major arcana – Page 6 – Just the Tarot

The Empress, Fucking a Trumpster, and White Feminism

A look at sleeping with the enemy and the politics of sex.

I have an online friend who’s fucking a MAGA Trumpster.

Now, I lived in Texas for many years so I actually have quite a few friends who are fucking Trumpsters, but this one feels different to me. This is a woman who claims to be a liberal and a feminist.

I read recently that we now have 15 different states in our Grand Old Union where, if a 12 year old girl is raped and impregnated, she’ll be forced to bear that baby to term. In some states, the rapist is even allowed to sue anyone who assists the little girl in getting an abortion.

We can draw a direct line from that barbaric state of affairs to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. And we can draw a direct line from the court doing that to Donald Trump’s appointments to that court.

So how, I asked my friend, can you – as a feminist – be on intimate terms with someone who supports the politician who has caused so much harm to the women’s movement and so much pain to individual women? Her answers were telling.

You don’t understand.

We keep politics out of our relationship.

He’s really a decent, nice guy.

He comes from a different background.

We don’t talk about that stuff.

Put another way, she chooses to not discuss the issues that she claims are important to her because they might be inconvenient to her romantic relationship. Put another way, those issues really aren’t very important to her, after all.

There’s been an interesting development in the feminist movement in the last few years, which is the rejection of, “white feminism,” by women of color. Among a myriad of disagreements, one that stands out is the accusation that white feminists tend to be more concerned with, “board room feminism,” than with the grittier women’s issues.

For instance, a white, middle class feminist might be much more concerned about equality in the workplace and getting that promotion to CEO than she would be about issues like rape, domestic abuse and abortion rights. And, of course, the reality is that women of color are far more likely to be raped, abused, and need reproductive choices than white, middle class women and much less likely to get that promotion.

Unfortunately, that view is born out rather powerfully by the voting records in the United States. In the 2016 election, 42% of female voters cast their ballots for Trump. That’s well, well past the time that every single adult in the country was aware of the pussy-grabbing tape and aware of the fact that Trump is a misogynistic swine who views women as mere life-support systems for vaginas.

As shocking as that is, here’s the more interesting breakdown on that: 55% of white women voted for Trump. 70% of Hispanic women voted for Biden. And 91% of black women voted for Biden.

You really can’t get much more definitive evidence of the racial differences in today’s women’s movements and how this is impacting some women much more powerfully than others.

Under that scenario, white, middle class feminists have gotten . . . comfortable. Like The Empress, they’re securely ensconced on their luxurious couches, wearing their prom queen tiaras and languidly waving their scepters at the women who are still down in the trenches getting raped. And it may be true.

I still care about my friend and respect her in many other ways, but I recognize that on this topic she’s talking the talk and not walking the walk.

You can’t share a bed with a Nazi and claim that you’re concerned about anti-semitism. If your boyfriend has a KKK robe hanging in his closet, you can’t claim that you’re upset about racism. And if you’re fucking a Trumpster, you can’t claim you’re a feminist.

The Fool, Flowing into Fun, and Making Wu Wei Our Woo Hoo

A look at Flow State as a spiritual practice.

Most people know about being, “in the Flow,” also known as being, “in the Zone.” It’s that feeling of engaging in an activity with such concentration and perfection that it’s as if we somehow become the activity and the activity becomes us.

Dancers and athletes talk about being in the Flow when they turn in a performance that’s absolutely flawless and they somehow go far beyond what they’ve ever been able to do before. Artists and writers have the same sort of an experience when they plunge so deeply into their work that it’s almost as if the painting is painting itself, or the page is filling itself with beautiful images.

One of the fascinating things about Flow state is that the world seems to disappear for a while. There’s nothing in our consciousness except the activity that we’re engaging in. It’s like a trance. Painters will frequently start a painting and then, “wake up,” six hours later, having lost all track of time, their environment, and anything else but the surface of the canvas.

Oddly, we see very much the same phenomenon with people who are plagued by ADHD. They may spend most of their lives jumping from one activity to another, unable to focus or stay on task for more than a few minutes. When we take those same people, though, and sit them down in front of a video game, it’s a very different story. They go into a state of hyper-focus and will frequently become so immersed in the game, so ultra-concentrated, that they may not leave it for hours. They’re in a trance and the world has disappeared. They’re in the Flow.

Hungarian psychologist Mihal Csikszentmihalyi first noted the Flow state in 1975, but Taoism pegged it centuries ago and calls it, “Wu Wei.” Wu Wei can be translated as, “inaction,” or, “doing nothing,” but a closer definition is, “effortless action.” Which is exactly how we feel when we’re in the Flow. We feel that we’re completely in synch, in the groove, in harmony with whatever activity we’re engaged in and it becomes totally effortless.

Now, a lot of Westerners have had trouble with the idea of Wu Wei, because they glom onto the idea of just doing nothing, rather than doing something effortlessly. As lovely as it can be, sitting on a beach dangling our toes in the water is NOT Wu Wei.

We are in the Flow state when we are involved in an activity for which we have some skill. When we’re doing something completely. Somehow in that process our ego disappears, our environment disappears, and our sense of time disappears, which is pretty much the definition of a transcendent spiritual experience.

To put it another way, we’re co-creating with the Universe.

Mike Dooley hints at that process when he’s talking about the art of visualizing and manifestation. He says that the Universe acts as a sort of a GPS system that guides us to our goals, constantly popping up directions and resources to get us where we want to go. BUT . . . we have to actually start the car before the GPS system starts to work. We have to get our asses in gear and move before the Flow state happens.

The closest that the Tarot gets to portraying that state is The Fool. The Fool is dancing along at the edge of a cliff, so absorbed in his joy that he really doesn’t even see the precipice. The message of the card is that even if he dances off of the edge he’ll just go on dancing on air. He’s in the Flow.

