249: MONTHLY MEDICINE: November is Grief
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Deepest blessings to you at the crest of a new month, Wild Souls, on this very potent time of the yearly spiral.
Air date:
November 1, 2023
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About the Episode
Deepest blessings to you at the crest of a new month, Wild Souls, on this very potent time of the yearly spiral. Happy Samhuinn, Halloween, and Day of the Dead to all those who celebrate and acknowledge them.
The theme for November is Grief, and it is no wonder that it is. Whether witnessing the horrors happening in the world right now, or working through our own deep personal process, grief is at the center of this moment, and deserves our full attention. We are in a time of suspension and change, one that is highly liminal and unknown (hello, last few months in a Chariot year), which can bring up highly vulnerable, tender feelings.
Our work in November will be to keep our hearts and eyes open, to nourish a soft front and a strong back (thank you to Alua Arthur for this sentiment), and to tend to ourselves and one another in these times in a way that is sustainable and useful.
Our Soul Tarot Reading for November:
Card for the month ahead: Queen of Pentacles and King of Cups
How can we work with the energy of this card?: Justice
What we’re being invited at offer our attention to most: The Magician Rx
The deepest lesson of the month ahead: Nine of Swords
How are we being invited to tend to ourselves most this month: King of Swords
How are we growing and transforming this month: Ten of Cups and Ten of Pentacles
Lindsay’s Links:
Learn more about Lindsay and dive into all of their courses, journal posts, and free resources here!
Got Q's for Lindsay to answer on the podcast and beyond? Ask them here!
Download the (free!) Ultimate Soul Tarot Card Guide here
PODCAST EDITOR: Chase Voorhees
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTIONISTS: Meghan Lyman, Terri Wanjiku, Annelise Feliu, Valerie Cochran
PODCAST ART: Rachelle Sartini Garner
Land Acknowledgement
Honoring and acknowledging that this podcast episode was recorded on the unceded land of The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, currently called Portland, OR, with the deepest respect to the Kalapuya Tribe, Cowlitz Tribe, and Atfalati Tribe.
Please Note
CW Tags: grief, illness, injury, anxiety, ancestral trauma, death, loss of a loved one, genocide, violence, colonization, land-based trauma, parenthood, birth, and pregnancy
The content in this episode contains references to related to grief, illness, injury, anxiety, ancestral trauma, death, loss of a loved one, genocide, violence, colonization, land-based trauma, parenthood, birth, and pregnancy. We have done our best to identify difficult subject matter, but the labels may not be comprehensive for your personal needs. Please honor your knowing and proceed with necessary self-awareness and care.
Transcript
[Introduction]
[0:00:00]
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(Instrumental intro music)
Welcome to Tarot for the Wild Soul, a podcast that explores the Tarot through an inclusive, soul centered, trauma-informed perspective for growth, healing, and evolution. I'm your host, Lindsay Mack.
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Hello, Loves, and welcome back to Tarot for the Wild Soul podcast. I am your host, Lindsay Mack, and could not be more honored and more grateful to not just be gathered with all of you but to be gathered with all of you to celebrate and honor and get a sense of the invitations of the month ahead, November 2023. And to kind of move through the medicine of the Samhain/Halloween/Day of the Dead portal with all of you, no matter what you're celebrating today or around this time on the spiral of the year, if you are. Just loving and bowing to you, and really grateful to be gathered with all of you.
November is a really, really tricky month. It's really soft and also really sharp. It's really complex and also very simple and very… Maybe not simple, but very blunt and clear. It's calling us in, but there's also quite a bit of external stuff related to the month. It is kind of all the things and, like, none of the things (Lindsay laughs). And it feels like a very big month, but could also honestly be experienced as very subtle. The theme for the month of November is grief, and I'll talk about that in a moment. But wanted to talk about kind of where we are energetically. So, where we are energetically is kind of a giant clusterfuck, a little bit, and will be for the next month or two until we pivot into 2024. We're coming off of some pretty extreme eclipse energy. Major. Obviously, collectively, planetarily, enormous things are arising right now. Environmentally, enormous things have been arising right now. I know personally, I'm going through things right now that I've literally never gone through in my life, amazing things and also very challenging things. And I'm going about it kind of alone, which is… I'm very lucky to have my partner, but I'm not really working with any teachers or mentors right now, which is very uncommon for me. But it kind of is the way it is. No problem. No big deal. Just one of those chapters of life where I think I'm really being invited to kind of trust myself, and I am positive that I will be back in some supportive circles soon. It's just a weird timing where a lot of the folks I work with are either unavailable or we completed our work together.
