The tarot card for 2024 is Strength.
(It’s also my birth card and a lens through which I have blamed made sense of my life story.)
I was taught that strength was quiet, hard, and stoic. I was taught to hold back those messy feelings and keep your tears to yourself.
You can’t have THAT many emotions all the time.
You don’t have to share ALL of your feelings.
The shame of feelings is still heavy across my chest, even as I use my fingernails to peel back the layers upon layers that still get stuck in the corners of my heart. Even though I can write about, teach about, and trance about feeling every single mother-loving thing. Again and again.
It’s laborious, like giving birth to myself again and again.
Sometimes through poetry.
Sometimes through crying when I don’t want anyone to see it.
Sometimes through magick and a spell I didn’t know I was going to cast until the bottle was in my hand and things started falling into it. And I chanted to each ingredient what I truly, really, completely desired.
Sometimes through unexpected substack posts and a poem that followed me to sleep and into the afternoon.
Being born takes breath, a big one, many shallow ones, and one that sneaks in between the tears and the laughter.
And all we can ever do is keep breathing to give birth to the promise of softness where it all began. Before it was stiffened or stifled or hidden.
a poetry offering: laboring love
push until you need to breathe
rest until it’s time to tense and growl
remember it all came from connection
and naming desire as holy—
the loudest prayer
the easiest spell
time grows things at awkward angles
and bodies can learn to hold the unholdable
my hips are wide enough to bear
disappointment and traumas i didn’t expect
to recognize as they grew—
placing space between who i am
and what i could carry
or reach
maybe it’s the necessity of unavoidable surrender
to know compassion
or deliver the begged-for healing
to perform necessary exorcisms that rearrange (once/still)
precarious structures
there is slippery-ness in liberation
and the quick thrust that allows
everything
everything to fall to the floor
comes when you expect it
and still aren’t prepared
i will not remember the way i didn’t trust
anything could arrive—
screaming will disappear in how i tell the story:
i was not aching along the way, i’ll say,
i was being born too
we are (all) poets and magick makers
In each breath, we are born into a moment that waits, perhaps impatiently for us to notice the way it taps its foot and reminds us that we are alive.
I know of a spell that has stretched from my birth to this moment. And I didn’t cast it, I didn’t plan it, and I didn’t know it was for me — until I knew it was for me.
This sounds earnest, maybe breathless. Maybe it sounds too much like an offhand remark or a throwaway comment that I think no one heard, but the godds did.
This spell is poetry, the poetry of becoming and bleeding onto the floor.
Each encouragement whispers: keep going.
Each missed opportunity whispers: you deserve more anyway.
Each quiet night that forgets the shape of sleep whispers: you are not as alone as you think.
These are homecomings we could plan parties for, if we believed (earnestly) that the unsure waves were heading toward the truth of our becoming. That each roll into the shore promises a return to something that’s only steady enough to reshape itself in rhythm to the moon.
And that sort of steady is magick.
I am a labor of Love. And you are a labor of Love. Breathe into your strength, your power, your wild messy edges, and the pools of confusion that may still sit at your feet.
It is labor. And that is strength too.
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Welcome home, to this homecoming. This so much more. Deeply received🙏♥.
So much this! Vulnerability takes far more strength than stoicism does.