The neat thing about all of this is that, when we look at being in the Flow AS an act of co-creating with the Universe, then it becomes a spiritual practice. It becomes a way of communing with our higher powers or spirit guides or angels or whatever we want to call them.

All we have to do is to figure out what gets us into that state of Flow and DO IT. It can be almost anything. It can be painting or writing or dancing or gardening or cooking or having incredible, mind-blowing sex. It’s just a matter of thinking about what activities come the closest to putting us into that trance state. What is it that, when we do it, the world disappears for a while, time stops, and we completely forget our egos?

Once we identify the activity – and we all have at least one – then we build it into our lives more and more. Every time that we engage in our particular Flow activity, we form a stronger and stronger bond with our higher powers and our higher selves.

And it’s fun. It’s lots and lots of fun.

The Fool, Double Dorjes, and Saying Yippee to the Universe

A look at the underlying, happy energy of the Universe.

I’ve been playing around with making altar cards to sell on my Etsy shop (synergyfolkart.etsy.com) and trying to put together a line of them for Buddhists. The other day I was looking at a picture of a double dorje – a very powerful symbol in Vajrayana Buddhism – and I thought, “I wonder if I could make that gold, instead of bronze?”

Lo and behold, after several hours of research, clicking, layering, re-layering, and praying to the mighty goddess of Adobe Photoshop, I went from this:

to this:

Now, it hasn’t been that long since I had sex with someone – probably not more than 5 or 6 hundred years – but completing this transformation was very much like that feeling. When I saw the final image there was a huge, internal, “YIPPEE!,” from my Inner Child and I got up and danced around my studio. (And, yes, when I used to Get Lucky I would frequently shout, “YIPPEE!” and dance around the bedroom.)

There are probably about 30 million 10 year olds who are far more adept at Adobe Photoshop than I’ll ever be, and I only get a few bucks for each card, so there was nothing earthshaking about this. But that’s not the point.

The point is that the Universe is doing something . . . somehow . . . for some reason.

I don’t think I can put it any more clearly than that.

Scientists tell us that about 13 billion years ago there was a tiny dot of super-concentrated energy in the center of the Universe. Well . . . it wasn’t the center of the Universe because there wasn’t any Universe, yet, but just for the sake of argument, pretend there was a Universe and there was this dot in the middle of it. And then – KABLAMMM!!!!!!!!! – the tiny dot of energy suddenly exploded for no particular reason and started expanding outwards into . . . you know . . . nothing.

The energy carried with it all of the . . . um . . . stuff . . . that would later form into solar systems and suns and planets and moons and Donald Trump’s hair.

That’s what they call the Big Bang Theory.

AND . . . according to the scientists, the Universe is STILL expanding.

I’ve always had a little trouble with that part because I’ve never been able to figure out exactly what it’s expanding INTO. I mean, if the Universe is everything and it’s expanding, then there must be a whole lot of nothing out there somewhere for it to expand into and I wonder if there’s some sort of a fence between the Universe and the Nothing.

But I digress.

Modern science has pronounced that the Big Bang was sort of an incredibly powerful firecracker that blew up and scattered detritus all across the Universe. And they’re very proud of that pronouncement because they feel it gets rid of all of the superstitious nonsense like gods and goddesses and creation myths and fables. But just saying that there was a giant cherry bomb in the middle of the Universe before there was a Universe and it somehow blew up and somehow made the Universe, doesn’t really explain anything. There are still those questions like, “Who made the cherry bomb?” And, “Who lit the fuse?” And, “What’s the point?”

For centuries, Sages, Mystics, Philosophers and other people with far too much spare time on their hands have tried to figure out exactly what that primal energy that exploded outward from the Big Bang is composed of. Is it alive? Is it conscious? Is it thinking? Is it feeling? Is it in a bad mood or does it have a sense of humor?

There are a few religions and philosophies out there – like Taoism and Vedanta – that assert that the primal energy is very much alive and conscious. And, although our egos tend to make us forget it, we ARE that energy. In many ways, we may actually be the spear tip of that energy because we’re one of the few species we know of who have evolved into thinking, self-reflective, beings.

It makes sense, then, that we feel at our best when we’re in alignment with that energy. And we feel at our best when we’re loving, creative, and playful, much like the energy of The Fool, dancing along with his little doggie.

It’s not a HUGE leap, then, to extrapolate that the basic, primal energy of the Universe is loving, creative, and playful. When we’re laughing, having great sex, or making Golden Double Dorjes. To me, at least, that’s a lot more logical than thinking that we’re the left over wrappings of some giant firecracker.

Yippee!!!!

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The Emperor, Robotic Cats, and Suicide Among Elderly Men

Examining the reasons for the high suicide rate among elderly males.

I was just reading an article about suicide in the elderly and the author – a certified therapist with a PhD, mind you – suggested that a good preventative might be a robotic cat or dog that we could talk to and sleep with. That way, we wouldn’t be lonely and, if we weren’t lonely, we wouldn’t be offing ourselves at record numbers.

Now, if you weren’t already suicidal, the idea of having to get a little cat robot to be your best friend would surely drive you over the edge. It’s such a radiant example of NOT understanding suicide in the elderly that it’s almost breathtaking.

Here, kitty kitty! Oh, shit, her batteries are dead. Might as well just kill myself.

The, “reasons,” for elder suicide are all over the place. According to the experts, it’s because we’re lonely, or we’re socially isolated, or we’re sick, or we don’t have jobs anymore, or our spouses died, or we’re invisible in a youth-culture, or we never get touched by anyone.

My very favorite is that elderly people commit suicide because they’re . . . drumroll, please . . . depressed.

You think?