[0:03:42]
So yeah, very strange. And that's, again, me personally, but I know a lot of people feel similarly. It's just a very odd, stretchy time with not a whole lot of answers, context, or clarity across the board. And I'm not saying like, “Oh, it's because of this…” But one of the things that I think is contributing to the overall feeling of just dense, super liminal fogginess is the fact that we're completing and wrapping up our work in this Chariot year in 2023. I've talked about this with y'all for many years now. Because we've been doing this podcast for many years, so I've been talking about end of the year/beginning of a new year for a long time now. But you've heard me say before that as we travel through the calendar year, the card of the year starts to, around kind of after the midpoint of the year, starts to dial things up a little bit intensity-wise. Like, we're kind of rising to the energy in the first half of the year, and then we're falling into the energy. We’re starting to go down the hill. Once we get to October, and especially November and December, that intensity is dialed up to the point of, like, cacophonous. And one of the reasons that it is that way is because it becomes even more and more important to do, and process, and complete the work that we're meant to do in the card of the year before it slips out in January, and another card starts to basically bloom forward where we're more in a process and a cycle with that card.
So, what to know about that? 2023, as y'all know, has been a Chariot year. And Chariot years are all about helping us to be birthed out of something we have outgrown. It is a large process of… It's many different things: it's realizing something doesn't work and then usually denying it, trying to make it work, work, work, work, work. Shifting out of that and into a place where we're like, “Oh, this really doesn't work. I've tried it 90 times. I have to let this go.” And then we have to grapple with basically feeling like we're hovering out in space because Chariot years are about helping us to understand what we've outgrown and acknowledging like, you need a different vehicle, basically, for the road to come. But we don't know anything about that road. We have no context for what we're going into. If we think about a baby reaching full term in the womb or a—I use this metaphor all the time—but a little bird hatching out of an egg, all that is known is the safety, and comfort, and container of that. And so, to get out of that is extremely intense. It's extremely intense. And so we're in that phase right now where it's not, oh, labor is starting. It's like we're crowning. We're getting squeezed out of this.
The other thing that is so tricky and so, honestly, painful about Chariot work is that it's not about the charioteer. It's about the chariot, right? It's connected to Cancer, so we're in Cardinal Water. Wavy, liminal (Lindsay makes wooshing sound), swirly vibes right now. Very watery. The other piece of it is that Cancer energy really holds this profoundness of being about both the flesh of the crab and the shell of the crab because Cancer’s connected to the crab. So there's so much tender flesh, so much tender inner spaces and places within ourselves that we're touching into in this symbolic way. Obviously, this is not safe for a crab to do in actuality. But it's the crab shell that’s shifting and changing, that we're shedding to bring more of ourselves forward. So, The Chariot touches on these big themes of like, how are we seen? How do we like to be seen? What’s been a very important part of our identity? What makes us proud? What looks really good to other people but actually isn't really working? What are we grappling with right now? That's a big one for a lot of us.
[0:08:45]
And impregnated in all of this is the medicine, and the agony, and the ecstasy of grief. The Chariot is the most present card, I believe, for the process of raising a child and for moving through your own growing up journey because The Chariot comes with you more presently than anything else. You see it in your child outgrowing their clothes or their shoes. You see it in them getting teeth and losing teeth. You see it in them dropping or releasing certain aspects of what were really important to them, or being interested in something and then that having its own natural evolution and moving into something different. We outgrow everything. And what a privilege it is to get to witness your child in a perpetual outgrowing, and there's so much grief in it. There's so much gratitude, and there's so much grief. And we, as a culture, are not comfortable with grief. We have been witnessing, like, what's happening in Gaza, in Israel, in the Congo. There has been nothing but grief on my heart and mind for the last several weeks. Everybody I know, it's in the background of everything that they're thinking about and considering how we can be of service. In what way are we being called to help anybody from any of those diasporas right now? And each of us will have different ways of approaching that.
