Temperance
It's been a long period of pouring back and forth.
I am, in many ways, a set of liquids that do not mix well. Emotionally I am a meandering, swollen and occasionally torrenting river. I am filled by the rains and whims of the local climate and occasionally parched dry by a baked out tiredness.
And in that water, I carry things.
Temperance is not just the one foot in, one foot out of the river. It is the cups. The cups full of spirit and heart and excitement I assume. For me, for now, I think of this as my interests, my passions. I am stuck on the thought that my 'brand', my 'identity', my 'self' cannot ever be truly coherent while it tries to bring together simply too many elements.
Everybody is like this of course. Everybody is a thousand things coming together in a tangled web. But for some reason, with me, I take it very personally. I want to be the person who can seamlessly interweave the precise imagery of the tarot with the multi-layered mysticism of bookkeeping. I want to be the one who can speak the correct words to make every single human immediately fall in love with a particular cinnamon roll loving Japanese wrestler, or a slice of immaculate drunken disco, or the way the supporting cast of that one comedy show represent everything it means to be healed and hurt and healing, or the vast time loop of that one series (two and a vinculum, actually).
I want to be able to shout into the void and have people hear me. But I'm not confident anyone wants to listen to one mad girl who gets deeply obssessed by twelve things a day.
Do you?
The other D word
Starting again. I think that there's a version of this where I see the whole meaning of life in this one card (actually it might also be in the Queen of Swords, and maybe that means it actually actually is the truth running through every card and everything, which I guess is what a meaning of life should do, like a word folded into a stick of rock).
We are a product of everyone we have ever known. The product of everything we come into contact with.
Wait, scratch that. I rejected the word productivity years ago (I failed, and am still failing, not to beat myself up for the lack, but I know I want to stop, I want to stop).
We are constructed from threads of feeling, trauma, love and inspiration pulled from everything single person and fiction and animal and element we ever come into contact with. I think this most powerfully with the people we love. And in fact, that's where I reached this conclusion.
I lost a lot of people in my twenties (and surrounding, but particularly that decade was hard) and I needed a way to understand how I was still here. Grief is a strange beast, and I've always felt pretty undeserving of the life I live. Just to be here seems a grave injustice, given my flaws, failures and general fuckery.
I landed upon the idea that actually, Nobody ever dies.
Bold I know, but hear me out. Everybody who I have loved has left a mark on me. Concrete, practical changes in my behaviour, taste, rhythms, words and ways of being. Even people I loved fleetingly and lost quickly, told me things that stayed with me, things that have made me who I am today. Maybe only tiny fragments occasionally push out. But I'm still made of them.
So they're still here, right? And not only that, but I too (provided I am loved, and I do believe I am) am affecting others in the same way. Bits of me, that are bits of my loved ones, are constantly being smeared around by every inch of me. I cannot be present with another without smearing some of myself, some of my loved ones, one them. (Why does this sound so aggressive, I'm just talking about communication, story telling, touch and connection. Why is it always smearing?)
As long as there are humans, I think we will always be passing on these tiny warm details.
There's a catch. People generally just accept the platitude, but the wisest (and I found one recently) notice the problem.
Because this is generational trauma too.
It isn't just love that passes on pieces of people. Abuse, anger, neglect, bullying. All of this also passes from one to another, and then onwards beyond. We all have a hundred stories of ways we have been hurt, and we can pass on these pains so, so easily. Taking out our suffering on others. It can feel righteous and just, even. Though it is rarely so.
So what are we to do?
My friend and I, we call it 'the other D word'. Discernment.
We are all temperance. We are all a vessel for everything good and bad that has been done to us. We are filled with those mixed and blended liquids. And we are here, I think, to try and choose as best as we can, as much as we can, to pass on the right things, and not the wrong ones.
We must judge what we must do, and that is the point itself. Judgment, Justice, Temperance. Which creates the World.
And it does.
It's a huge collaborative project. Over all of time and space. Every conscious entity is able to make choices about what to do, what to think, what to be, and what to pass on.
You will feel a lifetime of crisis running through you. Every minute of every day, you will be faced with choices about how to act, what to say. You will remember, you will feel (god will you feel) and you will do.
If more of us make good choices than bad. If more of us take the pain we're given and choose kindness, than see the luck we've had and choose entitlement, then...the world should get better. Slowly and entirely evitably.
I do believe that people can do this. I do actually believe the people will do this.
It might be harder right now. The sheer volume of absolutely everything that is put in front of us makes it harder and harder to discern the right path. It is so much easier to be traumatised and frozen in the face of the impossible hardness of the horrors people's discernment is currently delivering to the world.
But I do think kindness, joy, compassion and solidarity are stronger, more fundamental, and what most people choose.
Maybe the horrors are overwhelming. Too much and too strong and we'll be overrun completely. But as long as there are people, there are choices being made by people. And I believe if people look, learn and grow with discernment, they will make right choices.
And eventually, that has to mean something.