Libra 2 - Three of Swords - Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad

       

The Three of Swords card from the Wild Unknown tarot deck. The tarot card is centered on a green fabric background. The illustration on the card features three black-and-white swords, each with a different hilt, crossed over each other and bound by many intersecting wrapped cycles of red ribbon. The bottoms of each sword are dripping with blood.

To open, three questions:

Reflect on a day in the recent past when learning about a catastrophe that impacted a total stranger brought you to intense sadness, rage, or grief.

Did you take an action to distance yourself from the emotional experience of grieving another’s suffering?

After distancing yourself from grief, where did you arrive?

What is one reason you might choose to return to the place where you grieved another’s suffering?

*     *    *

Writing here, again. If you’re reading this, thank you for being here.  This blog is important to me because my self-publishing practice helps me continue to write more honestly, which requires that I write about the things that matter most. Therefore, continuing to write about Palestine in public is also of central importance to me.

The most important book I read this year was Isabella Hammad’s bookRecognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative.

The book cover of Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad. The cover text is in black and red, and the central image on the cover is of two keys, joined at the handles.

What I had previously been taught--by authority figures, canons, and hierarchies of award/reward/power--about narrative was that every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I was taught that meaning is a shape that forms between these three crucial milestones, and most crucially, I was taught that it was not only possible to correct to embrace what meaning can be generated by a book without regard for the material impact the work generates in the actual world beyond its pages.

Crucially, Hammad’s work in Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative grounds our focus beyond the easily-centered topic of narrative sequence. Rather, her writing reminds us that if art is to be meaningful, we must reckon with narrative’s actual consequence, and specifically the consequence that exists in the “moment of recognition”, which she writes of as a “turning point”:

“In the language of both law and literary form, then, recognition is a kind of knowing that should incur the responsibility to act for it to have any value beyond personal epiphanies, or appeasing the critics of the one doing the recognizing.” 

Halting, letting go, and rededicating

If you've ever read any posts from this blog, thank you so much! Today is Saturday, November 30, 2024, and I am releasing the scheduled structure I initiated in April 2024 (writing a post for each decan through the 2024-2025 zodiacal year). The reason for this is because I can better care for this space if I stop relating to it through the forced reality of deadlines.

I will miss the deadlines, and I have missed working to honor them. October brought on a big move, a major surgery, and recovery/reorientation through all associated changes. Any projects outside my day job and family responsibilities took a deep pause, and all the while, the United States government has continued to finance and profit off the genocide of Palestinian people starving, displaced, and/or trapped behind concrete walls. May I become more and more adaptive to the care needs of the world I share with our most marginalized peoples, and more and more willing to reexamine and rededicate my energy towards providing care in as many ways I am able.


My hope is to jump in and post when able between now and next April, but in case this is the last book-themed post that happens before then, I hope you will read or recommend to your beloveds the most important book I read this year, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad.

Reading and writing tarot and astrology are important to me because these activities are directly correlated to the amount of time I spend engaging materially with my communities. Spending time with the cards and the stars reminds me to spend time caring for my people(s). My goal is to convert this project's purpose towards fundraising in 2025. 

In the meantime, please consider donating to and amplifying The Sameer Project, a Palestinian-led initiative working to provide, among other aid, blankets and tents to people in Gaza as winter arrives: 

Donate to the Sameer Project

With love and thanks,


L

Virgo 2 - Nine of Pentacles - "Free Black Gxrlz and Free Palestine" by Aurielle Lucier

      

The Nine of Orbs card from the Spirit Keeper's Tarot (Revelation Edition). A depiction of Venus hovers over a scene of daily life in the card's center, eyes closed and hands upraised. On the ground, three women in traditional garments tend to the harvest (of green melons?) and to each other.