But really, the question is: how do we respond to ourselves when we are not just in grief, moving through grief—which I believe we always are. Grief is always present. But when grief is at a really high pitch, when the loss and the devastation is immense, when we personally are moving through perhaps an acute grief, perhaps just a realization of things being so big… Like, I know there have been a couple of times… And again, it's a privileged problem to have. It's in no way a comparison to any, like, true issues that anybody is having right now. But I'm moving through a time when things are so unclear and so liminal. And I'll hear things from my Guides, and then like the next day, literally, they change. Yesterday I cried so much just out of frustration for how confused I feel. It's just extremely frustrating. And I didn't do anything but just let there be tears, because I was just like, “Yeah, there's grief in this. There's grief in not knowing what to do. There's grief in worrying if I'm making the wrong choice. Am I not doing more? Should I be doing less?” And again, going through a period where I don't have many places to bounce that off of as I usually do. And again, I also really trust that because there's really no arguing it.
I also think the fact of this part of the Wheel of the Year, Samhain, Day of the Dead, Halloween—especially Samhain and the Day of the Dead—the heart of them is grief. So, how can we not run from that or hide from that? How do we come home to ourselves more, tend ourselves through grief, hold ourselves through this immense time of suspension, of liminality, of change? For better or worse, it's a big time of change. And it's gonna feel pretty high-intensity until we move into 2024. And it's not like 2024, all that's gonna go away. But the energetics of it are going to drastically shift. We will not be in this same liminal middling place of process. We will be in a place of profound action and movement, and feel like the path forward is actually flowing. Like shit’s happening. So yeah, really, how do we caretake ourselves on a bridge between two worlds?
[0:13:56]
And there's something that's been coming up in my own thoughts that I do think is appropriate and relevant, both for setting the stage for the reading for this month ahead, and thinking about Samhain, and thinking about these hugely devastating times that we're living in. I think a lot of you know, and if you don't, I've been in a death doula training. I think we're now on week eight. And there's about four more weeks to go, and then I start some other supplemental trainings. But I'm loving it so much. I'm not totally sure what I'm (Lindsay laughs) gonna do with it right now, but I love it, and I'm interested in it. It's completely fascinating, and, yeah, it's an incredible thing to get to do. And in one week where we were talking about the process of dying, what dying looks like, if we’re talking months to weeks, or weeks to days, or days to hours, what do we as doulas…what can we look for, hold a space of awareness around? And our instructor, Alua Arthur, was talking to the special guest of the week, a palliative care doctor who was wonderful; works in that space. And she was asking him to identify, in his experience, what does he see when somebody is weeks to days, or days to hours? And he said, for lack of a better way of putting it, people tend to say that they see other people in the room, or they're visited by other people. And there does seem to be a welcoming party for the people who are close to dying; that they do seem to move into this process with a lot of people around them. And I've since heard a number of other folks who are of service in this space, are of service to folks who are dying that are bedside or whatever it might be, that we do not move into the Veil…we don't go home to the Veil alone.
That was incredibly moving for me to hear and also has been popping up into my head so much with regard to thinking about Samhain and my own relationship to this time. And the fact that because Samhain and Beltane share an axis—Beltane happens in the southern hemisphere when we honor Samhain in the northern and vice versa—that Beltane has to also be a thinning of the Veil too. Which speaks to what I was talking about a week or so ago in a podcast episode I did about ancestors and the kind of ancestor work we really, I think with great humility, at least in my experience, we really do. And some of it is going beyond and advancing, and going further than our ancestors were able to do. Working with them to meet those ends. And that includes both reclaiming the idea of pleasure. Like, it's safe to receive pleasure when a lot of our ancestors did not feel that way. Or if we have ancestors who caused harm, how can we…? And by the way, we all do. But how can we allow our lives to be a living amends from that space, knowing that we're never alone in it?