After spending several days combing through articles and studies about why elderly people kill themselves, I came to two conclusions. One – nobody really knows why. Two – nobody is very motivated to find out. From a purely dollars and cents perspective, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to social scientists to study elderly suicide because – hey! – old people are, you know, old. Why spend a ton of money studying how to keep them alive when they’re supposed to die soon anyway?

They have pretty much pinned down the people at the highest risk. The person who is most likely to commit suicide in the United States is an elderly, white, male, introvert with a family history of suicide.

Males kill themselves four times more than females. Apparently it’s one of our special skills, though it’s probably best to not note it on our resume’s. No surprise, then, that those statistics would go across all of the age groups and extend into old age.

I can also understand the factor of the family history of suicide. Perhaps that’s just a genetic predisposition to depression, but once you’ve seen suicide modeled in your own family, it’s hard to unsee it.

Introversion is a little harder to grasp, because it exists across such a broad spectrum and means so many different things to different people. About 52% of the general population are introverts but most of them are obviously not suicidal.

Researchers have been quick to make the leap from introversion to loneliness and social isolation, though. Under that model, introversion = social isolation, which = loneliness, which = depression which causes suicide.

Leaving aside the fact that those us with robotic cats are hardly lonely, other statistics would seem to refute this approach. Elderly women actually report much higher levels of feeling socially isolated and much higher levels of feeling lonely than elderly men. If there was causation from those factors, we’d expect to see the gender statistics reversed, with women killing themselves at four times the rate of men.

There’s another interesting difference we can discern when we look at a recent study from UCLA. Dig this:

“What’s striking about our study is the conspicuous absence of standard psychiatric markers of suicidality across all age groups among a large number of males who die by suicide,” said Kaplan, a professor of social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. They found that 60% of victims had no documented mental health conditions.

In other words, the standard perception of suicide as being caused by long term mental illness simply isn’t born out. Suicidal men aren’t crazy, they’re just suicidal.

So, if elderly men aren’t killing themselves because they’re more lonely, more isolated, crazier, or more introverted than everyone else, what’s causing it?

I suspect that a large part of it may lie in another part of the description, which is, “white male.”

Of all of the many groups in the United States, there is no group that is more likely to fully participate in the toxic masculine paradigm than the Caucasian male. We have, simply by being born with white skin, more access to the education and financial resources that enable us to become completely enmeshed in the insane pursuit of money, power, and position. We abandon our own authenticity in that lifelong pursuit.

When we look at the Tarot card, The Emperor, we see the ultimate outcome of that paradigm. Yes, he’s sitting on a throne and he’s powerful. He’s also completely and totally alone, covered from head to toe in his armor. Everything around him is a blasted, sterile wasteland. No friends. No lovers. No family.

He doesn’t even have a fucking robotic cat to sit on his lap.

When we talk about toxic masculinity, we mainly frame it in terms of the negative effects that it has on women who come into contact with it. We tend to forget that it’s the men who are carrying all of those toxins around with us. And it’s killing us.

Is it likely that white American males will begin to look at the female paradigm or perhaps people of color and try to figure out why we’re killing ourselves and they’re not? Probably not. On the other hand, artificial intelligence is improving by leaps and bounds. It’s only a matter of time – hopefully a very short time – until we’ll all have robotic cats and dogs who can actually talk to us and help us deal with our emotional problems more realistically.

Here kitty kitty! I have some brand new batteries for you, sweetheart.

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How to Lighten the Fuck Up by Fooling Around with Magic

A Quick Look at the Playful Nature of Magic.

Magic.

What is it, anyway? We talk about magic a fair amount. We say that something, “felt really magical,” or we, “feel a lot of magic,” when we’re with another person,” or a solution to a problem appeared, “just like magic.” But what, exactly, is it? Is it just a feeling, or is it a real thing that exists in the world independent of our feelings?

In The Magician card, we see a person channeling magical energy from, “above,” into the material plane. He’s using his concentration, his will power, and his skills to pull that energy into what he wants to manifest.

Which, of course, is a major clue. Magic is an energy, just like light, sound, radio waves, or solar flares. What’s more, it is it’s own energy, meaning that it’s distinct from other energies.

We tend to get it mixed up with other energies, because it appears coincident with them. When we’re madly in love with someone, it feels magical, and so we tend to mix magical energy up with being in love. When we’re joyous, it feels magical, and so we tend to mix magic up with great happiness. But magic is it’s own energy that appears with joy and love, but isn’t just joy and love.

We can see an analog of this with emotions and brain chemicals. When we have a lot of serotonin in our bodies, we feel happier. When we have a lot of cortisol and adrenaline in our bodies, we feel more stressed and anxious. But . . . happiness causes serotonin to appear and serotonin causes happiness to appear, so it’s a definite, “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” situation. They’re not equivalent – they just appear at the same time.

Reductionists would have us believe that serotonin = happiness, but it’s not true. Antidepressants, which increase serotonin levels, can be a very effective band aid for depression, but they pretty much have to go along with good therapy to deal with the underlying problems. If we don’t build in the therapy, the happiness goes away when we stop taking the antidepressants because – guess what? – the things that were making us unhappy are still there.

In very much the same way, magic appears in our lives coincident with love and and joy, but the love and joy don’t cause the magic. Nor does the magic cause the love and joy. They just appear at the same time.

There are some other clues we can find that point to what magic actually is. Two major markers that appear in our lives when we’ve got magical energy flowing through us are synchronicity and serendipity. Synchronicity and serendipity are really just short hand for, “life is easy.” Solutions to our problems appear out of nowhere. People, places and things that feel like gifts from the universe manifest with no effort at all.

And, “life is easy,” is really just short hand for, “life is light. Life is playful. Life is fun.”