On September 2, 2024, the Sun moved into the second decan of Virgo, that ruled by Venus, who–being in their fall when in Virgo–receives the least support and resources of any Venus sign-placement. The Nine of Pentacles card is often depicted as one of the most beautiful cards in the minor arcana: a woman centered in intimate communion with a bird in the safety of a garden, clothed and surrounded by abundance. As a mutable sign, Virgo is double-bodied, embodying multiple realities beyond what is first apparent. Thus, when I contemplate the image of beauty evoked by the Nine of Pentacles, I also reckon with these questions:

What are the true, oppressive costs of my access to material comfort?

And who is paying the price?

My keywords for the Nine of Pentacles and Venus in Virgo were: Love requires discretion, rejection, criticism, and uncompromising standards of care. Love requires that we risk loss of pleasure. Love is, among all things, risk of discomfort.

And a crucial work that exemplifies this process of collective responsibility and care is an essay written by Aurielle Lucier, published in The Offing in May 2023, “Free Black Gxrlz and Free Palestine”.

Virgo 1 - Eight of Pentacles - "Uprisings are Just the Beginning", STILL ON LEAVE

Well, I missed this decan's work, too, having needed to be on my weird medical leave: lots of practical, constant, unsung taskwork to prepare for a surgery that was suddenly rescheduled, a development which generated yet more Eight of Pentacles responsibilities, and reminders of the privilege I have to take care of such needs/work as a housed, fed United States citizen with health insurance.

I hope to come back and write more this post in the future, focusing on this poignant piece from Hammer & Hope, "Uprisings Are Just the Beginning".

"How do we put back together a society that has broken apart? How do we build solidarity within a culture of individualism, punishment, and accumulation when we are constantly repairing ourselves in the face of various forms of daily heartbreak?

If we lend ourselves to the emergent struggles of our times — against Cop City; for Black history, abortion rights, trans liberation, widespread debt cancellation, climate justice, access to land, and alternative food systems; in solidarity with actors and writers on strike and so many others — drawing connections and showing up is where we should start and return to again and again. Now is a time for experimentation and discipline alike." 

-- Hammer & Hope, Issue #2, Summer 2023

 

Links and other reading:

Please help support the Municipality of Gaza, who are working to restore water and other life-saving infrastructure to Gaza: https://gaza-city.ensany.com/campaign/6737

Leo 3 - Seven of Wands - EVALUATING EFFORT, TAKING A LEAVE

      

The Seven of Wands card from the Tarot of Pagan Cats. An orange cat stands on a grassy hillock, back arched, tail puffed. The cat hisses at six wooden staves being brandished at the cat by unseen attackers. Behind the cat, a seventh wooden stave is planted on the hillside with a small red flag hanging from the top (with the alchemical symbol for fire on the flag). 

No post here and now–I am on temporary medical leave, and while I was really hoping to dig down and fight through to write something earnest for this decan’s subject–suburbia’s outcast White queen Shirley Jackson and her heart-wrenching novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle–one of the lessons the Seven of Wands and Shirley Jackson has taught me is to observe and honor the costs of fighting through, and to retreat when doing so is required to regain strength.

Hopefully, I will come back and write this post in the future. For now, I continue to dedicate my heart to all of you who are resisting oppression and injustice in all its forms, in as many creative ways as are within your power to wield.

Links and other reading:

https://gazafunds.com/

Support the Municipality of Gaza, working to restore water to Gaza: https://gaza-city.ensany.com/campaign/6737

Leo 2 - Six of Wands - "Every Throne Will Fall" by Vajra Chandrasekera

     

The Six of Wands card from The Fountain Tarot. A person wearing a white shirt is lying horizontally on their back, held aloft by the hands of multiple people whose forms are not visible. The bottom of the image is flooded with bright red. Five white wands surround the raised figure and the people lifting them. The raised figure holds a sixth white wand in their raised hand. The expression on their face is intense, activated.

What is publishing for?

*     *    *

On August 1, 2024, the Sun entered the second decan of Leo, that ruled by Jupiter. My keywords for the Six of Wands and Jupiter in Leo are: philosophies of visibility, vectors of privilege, and the tiny benevolent dictator who lives within. 

