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| The Four of Wands Rider-Waite tarot card by Patricia Colman-Smith. Two people with garlands on their heads are holding up bouquets of flowers between four garlanded wooden poles. A crowd of people is gathered behind them. In the background of the scene, a stone wall with many towers looms. There is a window in top of the most visible tower. |
On April 9, 2024, the Sun entered the third decan of Aries, that ruled by Venus. Venus–planet of harmony, ease, and connection–is under-resourced in Aries, a sign whose strengths include individuality, suddenness, and boldness. The tarot card associated with this decan is the Four of Wands.
Venus in Aries and the Four of Wands evoke possible (and often conflicting) images of art, relationality, war, stabilization, weddings, gathering, separation, and creative survival. This decan marks a time in which we can celebrate the beauty and art that communities insist on claiming despite the harsh realities of their environment; this decan also speaks to the acute grief that is warranted when we refuse to look away from those whose lives were cut short by war, famine, oppressive power, and institutional abandonment.
My keywords for this decan are: gathering change, the tensions of devotion, and where we can find creativity in oppressive structures.
The text I read and wrote on for this decan is the essay “The God of Every Day” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, published at Topical Cream in December 2021.
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In “The God of Every Day”, Alexis Pauline Gumbs weaves thought, prose, and poetry within a structure that shares with the reader both a text of study and a place to sense ideas. Gumbs writes about how, as part of her work of learning the words that Boda, her “ancient mother who survived the middle passage [and] was an Ashanti woman,” as part of building connection to the languages that Boda shared and shares with Boda’s descendants and Gumbs’s other ancestors, Gumbs read J. B. Danquah’s The Akan Doctrine of God.
Gumbs writes:
"Danquah, arguing for an Akan concept of God to an audience of European theologians and anthropologists and seeking also to displace several colonial misinterpretations needed as many names for gods as he could find. So I worked through the pages, and wrote a poem every time he named a different name for God. A particular god with a particular function. A type of god. The way you name God in the face of death or in the face of famine or to describe origin or to describe connection. An etymological trace of God in a word that means something else. It helped me to remember that everything is God. A plant. An old proverb. A day of the week. Everything is God. Everything and everyone."
In the footnotes at the bottom of the text, Gumbs shares that the titles of the 7 poems published therein are titled with the names of Akan Gods named after one of the days of the week, or names for children born on those days. As a reader, I experienced something thrilling, uncanny, and caring about the idea that we can imagine the coexistence of high, hard concept (cosmology, God/gods) and personal mundanity (God/gods are everything and everyone, and the concept of dailiness as deserving of exaltation). There was something freeing about the juxtaposition of the words experiment and life. In this text, surprising edges and openings brightened in the dark. And ultimately, I realized that although the call to “daily practice” is definitely familiar to me as a person with an Instagram account who receives a thousand reminders to practice “self-care” (within the conventional structure of capitalist consumer culture), this piece named and reminded me of needed resistance to the assumption of desired “sustainability”, which is only accessible to certain people under certain conditions.
Below are four quotes from “The God of Every Day”, and four reflections.
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1
“What if it is not an experiment, this creative life of refusal. This rarely institutionally-funded disloyal life of practice for a world as yet unnamable. This insistence on transformation when the bank account screams “conform.” What if this life as an independent experimental artist is not itself an independent experiment? What if it’s an interdependent ceremony?”
-- Alexis Pauline Gumbs
What if it’s an interdependent ceremony? In the Rider-Waite tarot image of the Four of Wands by Patricia Colman-Smith, two people are most visible in the card, clearly exalted–they are garlanded, centered beneath the beautifully decorated wands, and supported by a group of congregants behind them. Behind this scene, a forbidding structure rises high into the sky–a huge stone wall, with multiple towers/turrets and several tiny windows. Who is inside the tower, behind the wall? Who is separated from beauty and pleasure by the forces of institutionalization?
What is the nature of the spiritual (Wands) separation (Aries/Mars) that can be healed (Venus) by collective structures (Four) of creativity (Fire)?
What if the interdependent ceremony of a creative life of refusal requires daily reckoning with my relation to other people, from whom I tend to fearfully assume I should remain separated?
2
“If I was answering the question of how I stay in the work that stains my hands and the walls around me, I would say practice. I practice my practices. Looking myself in the eye in the mirror is a daily practice. A tarot reading for my mother. Blending the tea I need for this moment of embodiment. Spending time with my ancestors. Writing something I don’t care whether anyone reads. Filling the air with cinnamon. Dancing with my partner. Video calling my nieces. Composing a sentence in a language I don’t speak daily. These are some of my daily practices. I protect my practices. There are many names for God. The name I use is “every day.””
-- Alexis Pauline Gumbs
What if devotion is how we can make a loving life out of any complication? There are many names for God–what were previous times in my life when paradox created possibility? To what have I devoted myself to, and to what do I wish to devote myself to instead?