Which are some more major clues about what magical energy really is. In the same way that magic tends to appear when we’re joyous or in love, magic tends to appear when we’re happy and playful. It’s almost as if the universe is saying, “You know, you really need to lighten the fuck up if you want me to play with you. I get that you’re all sad and dour, but it’s a drag and I can find someone else to hang out with.”

So magic is an energy that tends to appear in our lives when we’re loving, joyous, happy and playful. It doesn’t cause them and they don’t cause magic, but they definitely appear at the same time.

Which brings us to another card, The Fool.

The Fool is FULL of magic. He’s dancing along at the edge of a cliff and he really doesn’t give a fuck about the danger because he’ll just float right off into the air and keep dancing. His little dog is picking up on his joy and dancing right along with him, in just the way that dogs always will.

Now, the interesting thing about The Fool is that he’s the Zero card in the Tarot deck. Every other card has a number, but The Fool is Zero. Which means that he doesn’t belong anywhere and he belongs everywhere. We can literally take any card in the Tarot deck, drop The Fool on top of it and things will start to get better. Even extremely bad cards like Death and The Tower start to improve the second that we bring in magical energy.

There are people in the world who will tell us that life is insane, tragic, and brutal and that there’s very little to be optimistic about. And, when we look at the daily news, it can be hard to argue with that view. Believing in love, joy, playfulness, happiness and lightness can seem downright . . . Foolish.

But that’s the point. No matter how bad the situation may be, if we start to drop The Fool on it, if we start to increase the magic in our lives, it will get better.

Magic brings love, joy, happiness, playfulness, easiness, and lightness with it.

Yes, please. I’ll have some of that.

My e-book, Just the Tarot, is still available on Amazon at a price that’s SO reasonable that it would be downright Foolish not to buy a copy.

The Chariot, Choices, and Man in the Moon Epaulettes

Choosing new lives after devastating loss.

I’ve always loved the way that the guy is dressed in The Chariot Tarot card. I mean, what a spiffy outfit! He’s got a crown with a star on it, his very own scepter, and he’s rocking a sort of a skirt with all of the signs of the zodiac on it. And the pièce de résistance is those wonderful Man in the Moon epaulettes. I mean, this is a guy that, if we saw him walking down the street, we’d definitely be impressed with how put together he is. Not to mention his bold sartorial choices.

Of course, there’s a major wink in this card. When we look at the two sphinxes that are pulling the chariot he stands in, we realize that (a) they’re sitting down; (b) they’re facing in opposite directions; and (c) there are no harnesses or reins attached to them. In other words, the Charioteer, despite his glorious finery, is going nowhere any time soon.

The reason he’s not cruising is a matter of choice, and I don’t mean that he’s chosen not to move. He’s psychically paralyzed. The black and white sphinxes represent duality. The second that duality comes into the picture, we’ve got choices to make. Should I go right or left? Should I get this job or that job? Should I get married or stay single? Should I follow the Yellow Brick Road or just hang here with the Munchkins?

When we suddenly have too many choices, we can become frozen in place, like the classic deer in the headlights. Which is ironic, because for so much of our lives we bitch about NOT having any choices. We’re stuck in a dead end job. Or we can’t leave a toxic relationship because we’re worried about the kids. Or we’re living in a town we hate but we don’t have the money to move.

If only . . . if only . . . we had a choice. Things would be different. Life would be good.

Now, when our lives suddenly blow up – and I mean really blow up – we may not have much left. If we go through a devastating divorce or our partner dies or we lose all of our money, we’re left standing there with nothing. The one thing we DO have left is choices.

It sounds paradoxical, because when we, “lose,” everything, we feel powerless. We feel as if all of our usual, reliable resources have been stripped away from us and we have nothing left to work with. Oddly, though, we find out that we have much more to work with than we did before we lost everything, and that’s because we suddenly have choices. As Kristofferson said, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” When we lose everything, we can actually be free, perhaps for the first time in our lives.

The Chariot is a wonderful metaphor for how we traverse our lives in ordinary times. We may not actually be going anywhere, we may have no sense of direction, we may feel that our lives lack any real meaning, but by god we’re well dressed. Before we step out into the world every day, we make sure our crowns are on straight, our zodiac skirts are clean and pressed, and we have a firm grasp on our scepters. We may be, “leading lives of quiet desperation,” on the inside, but we see to it that our outsides are impeccable.

We’re standing there in our glorious, glittery chariots that we call our lives and – BOOM – we get fired or we come home and find our wife/husband shtupping our best friend or we get run over by an out of control ice cream truck. Suddenly we’re lying there in the ditch with our crown all bent to hell, our scepter broken in two and our epaulettes torn off.

And, of course, we’re filled with immense grief for all that we’ve lost.

One of the first things that happens in the grief process is that we try to pretend that everything is normal. Nora McInerny talks about that in one of her videos on grief. In a period of just a few months, her father died, her husband died and she had a miscarriage. When friends and family would ask how she was doing, her constant refrain was, “I’m fine. I’m alright. I’m perfectly fine,” though she was shattered inside.

So basically, our first impulse is to pick ourselves up out of the ditch, dust off our zodiac skirts, glue our scepters together and put our bent crowns on our heads. We’re fine. Perfectly fine.

That works for some of us, after a fashion. If we get our outsides together, then we can reassure ourselves that our insides must be okay, too. Hey, I’m going to work, I’m paying my bills, I eat meals . . . sort of . . . so I must be okay. Our friends and family will shine that back at us, too, because they really, really don’t want to deal with us NOT being okay. Right around the six month mark after a death they’ll start to be worried and say something like, “Look, isn’t it time you start to get over this? Maybe get out and meet someone? You know . . . get on with your life?”