Today, I would like to read Jupiter specifically as a planet of politics. Like Jupiter, political reality connects us to each other, generates vast ideas, and champions the creation of dynamic conceptual frameworks and spiritual practices. Jupiter helps us commit to what is greater than the individual self. Jupiter excites the soul to make more space for all people. Jupiter tests the margins; Jupiter creates the conditions for the nourishment of those who have been forced to survive at the margins. Jupiter is political. 

And Leo is loud, proud, unapologetic of personal triumph. The sign that is ruled by the Sun, and in which Saturn experiences deprivation, says No to shame, says Yes to the individual’s motion to take up space, to show what they’ve got, to ask an audience to listen to what they have to say. Leo knows that the gift of a performance cannot be delivered without asking the group to sit down and grant the person on the stage the time and space to do their work in the spotlight.

In particular, I am thinking about publishing. This is the topic because I think about publishing all (too much of) the time, but publishing is also Jupiterian, involving the expansive deliverance of knowledge and worldview. Publishing, much like the ruler of thunder and lightning, can deliver a really shitty experience, but also has the potential to be politically and personally transformative if its radical potential for connectivity, as opposed to its profitability, is centered by those who participate in its cycle, its system, its impactful events.

The text I am spotlighting for this decan is Vajra Chandrasekera’s blog post, “Every Throne Will Fall”. This post, published on November 8, 2023, delivered two distinct and inseparable revelations for me as a reader: one, this post shared the official announcement that Chandrasekera’s second novel, Rakesfall, would be published in June 2024 (it is in the world, it is in the world!!!); and two, this post was the first example I had ever seen of a successful author choosing to use their book announcement to amplify a statement of resistance of the genocide of the Palestinian people.

This wasn’t the first time Chandrasekera had done this (and since November 2023, he has often paired announcements of his award nominations or wins with renewed calls to support and amplify Palestinian liberation). It was just the first time I had witnessed such an act of publication, and the one that forever changed my understanding of authorship–what authorship is for, what publishing is for, what any of this is for.

As a result of reflecting on this text, as well as others that have been published by other authors in the last year, for this decan I consider the idea that in a world worth living in, personal success is responsible to political relations.

Leo 1 - Five of Wands - "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" by N. K. Jemisin

    

The Five of Wands card from the Modern Witch Tarot. Five people stand in a group, each facing another person, who is not necessarily facing them. Each person is wielding a large wooden staff in a pose of combat. Two of the people are wearing face masks.

What is citizenship for?

*     *    *

On July 22, 2024, the Sun moved into the first decan of Leo, that ruled by Saturn, the lord of difficult lessons that can take a lifetime to learn. Leo is the solar sign, and in the domain of self-expression and instinctive confidence, Saturn’s gifts can feel more alienating than affirming to bear. I always think about that feeling when I look at the Five of Wands–why, I wonder,  would I look upon an image of all-around conflict and want to do anything but avoid it? As a Libra Rising with a loudly debilitated Mars placement, my first instinct when involved in a conflict is not to engage with a healthy application of personal power, but to people-please myself into an early grave. 

Saturn is also the lord of death, and the hard truth is that how we choose to respond to conflict–which I also think of  as the dilemmas inherent to power struggles–does have life or death consequences.

The text I read and wrote on for this decan is a story by one of the writers who has most meaningfully impacted my adult life, N. K. Jemisin. Her short story “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” is not a single defined answer to the painful questions that arise from the topic I raised. It’s a response–and yes, the story is definitely a response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, but I find that the story carries a living energy of responsiveness to continual moments of urgent, existential grief that have more to do with the world we live in today and tomorrow than with Le Guin’s original text. Maybe this is the singular gift of “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”--that the story’s organic responsiveness echoes its call to the reader to use our privilege to be responsive to harm, as opposed to using our privilege to merely broadcast our disapproval of harm.

Thanks to the powerful, dynamic ethics and philosophical catalyst that Jemisin created in this story, I have been thinking of the Five of Wands and Saturn in Leo in the terms of collective struggle and creative expression as inseparable from conflict.