what that card means to him personally,  as well as being part of the ether now.  Tarot is both general and deeply personal.  And if you do readings over time,  you can get to deeper insights too.

Good days and Bad days

So I've been having good days and bad days.  Good days I genuinely count my blessings of which there are plenty.  But the bad days - they creep up. For five days I needed to buy groceries and couldn't make myself leave the house.   I actually opened the shelf long life milk I had bought early in the pandemic  to tide us over.  (It's weirdly creamy)  

And then,  yesterday,  I got out of bed,  did 3 loads of washing and went shopping for food. There is now milk and eggs in the fridge.  And to my huge relief,  the supermarkets in Sydney are edging back towards normal.  The price of fresh produce has gone up enormously - but that's because of the bush fires late last year impacting us. One thing this year has brought home to me is how connected we are to the land,  and how when we lose connection,  when we disregard the land,  that's when devastation can arise.

So if you are having a bad day,  be kind to yourself,  and if you are having a good day,  do your washing.  I am still writing lists, as I find myself more forgetful than usual,  when the fog as I call it, comes and sits on my head.  

But yesterday I played scrabble with a friend (appropriately socially distanced)  and life felt more ordinary and thus so much better (and she put down an 8 letter word! Hamsters!  84 points!!) 

Speaking of Poetry

Here is another poem that spoke to me

Pandemic

“What if you thought of it

as the Jews consider the Sabbath—

the most sacred of times?

Cease from travel.

Cease from buying and selling.

Give up, just for now,

on trying to make the world

different than it is.

Sing. Pray. Touch only those

to whom you commit your life.

Center down.

And when your body has become still,

reach out with your heart.

Know that we are connected

in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.

(You could hardly deny it now.)

Know that our lives

are in one another’s hands.

(Surely, that has come clear.)

Do not reach out your hands.

Reach out your heart.

Reach out your words.

Reach out all the tendrils

of compassion that move, invisibly,

where we cannot touch.

Promise this world your love–

for better or for worse,

in sickness and in health,

so long as we all shall live.”

– Lynn Ungar 3/11/20

Finding moments of Grace

It's been a difficult few days and they are only going to get harder.  April will be a tough month.  May,  I hope,  will be the epoch,  and after that,  things will get a little easier.  In the meantime, I'm hunkering down.  

I'm also counting my blessings.  That I live in such a physically beautiful place - Little Bay - near the sea,  near the city,  near national park.  That I enjoy spending time with my husband.  We share this new isolation quietly,  contentedly.  I'm cooking all sorts of new recipes,  baking,  using that weird collection of bananas I had in my freezer.



And tonight we watched JoJo Rabbit,  which moved me far more than I thought I would.  It's funny and whimsical and then suddenly,  terrible and real. It ended with some lines from a poem which really spoke to me,  so I'll reprint them here for you (poetry is like wine to me,  I can get drunk on it,  it punches though my intellect and puts me in a world of feeling)

Go to the Limits of Your Longing,  
by Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Book of Hours, I 59

Wishing you well in these difficult times.