For many of us, though, that doesn’t work. We know that the crown is never going to fit on our heads again, the goddamned scepter won’t stay glued together and our Man in the Moon epaulettes are in shreds.

At first blush, that can feel incredibly overwhelming, because there’s a realization that so much of what we used to call our lives was total bullshit. If everything that we thought was so solid, so dependable, so . . . normal . . . can be taken away in a flash, then it wasn’t worth much to begin with, was it?

Then we enter into another phase of the grieving that can be just as painful as the first, shocking, phase, which is, “what do I do now?” How do I put my life back together in such a way that it can’t be exploded into pieces by the next shit storm that blows through? We have to make choices.

That secondary phase can be agonizingly slow and filled with crushing anxiety. Like the Chariot, we can end up frozen in place for months, perhaps years. Just the realization that we made SO many wrong choices in our previous, pre-disaster lives, can render us terrified of making any choices now. How do I not screw this up again?

The ironic thing is that eventually it turns out that even the idea of making new choices is bullshit. There’s a new self that begins to emerge spontaneously and, much like the birth process, it shouldn’t forced and it can’t be stopped. The new self is kinder, more compassionate, more loving, more patient, more authentic. And a lot less concerned with how our crowns fit.

It was there all along, just waiting for the right circumstances to be born.

The Buddhists talk about it in terms of, “original nature.” They say that we each have an incredibly beautiful gem inside of us that’s covered with common rock. As we chip away at the rock, we gradually reveal the jewel that is our real selves. Sometimes it may take decades of patient meditation and practicing loving/kindness to reveal it. Sometimes it just takes getting run over by an ice cream truck.

Christmas Candy, the Meaning of Giving, and Tibetan Meditation Centers

Making our lives into gifts.

Here in the United States we’re just finishing up the annual emotional and commercial orgy of Christmas, also known as, “the season of giving.” It started me thinking about the nature of giving and, oddly, a Tibetan meditation center I toured over 20 years ago.

Our guide was a woman who lived there with the improbable name of, “Candy.” I’m guessing that trying to explain the intricacies of Buddhist philosophy to a group of tourists in Bermuda shorts was not the highlight of her day, but she was pleasant, kind, and patient. One of the concepts that she put in a nutshell for us was the idea of accumulating merit.

“We get up in the morning with the idea of helping other sentient beings and, if we do that, it earns us karmic merit. And then, instead of clinging to that merit for ourselves, we dedicate it to the good of other sentient beings. Which accumulates more merit, which we dedicate to the good of other sentient beings.”

I glanced around at the people I was with and their faces were frozen in expressions that pretty much conveyed, “I don’t know what in the fuck you’re talking about, but you seem relatively harmless.” To me, though, it was a major revelation. In just those few sentences, I understood the concept of giving with absolutely no expectations of getting anything back. It’s been something I’ve gone back to again and again over the last two decades. A lasting treasure.

Now, here’s the thing: I feel absolutely sure that Candy had no idea that she was making a major impact in another person’s life and thoughts. We spent maybe 30 minutes with her and I’ve never seen her again, but I still remember that moment like it happened yesterday. It was a gift, and the gift was her just living her life and telling her truth.

We tend to think of giving as being something that’s transactional and we can see that idea illustrated in the Six of Cups. The little boy is giving a gift of love (symbolized by the Cup) to the little girl. Implicit in that image is the next step in the transaction, where the little girl is going to say, “Oh, hey! What a nice cup! Thanks so much for thinking of me.”

And then we feel good because we’ve made someone we care about feel good and we feel good about ourselves because, after all, we were thoughtful enough to give something nice to someone we care about. When we put all of the commercialism and forced jolliness aside, that’s part of the sweetness of Christmas – it’s a chance to give something to others and tell them we love them.

Most of us feel pretty disconnected with that in our general, everyday lives, though. We may get up in the morning with the intentions of being, “good,” people. We’re loving with our life partners, we don’t snap at the cashier in the grocery store, we smile at our co-workers and try to work hard at our jobs. As near as I can tell, right around 90% of us are good people, in the sense that we make some effort to not be shit heads and to be decent to our fellow humans.

Still, a lot of us are afflicted with a sense of meaninglessness. We feel like we’re slow walking through life in a sort of a daze and we’re not really making any difference. It’s like we’re born, we eat a lot of t.v. dinners, and then we die and we wonder if anything we’ve done actually matters.

That’s where synchronicity and a leap of faith comes in. That’s where giving with no sense of attachment to the results comes in.

Each one of us is absolutely unique. There’s never been anyone exactly like us before and there will never be anyone exactly like us again. To the extent that we celebrate that uniqueness and share our own individual truths in our lives, we become a walking, talking, breathing gift to the world.

But we almost HAVE to detach that gift from results. If we make our giving transactional – which is to say, someone saying, “Thank you for being you,” – we’re setting ourselves up for a lot of disappointment. The fact of the matter is that most people don’t even see us, in any sort of a meaningful way. Like us, they’re hustling and bustling through life, trying to pay their bills, hoping they’ve got some clean socks, trying to figure out what in the hell they can cook for their kids that isn’t a t.v. dinner.

And if they do notice us, the odds are that they’re seeing us through so many perceptual filters that they don’t see who we really are. As the old Indian adage goes, “When a pickpocket looks at a saint, all he sees is pockets.”

So, we have to make a little leap of faith that we ARE being seen without knowing that we are. And that we ARE making a difference in other people’s lives and in the world, without any proof that it’s so. Sometimes it may be like Candy at the meditation center, where words we speak become seeds that grow in other people’s lives. Sometimes it may be as simple as smiling at a person we pass on the street, never knowing that they were depressed and suicidal until they saw our smile.