And that's been interesting to think about because I definitely have had feelings of like, “I have no one to talk about this with other than my partner.” And I'm so lucky to have my partner, but it's a different relationship than a process space. So, yeah, that we're not alone. That seems to be at the heart of the reading for the month ahead. How do we reach for care and tending, and support, and bolstering as we navigate this month that isn't going to be full of grieving necessarily, but full of an examination of the grief that is present and has been present for a long time, and is especially present now. But just coming home to what is. Coming home to that being a huge part of Chariot work. There's grief in all of that. There's privilege in it, there's gratitude in it, there's joy in it, there's celebration, and there's grief. And there's grief.
[0:19:06]
Our card for the month ahead—two cards came forward—are Queen of Pentacles and King of Cups. So, this is a time when a lot is being asked of us: to not look away, to be of service, to give of our energetic capacity. There's a lot of personal work that we're being asked to do that's requiring a great deal of us. King of Cups has to do with preserving, reserving, and being really clean, crisp, sure with our boundaries, energetically speaking. What do we have available to give? We cannot give more than what we are available to give, or we will wind up burning out, and we will be not available to give anything. There really is no shame with being able to say, “Okay, I'm going to pause here. I can give of this. I cannot give of this. This is what I can provide. This is what I cannot provide right now.” King of Cups is of service. That is the primary directive, intention, desire, focus of this archetype. They want to be of service. They want to help. They want to be present and hold space for anybody who needs help, support, witnessing, validation, etc, and to do their giving of a cup from themselves. And King of Cups teaches us we have to take in a cup for every cup we give.
I can tell you, the… What is the word that they're trying to say? The premium on that is very high this month. We are gonna get…slammed is too hard…really politely, and gently, and respectfully bopped on the head (Lindsay laughs) very clearly when we have breached that. And usually, we're the ones breaching that. We're the ones going, “Oh, sure, you can have another cup.” There’s a zero-tolerance policy for that right now. So when we reach that line, we're going to be invited really clearly not to go over it. And if we do, we can always adjust. That is extremely important. That is a crucial part of our Chariot work. We cannot overgive. We cannot betray ourselves, period. We can't, otherwise, we won't be good to anybody, you know? So it's very, very important to pay close attention. This doesn't mean bypassing. It doesn't mean opting out. It’s none of those things. It's about staying in our lane and being very clear about what we are being invited to offer in a particular situation, what we require in order to continue to be of service in that way.
I know for myself—I don't know if this is true for anybody else—I sometimes have a lot of ideas, Lindsay does, about what I should be doing in any given situation: with my kid, with my work, with whatever it is, with this podcast, inside of whatever it is. And sometimes I am bopped on the head, and it's like, no one ever asked you to do that. And now you're pissed because you gave of something that no one asked you to do, and you're cranky. And like, nobody asked you to do it. Was that really in your highest and best? Did you remember to check in about it? No. Or I had a sense and overrode it in some way. So, that's all King of Cups work is refining what that looks like, and just getting really explicit and loving and clear with ourselves, like, “This is the line, and I'm not going over it, period.”
[0:23:00]
Queen of Pentacles is also our card for the month ahead and just holds this incredibly beautiful healing, and helping, and witnessing space with this energy. So, King of Cups is here to help us to continue to show up and say yes to what we're being invited to do right now. Whether that's again, in a very large way being of service, or whether that's continuing to, like, take care of our kids and show up to our patients, show up to our clients. Whatever you're doing, whether it's in a large way or a very small and subtle way to yourself, to anybody that you're caretaking. It's all very personally felt and experienced. Like, how's our care being managed in conjunction with the people that we serve? There's a lot of work happening there. And it is again connected to our work with The Chariot because The Chariot’s here to identify what we've outgrown. So if there are any—I know this is coming up for me big time—if there are any areas where we've historically overgiven because we’ve felt like we've had to or whatever it is… Definitely not too shy to admit that's totally a thing that I do. And now it's a totally different ballgame. I have a child so it's like I'm there for them first and foremost, and I have to be there for myself in order to be there for them. So yeah, that's going to come up a lot for us. And if we get caught promising more than we're affordably able to give, we're going to be invited to make some adjustments to that.
