Retrograde Season and the Eights of the Tarot
Deck credit: Nosotras Tarot
Next week three planets will station retrograde, and we enter a dense period of reflection, reevaluation, and eventually renewal. At the top of the triangle, the page of cups reminds us to be playful with this time. Rather than allowing the new slowness of life to be frustrating, this card reminds us that slowness can also be fun. Confusion, even, can be fun. The page of cups asks us to infuse this time with the twin spirits of play and curiosity.
The two eights of the Tarot speak to the need to reevaluate. The eight of cups, in particular, is about assessing what has been acquired and recognizing that what we need is in fact something different. The eight of pentacles, similarly, is about apprenticeship, assessing our progression towards expertise with gentle criticism and the whole-hearted willingness to improve our craft.
I was reminded of the interpretation that another reader (@mysticaselvagem) gave to me of the eight of pentacles, which I found really lovely and helpful. This card, she said, reminded me that everything we’ve done—the lessons I’ve learned, the experiences acquired—goes into an enormous container to use at our disposal. No moment goes to waste. It was a beautiful message, and one I needed at the time. I was in Brazil on a yearlong teaching fellowship, and it felt important that I was there—it felt important, specifically, that I was not in the United States—and I was learning many things. But none of them seemed willing to converge into a solid shape. They were as disperse as particles of wind. And yet, this reader reminded me, they were all held together in an invisible container. They were all held together to support me. Even the spaces that felt empty held something important. And would, themselves, be contained for future use.
Retrograde periods can feel like empty spaces, but they are undoubtably of infinite use. So much happens in the ellipses of the stories we make of our lives. One of the most pervasive, harmful longings that I have is one for simplicity, a result of the magical thinking that also leads to my desire for instant gratification. Retrograde periods are the work and the confusion that we want to skip over in the retellings of our journeys to success, or to anywhere. We’re not interested in hearing or speaking about the six-hour accidental detour or the missed bus or the time that we didn’t have any idea what we were doing or even what we wanted to do and each day seemed like a distraction from itself. There is no lie more harmful than the myth that process is linear, clear from the start. We can do away with the implications that process doesn’t matter—that it isn’t the most electric, delicious part of the story, with its many humiliations and uncertainties—and that achievement, once earned, is fixed; that it looks and feels a certain way; that it is or even can be destiny.
An accomplishment-oriented culture creates a hierarchy of time. There is the time worth recounting, the time that deserves our words and attention: time in which we got something done. Then, there is time that in our stories we feel we can skip over: this is everything that happens in a retrograde. But while we may have preferences for moments that have certain qualities—moments of victory, passion, or justice—the way we understand our lives must try to negate these preferences. All moments deserve our attention, even if they do not demand it. Time operates according to its own logic, and that logic is void of hierarchy. All of the time we spend on this planet contains lessons, contains medicine, contains keys.
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