We can see that in another card, the Ace of Cups. The cup represents love flowing into the world, but, unlike the Six of Cups, it’s not attached to anything. It’s not something we have to earn. It’s not dependent on being thanked or being noticed or appreciated. It’s just there in the world and it makes life better by its very presence.

When we finally get it that we’re giving to the world around us and making a difference just by being us to the fullest extent that we can, then we shift into having meaning in our lives because we ARE making a difference. We may not see it. Perhaps no one will ever tell us. Maybe it will take twenty years for that good to ripen in someone else’s life, but we DO matter. Every single day.

My e-book, “Just the Tarot,” is still available on Amazon for less than the price of a meaningless t.v. dinner and it’s twice as nutritious!

The Magician, Apples and Bears and Cat’s Eye’s Marbles

The role of paying attention in magic.

Not too long ago a friend asked me, “Well, what IS magic, anyway?” And it’s hard to explain, you see, because magic is all about bears and apples and cats eye marbles.

We encounter images like The Magician Tarot Card or Hollywood depictions of wizards and witches and we think that magic is very mysterious and as rare as a mustache on a frog. It’s certainly nothing that those of us who are ordinary mortals will encounter, unless we trip over a bottle with a genie in it.

Not true. Not true . . . magic is everywhere. We just don’t pay enough attention to see it.

I live in the mountains of Northern California and one of the things that comes along with mountains is bears. Yes, large, furry, fearsome, 500 pound ursine critters with giant claws and paws and huge, scary teeth.

But it’s not so bad. For the most part, bears mind their own business and humans mind theirs and seldom the twain shall meet. You might occasionally step out on your back porch at night and say, “Oh, shit, it’s a bear.” No problems. The bear stares at you, you stare at the bear, you slowly step back into your house, close the door and repeat, “Oh, shit, it’s a bear.”

I don’t doubt that the bear is probably standing in the yard thinking, “Oh, shit, it’s a human.”

The one time that bears can become problematic is in the Autumn when they need to fatten up before they hibernate. During that brief period of time, they will destroy anything that lies between them and food. If you have a shed with trash cans in it, they will rip the roof off to get to the garbage. They will eat goats and sheep if you leave them lying around at night. They’ve been known to tear the doors off of cars because the owner left a bag of dog kibbles inside. And they love, love, LOVE apples, which coincidentally ripen at exactly the same time that the bears get hungry.

When my partner, Carol, and I first moved to the mountains we purchased an old ranch style house. It was built in 1950 and several generations of several families had lived in the house before us. The deserted tree houses and forgotten toys lying in the weeds were testaments to the fact that many children had lived in that house and romped around on the surrounding property.

One of the things we were most excited about was that we had our very own apple grove on the hill behind the house. There were about a dozen, gnarled old trees and we were thrilled when they burst into beautiful white and pink blossoms during our first Spring there. The aroma of the blossoms was like something out of heaven. Fat, black and yellow bumble bees buzzed and droned from blossom to blossom and life was mellow.

As the summer progressed and the apples began to form and grow, we fantasized about harvesting them in the Autumn. We knew we’d make apple pies and apple fritters and apple butter. Perhaps we’d buy a small wine press and make apple cider or bottle apple vinegar. Maybe we’d fill the bathtub with apple sauce and just squish around in it.

Oh, we were feeling very organic! We were living in the country and we had a huge crop of apples coming ripe on our little farm. Which actually began to worry me a bit, as I strolled through the grove, counting the apples. I realized that, even on those few trees, there were hundreds of apples. Maybe thousands. It slowly began to dawn in the recesses of my mind that maybe thousands and thousands of apples coming ripe at the same time might not be such a swell idea. What in the holy hell were we going to DO with all of them?

It was right about then that I first heard about the bears.

One of our new neighbors dropped by unexpectedly and I was standing in the yard with him pretending that I liked it when neighbors dropped by unexpectedly. He was chewing on a match stick, eyeing the apples trees critically and he said, “Best keep all of them apples picked up when they fall or you’ll draw every bear in the county.”

Gulp. “Bears? We’ve got . . . bears?”

“Oh, yeah,” he replied. “The goddamned county is full of goddamned bears. Better not go out at night without a gun or they could tear you apart. Of course, they’re not near as bad as the mountain lions. The goddamned mountain lions like to jump out of a tree, bite your head and crush it like a goddamned egg. Goddamned, son of a bitch bears and mountain lions. Best keep those goddamned apples picked up or you’ll be goddamned sorry.”

All of which leads up to the fact that I could not, in fact, keep the goddamned apples picked up despite frantic, manic efforts. Apples fell like rain and covered the ground. They fell into the rain gutters on the house. They fell into pots full of flowers. They fell on my head and shoulders as I rushed through the apple grove with a rake and wheel barrow. They were everywhere. Whoever said that an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree never had a goddamned apple tree.

Now, I only mention this because of the cat’s eye marble.

As it turned out, the neighbor was right about the apples and the bears. There came the inevitable night when the dogs were howling and there was much huffing and puffing and the sounds of branching snapping in the apple grove. When I ventured out the next morning, several of the trees had been thoroughly trashed. The goddamned bear, not content to eat the goddamned apples that were on the ground, had ripped down dozens of branches and they lay broken and scattered around the grove.

As I stood there, muttering to myself and examining the humongous mounds of bear shit, there was a loud cracking noise to my immediate right. One of the larger branches had been broken nearly in two when the bear scaled the tree and it suddenly sagged almost to the ground.

And there, partially embedded in the wood at the point where the branch joined the tree, was a single cat’s eye marble.

I reached over and easily pulled it loose from the tree branch. As I stood there staring at the marble in my hand, I felt a shiver run up my spine and the hair on my neck stood on end. I realized that at some time, many, many years ago, a child stood by that very tree. Perhaps it was getting dark and her mother called her in from playing. Perhaps she was leaving a gift for the fairies. For whatever reason, she had carefully balanced a marble at the convergence of the tree and branch and then forgotten about it.