What does devotion look like in the course of a week? When is devotion simple, and where is it not? Where is devotion predictable, and when is it not?
3
“...you keep
fire alive
with what you give it”
--Alexis Pauline Gumbs
There was a period in my life during which writing felt awful. Every time I prepared to write, was writing, or looked back on my writing, a tide of what I will call shame rose inside me, and the only directive I could pursue that would soothe this pain was to shut up, stay silent. This strategy worked until it didn’t: writing is life, so writers must find a way to write. As a result, I would force myself to write through shame, then retreat into silence and prepare the cycle again. I lived like this for eight years.
I did not “keep / [my] fire alive / with what [I] gave it” because I gave the fire nothing. Instead, I tried to take things away. Things that I refused myself and the fire:
Doing anything that was pleasurable instead of doing something that was productive
Reading books that made me laugh/weep/feel a sense of purpose instead of books that made me look smarter for having read them
Creating anything that could not potentially be monetized
Letting myself admit that I had failed and needed to do something else so I could learn something from failure and grow
In recent years, I have received a LOT of Venusian good fortune–a supportive partner who loves art and stories, a kiddo who cares deeply about connective relationships–and they help me learn to give the fire my love instead of my fear. Things I have been trying to give the fire every day:
Respect for the mystery–every story will unfold in its time, everybody is living their own story, and everybody tells theirs in a different way
Recognition of when I’m being offered a chance to spend precious time with a loved one instead of Keeping On Working A Little Longer, and making the more loving choice
Resistance to the impulse to read books that I do not wish to read or write things that do not matter to me
Remembering that life is precious and nothing is guaranteed, and for this among many reasons, love and art are interdependent
“Experimental artists, unruly creative women and non-binary folks, especially when we are Black and/or queer, don’t necessarily live long, sustainable lives. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes our don’t has to do with years of lacking access to healthcare. Sometimes our don’t has to do with the environmental racism of where we can afford to live. Sometimes our don’t is psychological. Sometimes our don’t is murder.
This is the real reason why my name for God is “every day.”I’m grateful for each one you and I have.”--Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Despite the time period described above, I never stopped writing altogether, a fact that’s inseparable from the privileges I receive in society. I love to constantly and loudly tell people to “Just keep going! Don’t stop writing! We need your voice, and I hope you will just keep writing no matter what!” I will annoy you and your brother with this repeated message, which does come with aggressive waving of emotional pom-poms. However, I also loudly reject messages that imply or instruct people that if they have lost connection/access/momentum/visibility with their creative works that it’s solely due to their lack of persistence. The most persistent people I have known are persisting round-the-clock to secure housing, food, and medical care and do not have access to the time and societal support that are required to “write every day.”
Here are several examples that come to mind of systemic survival necessities that are inseparable from the possibility of all people having access to long-lasting creative practices:
Medical care devoid of systemic racism
Access to nutritious food and clean water
Protection from systemic violence such as police brutality, military occupation, and the enabled abuse of children
Disability justice
May each of us who have lived another day find new, creative ways to boldly generate true love amidst our collective ruins. May we try to live this every day.
Here are 4 organizations whose work I believe in and hope will receive support as they do the work work of uplifting the crucial creative needs of their communities:
Rawa Creative Community Fund: Rawa works on many interrelated levels, supporting the environment for Palestinian community work through support, advocacy, and learning, as well as providing financial grants to creative Palestinian community initiatives.
Words of the People: Words of The People seeks to normalize Indigenous language creative production. WTP currently hosts Indigenous Language Creative Writing Workshops as well as Rematriation workshops in Tulsa, OK. As land-connected women have worked to define Rematriation, it is to “return the sacred to the mother,” and comprises a complimentary practice to the Land Back movement.
The Flourish Alabama: The Flourish Alabama is a nonprofit organization dedicated to planting the seeds to help young artists bloom. We create and facilitate “multi-medium” programming and curriculum geared towards helping youth create collaborative art projects, facilitate art workshops for artists of all ages, and create and host events that showcase artists of color.
The International Armenian Literary Alliance: “Collectively, we give Armenian writers a voice in the literary world through creative, professional, and scholarly advocacy. Armenians have a long history of traversing cultures and identities through immigration, exile, displacement and/or relocation, and the medium of writing is important for us to attach words to experiences that defy categories and reach across continents.”
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CLOSING QUESTIONS:
1. On what day of the week were you born? In “The God of Every Day”, after reading the poem corresponding to your day, what images of action from your daily life are you reminded of? What is your relationship to those actions?
2. What was the most recent offering you gave to your fire?
3. What is something you have not yet given to your fire, but would really love to give?
4. When you consider how your every day is connected and disconnected to the every day of other people, what are four words that come to mind?
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