Now, Queen of Pentacles has to do with: how are we being held? If King of Cups is about drinking in a cup for every cup that we offer—what fills the cup in the first place, that's Queen of Pentacles. I know that not everybody… This is not about fanciness. And again, this is not about opting out or bypassing or anything like that. It's about honoring the fact that if we are conceivably able to, if it is accessible for us, Queen of Pentacles is about feeling as though we're held by something bigger and more benevolent and loving that can hold us, that can encompass us the way a swan might envelop us in their wings and cuddle us close in a fantasy (Lindsay laughs) because I know a real swan would not do that. But that idea is what Queen of Pentacles is about. So floating on the ocean, floating in water, laying down on the earth, feeling the wind all around us, those are all Queen of Pentacles experiences where it's allowing the earth and allowing what's in and around us… And again, accessible means that we can reach for even the chair we're sitting on, or wherever we happen to be, to be an extension of that idea of this earth holding us, a larger universal love, or the thought and the memory of our beloved dead, our ancestors, our Spirit helpers. We have a welcoming party with us at all times. We're not alone in this life. We're not alone here in these experiences, even though we can really feel like that.
So those are the key pieces for November as we navigate huge grief, huge change, huge mobilization, huge invitations. A lot of them might be happening way under the surface. It doesn't make them any less large or small. How do we hold ourselves as we show up to and say yes to what we're being asked to do? How do we manage our energetic boundaries, and who holds us as we do it? Those are all immensely important things as it pertains to grief too. If we're holding space for anybody through a process of grief, or through challenges, or through difficulty, we know how important it is to keep our heart open but keep a very strong back, as Alua, my teacher, would say. From going with grace, a very soft and open heart, and a really strong back, which is brilliant and I love.
[0:27:59]
How do we hold that, keep our heart soft, stay open, not look away, and also be really clear about what is helping us to be of service in the way that we're being called to? How can we work with the energy of these cards? Justice. Justice comes up when we must face something, regardless of whether or not we frankly want to. Justice shows up when we will be confronted to examine our own personal dissonance around, “This should be happening. This shouldn't be happening. This should be here. This shouldn't be here.” We can argue with it, and yet, what is here is here. There's very little argument that can happen with it. The only thing, Justice says, that really allows us to be an agent for true change and evolution is to face what is present. To look at what's here. To look at what's ready to be seen. To know that this is not the end of the Major Arcana. This is the middle of the Majors. We have a lot more work to do from here.
Justice in this case—some of those pieces are more Justice in an objective or sort of general way—we have to do this kind of personal care work as a means to take care of one another. It's not an option. It's not frivolous. It's not. We must. Pluto technically is in Aquarius, like right now. I think it's retrograde in Capricorn at this moment. But Pluto will be in Aquarius largely for the next 30+ years, and there is no way that we're not going to be called to look at these themes over and over and over again. We're pivoting very far away from sort of the Pluto in Capricorn model and moving way closer to a more humanitarian, collective, community care model across the board. Which means that we need to think way more about the fact that we're in these bodies, and we're not machines, and we're not robots, and we're not meant to not have emotions. We have to get clear about what our part of this work is. I think it's also, there's a lot of stuff happening right now that is calling us to see things as they are, and not look away from that. So I think too, in response to that, these cards are incredibly important. And Justice can really show us the way there.
What we're being invited to offer our attention to most, what we're really being invited to pay attention to this month, I got The Magician reversed. The specific piece that feels very important here has to do with some kind of way that we've attempted to make things happen or do things. Some way that we've initiated or sparked something, or got something going, like got a ball rolling in some way, is not working anymore. And I think a lot of us are feeling that. That certainly is present in the collective. Like, what used to work doesn't really. We don't quite know why for all of it. We might know some of it. We may have some sense of why certain things have outgrown, but we don't know why to all of it. In an energetic way, for a lot of this, we're outgrowing some very old, very weatherworn, long-since-dead ways of pushing and forcing things forward. And we, I think, really are being invited to look closely at how we've done that. How have we pushed? How have we really, again, forced our way into certain projects? A lot of folks who are creative do that all the time without even realizing they're doing it, rather than letting things flow and come as they are ready to and then responding to that. It's not passive. It's highly active. It's just shifting from one gear to another.