Through the years, the tree grew and grew and the branch gradually enveloped the marble, holding it there safe inside of the tree. Until I happened to be standing exactly next to the tree at the exact moment that the tree branch broke and revealed its treasure.

I felt as if the ghost of a small child was standing right there next to me, handing me that cat’s eye marble and saying, “Look what I’ve got, Mister.”

And that’s magic.

The odds against that happening are staggering. It’s impossible. Can’t happen.

But it did.

The thing about it is that I didn’t cast a spell or wave a wand at the tree or ask the elementals to perform a magical feat. It just happened and I was paying attention, so I saw it.

Maybe it was the ghost of that long ago child, but more likely it was the Universe laughing and saying, “Look what I’ve got, Mister. Can you see? Are you paying attention?”

Magic is out there. It happens all of the time. We just have to learn how to see it and when the Universe asks us to play with it, gather up our marbles and go.

*. *. *

PLEASE REMEMBER THAT MY E-BOOK, “JUST THE TAROT,” IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON FOR LESS THAN THE PRICE OF WHOLE BAG FULL OF MARBLES. YOU SHOULD BUY A COPY – IT’S MAGICAL!

Time Travelers, Blackberry Salmons, and Babies in Sunbeams

Religious concepts of time and the destruction of mindfulness.

I love Eckhart Tolle’s statement that, “it’s never not now.”

It’s totally true, but we really have to bend our minds a lot to get into that space. It’s not too difficult intellectually, because we can look at it rationally and realize that there really is no past (except in our heads) and there really is no future (except in our heads.) I mean, it’s not like there’s some Past Land, like a Disney adventure ride, that we can go visit. IT DOESN’T EXIST. Ditto with the Future, because all that it really consists of is our projections of what we think will probably happen. Maybe. Could be.

Despite that, we humans spend a MASSIVE amount of our lives Time Traveling to the future or the past and very little time in the Now. Put another way, we use a lot of our mental space living in something that doesn’t even exist and, as a result of that, we spend very little time existing in the space that actually does exist. We’re so bad at living in the Now that we actually have to take mindfulness classes to learn how to do it.

So how in the hell did this sorry state of affairs come to be? We should find the person responsible for this and give him a good thrashing.

Oddly, the answer seems to be that it was our old buddy, Organized Religion, that did it. In the Tarot, organized religion is represented by The Hierophant and The Hierophant has rules and regulations that we’re all supposed to bend our knees to. One of his Big Rules is about time and it says, “There isn’t enough of it.”

Now, probably the original way that humans experienced time was sort of like this:

There was just a big NOW, with no concept of the past or the future. We just sat there in the bliss of the present moment soaking it all in. Or it might have been a little bit more like this, where one NOW moment just led into the next NOW moment. No concept of past or future, just NOW.

That’s much the way that babies seem to experience time. They can lie there for hours staring at a sunbeam and not get worked up at all about what the sunbeams are going to look like tomorrow or worry about what the sunbeams were like yesterday.

At a certain point in our evolution, our experience of time probably shifted more into the model we see with the Wiccan Wheel of Time.

We started to notice the cycles of the Moon and the passing of the seasons. There would have been some recognition of certain times of the year but not a great deal of worry about it. The Native Americans of the Northwest expressed it in terms of activities. “This is the time when we gather berries. This is the time we catch salmon. This is the time when we plant seeds.” And so on.

Still, there was none of the huge anxiety that we seem to feel about time today. Tribal people didn’t sit around their camp fires filling in dates on a calendar or trying to figure out how to, “use their time more productively.” They just did what they needed to do when it was the right time of the year to do it. “Hey, I’ll bet some fried salmon would go great with these blackberries! We should probably stack up a little fire wood while we’re at it because it’s going to get cold sometime soon.”

Unfortunately, while the Native Americans were sitting around having fish fries and enjoying their blackberry cobblers, humans in the Middle East were coming up with an entirely different concept of time, which historians refer to as the, “inclined plane,” model. The reasoning behind this model of time ran very much like this:

– If time exists, then there must have been a BEGINNING of time, because . . . you know . . . there just must have been.
– And if someone, “started,” time, then it must have been someone who was OUTSIDE of time and that would be someone who was eternal and that would be God.

-And if there was a start to time, then there must also be a stop to time, which is when the world ends and God will do that, too, so I think we should call it The End Times.

Okay, so it wasn’t the best piece of human thinking that we’ve ever seen, but they didn’t have Google in those days so they couldn’t really look things up. It also represents a HUGE shift in human perception and one that we’re still suffering from today. All of a sudden, time looks like this:

So time has suddenly become a quantity, rather than a quality. It begins and it ends. We can measure it, we can put it on calendars, we can plan it, we can carry it around on the daily planners of our phones. Shazam! – we have the concepts of the past and the future, of yesterdays and tomorrows. We see this notion of time-as-a-quantity deeply ingrained in our languages.

I need to SPEND some time on that.

I’m not sure I want to INVEST that much time in it.

Time’s a WASTING.

This should be a real time SAVER.

I need to ORGANIZE my time.

We’re RUNNING OUT of time.

I’ll PAY you for your time.

When we look at all of those statements, the basic message is that THERE ISN’T ENOUGH TIME, goddamnit! Which, of course, is ridiculous, because there’s all the time in the world. Literally.

We’ve been so totally hypnotized by the religious concept of time that we can’t imagine a world without it. We’ve devolved from that perfect bliss of a baby tripping out on the sunbeams into beings who are missing our own lives because we’re constantly living in the past or in the future. The only cure for it seems to be to re-train our brains back into living in the NOW through mindfulness meditations and living mindfully.

