When it all falls down

Notes on dropping what's no longer necessary

I have been quiet on this front but if I’m being honest, I have been quiet on many fronts for the past couple months. I have let myself go fallow in some spaces, as I have gathered up my resources in others, but really, the fallow has been here. The fallow has been calling to me. The fallow has needed to simply be.

I let my safety-net corporate client go back in July. The situation became untenable, on this particular project, yes, but also our last couple projects had limped along, rescheduled over and over indefinitely due to lack of leadership support. I couldn’t make it my priority anymore, when it wasn’t a priority for the people who had hired my attention. I couldn’t offer them that precious commodity anymore.

I had intentions, as I often do, to refocus that attention back into my own work, to building clarity in whatever this thing that I’m moving towards is — my work between mystery and mastery. Mastery has had a LOT of fucking attention in my life, decades of fine-tuning, and mystery has needed, still needs some space to step forward. Still needs space to unfurl.

I had expectations that I would create more, produce more than had been possible before, with all this free time, but it turns out the time didn’t really feel all that free, because oh, my life is full! It is full with social plans and visiting guests and comparisons and travel and little things I said yes to because, oh well, why not, that’s a little more aligned, even if it’s not mine.

I recently hit one milestone and then another — first, five years self-employed and then, being my own longest employer. I have now been my own employer longer than I have ever been an employee. A shock, somehow, a revelation, because it hasn’t felt like that. It has felt like taking one opportunity after another, to support others’ dreams, to put their most heartfelt ideas into words. To be but a mirror and articulate their yearnings.

I have been considering lately what it feels like to be supported, to not just be the support. I have been steady support for ages, have felt it’s my duty to be the stable one, the together one, the impressive one for so long, that I think I forgot that I need support too. To be with others who hold the space instead. To witness others in the flow of figuring it out, and to not have it figured out and be seen in my trying anyways.

This year, maybe more than any other before, has been a year of unlearning. Of admitting and reluctantly embracing studenthood. True studenthood, not just the performative kind. My work has always been oriented towards learning, towards curiosity and “getting up to speed”, but that process has so often been in hyperdrive — of discovery as quickly as possible so I could adopt the role, the authority, of teaching and guiding and strategizing on behalf of my clients. There is a hierarchy in that dialogue — one who learns and one who teaches — tethered by a shared love of learning. Maybe a perversion of the love of learning. Maybe a binary to be unraveled.

Lately, tarot has resurged as a practice worth extending, worth sharing with others. I have refreshed how I offer that, as both sitting together live to talk about your upcoming year, or as an asynchronous reading for the moment you find yourself in. This is new for me, untested, to offer my services up to a wider audience. I still don’t know if I’ve got the processes set up right. I still don’t know how to talk about it, even when it lights me way the fuck up and feel right in some way that resists definition. I’m still scared of naming mystery as my work too.

But what attracts me to tarot most now, is how that relationship is defined — that of reader and querent. Of the person coming in with a question, and the person offering possible interpretations. To me, in my practice of tarot, “reader” is on the same playing field, is in the compost of life and living and being and figuring it out just as much as their conversation partner is. Anyone who presents it differently does a disservice to what it means to be in the muck of meaning making.

This has been a ramble, but the leaves have all fallen from the trees now where I live, and you can’t help crunch as you move through the world. You can’t help but be in the mess of letting go and baring yourself to the elements, the wilds of the November winds. There is something unfolding here in letting that be true, simply true, not gussied up and neatly tied in a bag. In letting the wind blow you where it will.