[0:32:29]
There's two places that we're really being invited to kind of put our attention on with The Magician reversed this month. One is to not push or force if something's not ready. If something isn't happening, if it's not flowing, if you don't have the answer, you can't make yourself have an answer. Just ride the current. It's not forever. So, that's number one. Number two, there are certain things that we are absolutely going to know this month, like if you're in a place of like, “Oh, maybe I'll try this again. Maybe I'll go back to this. Maybe I'll see.” We are absolutely going to know this month, for real, “Certain things are just a no for me, and that's the end, and it's over. And now I will never go back to this because I'm absolutely clear and sure.” And some things may be sort of on their way out, and we may not have a whole lot of clarity. But the key in thinking about what to put our attention on in such a weirdly liminal energy here is paying attention to what's here rather than what we think we should be kind of figuring out.
I know for me personally—I don't know if this is a collective thing—but there are quite a bit of very surprising things blooming in my garden that I don't really remember. Some of them are intentions I planted literally seven, eight years ago that are happening now that seem to be just kind of humming along and flowing. And it's like, oh, okay. How interesting. That are totally different than what I have on my mind. And so there's been a lot of practice lately of like, okay, if that's what's supposed to be happening, regardless of what's important to my ego or what's important to what I think, I'm gonna let that be here. That is also The Magician reversed. It's allowing Mercury to work with us more spiralically. Usually, Mercury—Mercury rules The Magician—usually, inspiration hits the channel, and we go, and The Magician is like, “Everything's in place. Go. Let it flow out of the channel.” When The Magician is reversed, it’s not that that's not happening. It's working differently than how it typically works. And if there are any areas where we push and force something out before it's ready, The Magician reversed is going to really call us in on that and make it very clear like, “This was not ready.” So can we be with that? Can we look at that? There's also some Mercury Retrograde kind of vibes to The Magician reversed. And so I think also, what do we do in Mercury Retrograde? We pay attention. We open our eyes to what is calling us to look at something. Again, we don't impose. We follow. We're humble, and we're open to what wants our attention, and so that's another big part of what we're doing here.
The deepest lesson of the month ahead is Nine of Swords. Nine of Swords is often, frankly, not actually… It doesn't actually often show up when true nightmarish devastation arises. Not to say that it doesn't, but it's often the worry or the fear that some big scary ‘what if’ scenario will happen. It's like nightmare thinking. It's worst-case scenario thinking. “Oh my gosh, what if this? What if that?” When we get Nine of Swords, it's not to say like, “Oh, that never happens.” What typically is true is that the invitation of the card is not to try to make those feelings go away. It's not to try to fix or solve anything. It really is just an invitation to come home and tend to the parts of us that are scared. To hold them and say, “You're scared. I see you. I love you.” It's a reparenting. That's actually what allows some of that fear and some of that worry, and some of that fretting to be transformed. Usually, because this is a Nine, it's more of an internal kind of solo journey. So that's a huge lesson for this month is dissolving, resolving, and working through some fears that we have. Really facing them down, living through them and saying like, “Okay. Here I am. This was a massive fear, and here I am, and it's not a big deal,” or “It's a huge deal, and I survived it,” or whatever it might be. There's a liberation that always comes from our work in Nine of Swords, and it has to do with our willingness, again, to be present with ourselves. To not leave ourselves. To not force ourselves into anything.