I mean, you know, if we can schedule the time for that. I’ll have to look at my calendar . . .

Just a reminder that there is ALWAYS time to read my ebook, Just the Tarot, and it’s still available, dirt cheap, on Amazon

The Sun, the Moon, Julius Caesar, and Why There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

A brief look at the origin of the concept of time and its link to money, capitalism, and lunch.

Didja ever notice that we tend to discuss time in almost exactly the same way that we discuss money?

Consider some of these phrases:

We spend time.
We save time.
We waste time.
We invest time.
We say that we’re running out of time.
We tell people that we don’t have enough time.

And, of course, the one that really lets the cat out of the bag: “Time is money.”

In other words, we’ve made time into a commodity. We assure ourselves that we don’t have enough of it, but we trade substantial portions of it to our employers in exchange for money, which then allows us to take vacations when we’ve stacked up enough moolah, because we, “need some time off.”

Now, there are moments in human history when we, as a species, have made such monumentally stupid decisions about something that they amount to an evolutionary wrong turn and scar us forever. I discussed one such moment in my previous post, “Happiness, Capitalists, Yellow Rocks, and Radical Meditators.”

At some point in ancient human history, a person picked up a piece of gold and said, “I have a yellow rock and you don’t.” The appropriate response would have been to say, “Dude, what good is it? You can’t eat it and you can’t fuck it. Get over yourself.”

But, instead, we said, “I want one, too.” What followed was centuries of murder, pillaging, and decimating native cultures, all in the name of determining who had the most yellow rocks.

In much the same way, there was a point in human history when some idiot asked, “What time is it?” We have to imagine that the person standing next to him replied, “It’s day time. What are you blind? The sun’s up there in the sky and you can see your hand in front of your face. It’s day time.”

“No, I mean, exactly what time of the day is it?”

“Who cares? If it’s day time, we get up. If it’s night time, we go to sleep. Who cares what part of It’s-Get-Up-Time it is?”

“Well, if we don’t know precisely what time of It’s-Get-Up-Time it is, how are we supposed to know when to have lunch?”

“Oh . . . shit . . . I never thought of it that way. That’s an important point. I don’t want to miss lunch.”

“I know what! Let’s build a sundial! Then we’ll know exactly how much time we’ve got in each day and when to eat lunch.”

Thus was born the concept of time as a commodity. Something that could be measured and therefore controlled.

This form of insanity became SO popular that by 46 BC Julius Caesar said, “You know, we’ve actually got too much time going on and we need to get it under control, so I invented . . . the calendar. From now on, there are exactly 365 days in each year. Well . . . I mean, except for every fourth year when there’s an extra day and we’ll just throw that one in during February so no one notices.”

It seemed as if we finally had time under full control and everyone knew exactly when to eat lunch, when suddenly, 1600 years later, in 1582, Pope Gregory said, “Actually, I’ve been thinking about it, and I think that there are 365.2425 days in the year instead of 365.25.” And thus was born the Gregorian calendar, which we use to this very day.

Hurrah!

Now, let’s be honest. If we had a friend or a relative who was terribly, terribly, TERRIBLY worried about whether there are 365.25 days in the year or 365.2425 days, we’d say, “You know, that guy’s plumb nuts. He actually stays up at night worrying how long the year is.”

Really, there are only two natural measures of time here on the Earth school. The first is the number of times that the Moon gets full.

And the second is how many Full Moons occur while we rotate around the Sun.

It gets light and then it gets dark and that’s night and day. We have more dark in the winter and more light in the summer and those are the seasons. The, “shortest,” day of the year is right around December the twenty first, so the, “new,” year starts right around December the twenty second. Easy peasy.

We can see that more natural approach to time with the Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Northwest. They had one month that was called, “the time to catch salmon.” Another month was, “the time to gather berries.” Another month was, “the time to catch eels.” My favorite was February, which was, “the time to do nothing,” (probably because of that pesky extra day that Julius Caesar discovered.) They didn’t have any concept of weeks or months or hours in the day and were totally amazed at our obsession with watches and clocks and calendars.

So where DID this need to measure and control time come from? We can get a very clear picture on that when we consider the origin of the word, “calendar.” It was, “Kalendorium,” which was defined as, “A book in which the interest on loans (due on the first of the month) was recorded. An account book. A ledger.”

So the concept of time wasn’t invented to be sure that we all had lunch at the right time. It was invented to be sure that we paid back our loans on time.

Basically, the guys who had collected all of the yellow rocks said, “I’m going to loan you this yellow rock because all you have is copper rocks and you can’t even buy lunch with that. BUT . . . in exchange for my giving you one of my yellow rocks, you have to pay me back TWO yellow rocks. Unless, of course, you hold onto my yellow rock for longer than the period of the loan, and then you have to give me THREE yellow rocks.”

And thus was born capitalism.

It became more radical, of course, with the beginning of the industrial age when we saw the birth of the wage slave. That’s when the people who had collected all of the yellow rocks REALLY dug in and took control of our time.

“Look here,” they said, “I don’t have a lot of time because I’m busy counting all of my yellow rocks. You, on the other hand, don’t have any yellow rocks but you have a lot of time, which, up until now, was free time. Now, I’ll give you the dust in the bottom of my bag of yellow rocks in exchange for you using all of your time to work in my factory, and then you can afford to buy lunch. I mean, if I decide to give you a lunch break.”

And thus was born the minimum wage.

And that is how we came to lose our time. Now we can’t afford to waste our time, because we have to spend our time, in order to invest our time because . . . well, we’re running out of time.

Time is money!

My ebook, “Just the Tarot,” is still available on Amazon.com for less than you’d pay for three rolled tacos, even without guacamole’. You really can’t afford to turn down a bargain like that.