🌤️ Here comes the sun

On beauty, vulnerability and diagnoses

“The nose’s long biological development means that it connects our consciousness to the most ancient and intensely emotional parts of our brains, allowing an entire world to be recovered by the trailing scent of a Christmas spice…retrieving the soul of one's past as can no other sense. The Egyptians understood that the breath passing through a goddess’ nostrils to give eternal life to a deceased king would impart a fundamental reality, for the nose is like a forgotten portal to the archeology of the psyche.” – Entry on “Nose,” Taschen, The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images

In the month I was diagnosed with skin cancer, my tarot card was the Sun reversed.

One of my favourite practices is when I sit down with the cards at the start of the year, and draw a card for every month. It gives me a sense of the shape of what’s to come, what lessons I might be learning, what circumstances I might be absorbed in.

For a few years in a row, like clockwork, my card in October was the 10 of Swords. And over time, the meaning became clear to me — you’re saying yes to too much work in August and September. By the time October rolls around, you are wrung out under the weight of so many obligations. It’s a pretty dramatic card, but I tend to find it pretty melodramatic, ”oh, we might be playing the victim here. Maybe it doesn’t have to be so serious.” Seeing The Sun turn up for October 2024 at the start of the year, I felt a weight fall from my shoulders. Ahhh, maybe I have finally learned this lesson.

The Sun is taken to be radiant, optimistic — the sweet relief of daylight after the long night of the soul. It is card number 19, coming after the journey into darkness that the major mysteries initiate you into. Many see this card and think, “thank GOD, I could use a little light.” In numerology, it is a one, a fresh start.

I am always sensitive to how tender this card is, this baby on a horse’s back. That a horse’s coat, even the most well-tended-to horse, is so coarse compared to a baby’s smooth, delicate skin. Skin that may never have seen the sun before. A chubby little potato roll of a leg, an arm, a belly. This card feels warming and life affirming, but my attention is always drawn to that point of friction and contact — gentle against hard-wearing, vigorous against vulnerable. Joy does not come without its price.

The Sun tarot card, Smith-Waite deck

When I do my annual tarot reading, a ritual I’ve been doing for many years now, I don’t know what the year will hold. Who could promise such a thing? I couldn’t pretend to think of this practice as fortune-telling, or divining, or manifesting. I simply give myself little clues, little inklings of what might be meaningful to me. I leave myself notes — ”keep this in mind,” or “how might you respond to this question at that time?” It is a way of scaffolding my own experience of myself to myself, of beginning a conversation threaded through my past, present and future.

In October 2024, after a routine skin check, I got diagnosed with two different kinds of skin cancer, on two different parts of my body — a smidge of melanoma behind my left knee, and a coin-sized patch of basal cell carcinoma on my left nostril. “We caught it early,” my dermatologist said, assuring me simple surgeries would solve both.

We took care of the knee within days, and I spent October icing my leg and aching to return to my beloved movement practices, daily walks and a bit of yoga. It healed as all things tend to heal — slower than I’d prefer, but in general, it was fine. I got bored, did a lot of reading and knitting, the stitches became too tight, it got reopened, it got inflamed. I had to slow down even more than I had already planned. The nose surgery was booked for December.

When my dermatologist gave me the news, he said, “the sun is not your friend.” So I have been revising my relationship to the sun.

I’ve already lived through the nose surgery as I write this to you now. It didn’t feel real until all of a sudden it was, just this ambiguous cloud of dread, bolted to a date on the horizon, throughout my autumn. I didn’t want to make any plans for what came after, because who knows how I’d feel afterwards? This is a very visible spot, on the centre of my face, with the potential to change the shape of my nose. I didn’t even know if I’d recognize myself anymore.

I am Libra rising and a Venusian-ruled person. My Venus is in Virgo. I am most happy when I’ve had space, over long periods of time, to notice and to tinker, in environments both analog and digital. They become beautiful. They season into more of themselves. I can find it frustrating too, that things must be just right. But this work, this play, of getting everything where it's meant to be and bringing balance to it over time is an art I practice. I practice living into aesthetics.

I have come to love deeply this skill, of being sensitive, of enlivening the world around me with care for nuance, this yearning for colour and texture and pattern. And it feels radical to name, since this tangible, sensate way of navigating reality is so shamed as frivolous in our overculture. It only counts if it meets the standards the wealthy have deemed luxurious or artful. And yet, there is this ineffable joy when that particular vase is juxtaposed with those flowers. The rich blue-black of pen ink soaking into thick creamy paper. The satisfying balance of an almond shaped nail.

The opposite of aesthetic is anaesthetic — causing a loss of feeling or awareness.

There were parts of me that worried about my face, my face, my face that I love so dearly, and parts of me that scolded those worrying parts for “being so vain.” Parts who were already wincing at the pain. Parts that started to manage and try to control everything, clearing my schedule and sending me down late-night medical journal Google holes. I journaled a lot, to make space for all these conflicting points of view. Everything they had to say was valid. They all belong to me.

I noticed how I muted my use of the word “cancer” when telling people the news, seeing how instantaneously people’s hackles went up as soon as it was uttered. This simple word conjures ghosts, presences the spectres of all the people and opportunities it has taken from them, all the fears we carry about our human frailty. I watched it land in their bodies like the boom of a death knell. When cancer is so vilified, so feared, so immediate, so somatic, I found myself minimizing sharing my own fear so I could protect people from their fear proactively. I noticed how I wanted to prevent them from the pain of bracing, of memory, of anticipation, of mentally adding “get a referral” to their to-do list. I don’t know if I would’ve noticed this before. I’m grateful I could see it now.

I have so much tenderness for this part of me that doesn’t want others to be afraid. I feel for this vulnerable, sweet part of me, so willing to soften the blow of the arrow with my own body and suffer in silence instead. To feel the chaffing of the horse and grin anyway.

In the name of aesthetics, of feeling, I stopped making it so beautiful, so casual, “oh just a little skim there.” We hide the effort of aesthetics, the effort it takes to make something appear effortless, frictionless, smooth. This too is the work of shame. It takes effort to care. There is pain mixed in with our love. It takes effort to make this place beautiful.

We are vulnerable, like it or not. And I am learning how to speak truth to what it is like to be human, to be with the grief of pain and of love and to also be okay. To hold space for the flinching, the hardening we subject ourselves to, when there is so very much pain to go around, in our personal lives, in our family lives, in our communal lives, in our collective lives. It points us towards where we love.

To be alive is to experience pain and joy both. To gently squeeze the roly-poly leg of a baby and know they will grow and their skin will grow firm. To raise your face in the bright winter sun and feel the change in your mood, that warming relief that is so pure and sensual, and to wonder, despite your best efforts, if it’s changing you on a cellular level. To live is to feel all this and more.

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I am softly cracking open my tarot books for folks who want to explore their year ahead in conversation with me. If you would like to book an hour together, you can do so here and learn more about my approach here.

If you happen to be in Toronto, I’ll be teaching my annual tarot reading practice this Thursday evening, January 30th, 2025. Find details + book your spot here.

The next Journal Circle is Thursday, February 13th from 8-9pm EST / 5-6pm PST. Join us for free here.