[0:38:16]
The other thing that I think is really important to name here is again, when things are highly liminal, when we're in the void, when we don't have clarity about much… And we don't usually in life. Most of what we think we have clarity on is mostly perception anyway. But our sense of security, which is so important—obviously, this is life—can sometimes be wildly and radically threatened. And when we're living in a time where The Chariot energy is very, very high, when we're preparing to shift into a different year, when so many different things on the planet are happening that are devastating, when so much even outside of those devastating events are happening on the planet that just seem so unknown, it invites in fear. Because why wouldn't it, right? We don't need to banish that. We don't need to ignore it. We don't need to bolster against it or bristle up against it. We just need to soften to it and acknowledge like “Yes, okay, this is here.” It may seem weak or frivolous to some. It might seem uncomfortable—I'm telling you, there is no more powerful way for you to continue to keep your eyes open and stay soft and be of service in these times than to offer that gift to yourself and by extension, others.
And then finally, how are we being invited to tend to ourselves most this month is King of Swords. So, being clear about what we want, being clear about what's on our heart. Communicating and writing from a place of… I don't mean subjective truth, but a place of like, “Whew, this is my experience. This is what's on my heart to share, and this is what I have to share.” And usually, when we're doing that from a kind of a King of Swords space, it's a healing, not just for us, but for everybody who has the privilege of receiving it. Staying super soft, super open. Incredibly important.
And then I think I said “finally” to the last prompt, but this is the actual final prompt. Finally (Lindsay laughs), how are we being invited to grow and transform most this month? And I got Ten of Cups and Ten of Pentacles. So, two Tens. We're working with some pretty big cyclical shifts, some deaths and clearings of old ways, and some openings into the new way. I am not an expert in grief. I do think that what I do basically is rooted in that kind of care, like in space holding and witnessing, and in acknowledging and honoring grief, really, in all of the work that I do. But I won't say certainly that that's something I'm an expert in. But I do know that the more present and the more acquainted with my grief I become, the more open and present and grateful I am to every blessing, every beautiful moment because I am so aware that it's not something to take for granted.
[0:41:57]
That really, at its core, at its heart, is Ten of Cups. Ten of Cups, I actually think, rolls very deep and very close to us when times are shit, when actually things are really tough, really hard. Those are the most important times to stay tethered to, “Wow, this was beautiful,” because it's the refresh and the reminder to our spirit. Things are hard, and they are shitty, and the moon is beautiful tonight, and the sunrise was lovely, and my kid is safe today, and thank God. There are powerful simplicities that can come from our willingness to be in that space.
Ten of Pentacles makes me think of a welcoming party, makes me think of an opening, makes me think of a community. There's a lot about 2024 that is… And we'll talk about this in The Threshold when it comes out in a month or so. A little bit more than a month. There's a lot about 2024 that has to do with really being much more in connection with one another than maybe we've typically been. Some of us have been a little bit less, some of us have been a little bit more, even if we're still living with a form of distancing or if we're going through something specific where we’re more bedbound or whatever it might be. Feeling into a sense of greater wrapping, of community, greater witnessing by community feels like a pretty huge part of 2024. And I think that the growth and the transformation that come from these two cards… Because Ten of Pentacles also has to do with being at this peak point in some kind of cycle for better, for worse, for good, for bad. That in some way our work, our service is changing. And with Ten of Cups, our attitude and our relationship with ourself, and our perception of love is changing.
More than anything, this reading and the work that we're being invited to do this month feels like there's a very strong and very clear sense of not looking away across the board. Staying awake, staying present, keeping our eyes open to what is, and also learning a new way of tending to ourselves and being really clear with ourselves about what is in highest and best for us to do personally, collectively, planetarily, etc. How do we tend to ourselves through grief, no matter where the grief is arising from? A lot of the energies in here are about being with grief. Ten of Cups has always been an incredibly close bedfellow to grief for me, always, in some pretty, pretty brutal, devastating moments. There's also quite a bit here that's like, we are really being invited to let go of control in newer and more deep ways. There certainly is a lot coming up that's just whispering to us, can we surrender? Can we know that we're not doing it alone? So again, it's a complex song here. There's huge elements. There's very quiet elements. There's elements that seem connected; there's elements that don't. I expect that we'll discover more about it together, but I'm grateful to be on the ride with y'all.
Thank you so much for being here and for listening, and for your presence. I love you all. And until we connect again, please take great care.
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[Conclusion]
[0:46:17]
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