0_The Fool
work in progress
1_The Magician: You Are Magic (the sign language in the image)
In an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, actor Riz Ahmed talked about his experience of learning sign language for the role in the film Sound of Metal: “Listening is not something you just do with your ears. It is something you do with your whole body….Through [American] sign language, I was communicating more deeply and in a more connected way than I ever could have with words, because when you are communicating with sign language, you are communicating really viscerally with your whole body….Deaf culture, without hearing and sometimes verbal communication, really taught me the true meaning of communication.” And that is the true definition of the Magician. We may not have all the senses, resources or support we need to carry on as if life’s slacking. But we are not lacking. We adapt and make it work. Magicians can be found in the land of courage: people with disabilities are the Magician; single parents are the Magician; immigrants are the Magician; public school teachers are the Magician; we, the modern orphans ostracized without the Motherland, are the Magicians.
The Magician card shines a sheer layer of warm light into our empty hands. Against odds, we are magic. From scarcity, we find richness.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops - at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
2_High Priestess: The Bittersweet Truth
In Floriography, the meaning for Bittersweet flowers (the flowers in the drawing) is about truth and honesty. It symbolizes the deep knowing from our guts. High Priestess is always in the search for those moments: it could be brutal, it could be harsh but unmistakably brings forward the truth we need to hear. When we pull this card, our intuition is called for.
When we know, we know.
3_Empress
work in progress
4_Emperor
work in progress
5_Hierophant: The School of Self
Everyday waking up to a sorted to-do list sets us up to a “muscle through life” mentality. Bombarded by the need of being productive, we are convinced that by giving away our talents, time and energy in exchange for financial security, in the future we will be able to enjoy the well-deserved retirement and freedom. What we give out, we subtract from within. The Self that we trade for is inevitably lost in the midst of so-called life.
When we pull the Hierophant, oftentime it is a vital check-in: How are you? It is about our core: the captivating electrical sensation runs through our body when we are present with our aspiration; the joy that keeps us going, the underlying desire for self-expressions.
It is a card about self discovery, a lesson about yourself, taught by yourself. Getting this card does not necessarily mean that we are out of alignment with who we think we are. There might be something that needs to be reminded. When we dive into essential questions about ourselves with the Hierophant journey, the source of how we get here is under the spotlight: what are our influences? What is our relationship with them? The Hierophant is an invitation of going through a mini-course of the Self which leads to a journey of evolution by acquiring assurance of the Self .
The Hierophant asks us to ground our mind and shift the focus inwards.
Daily practices: Morning prayer.
Every morning when you wake up, either in bed or at your altar, please call for your spirits, helpers, gods, or ancestors to gather around you. Tell them specifically what you need help within your realm in this particular time in your life. This morning ritual connects you with the Divine that brings the support we need throughout the day. Here is an example of my morning prayer:
Dear Siddhārtha Gautama, Amitābha, Avalokiteśvara, Kşitigarbha, my dear mother, ancestors, my three Spirits, gods of the Moon, Sun, Ocean, Plants, Animals, Wind, and all other energies that are protecting me, please protect my health, peace of mind, the health of my kittens, my dear Bat Haus, my family and friends. Please help me move through and forward with my Tarot deck production and publish it when it is done and ready to go out to the world.
6_The Lovers: A Self-Preservation Odyssey
The monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is the concretization of what humans essentially are. It is not the essence in Sartre’s “existence precedes essence” that we make uniquely with free will and personal choices. Rather, it is what all of us have in common: consciousness, the sense of autonomy. It is the most intrinsic characteristic we possess. We carry this sense of Self everywhere, all the time. Even with the presence of others, the subjectiveness of the mind persists.
Some of us forge intimate bonds with others while keeping a keen awareness of the Self. We preserve our autonomy in relationships by continuously seeking a delicate balance between affectionate closeness with partners and separateness granted by our subjective minds. Psychotherapist Esther Perel expresses: “With too much distance, there can be no connection. But too much merging eradicates the separateness of two distinct individuals. Then there is nothing more to transcend, no bridge to walk on, no one to visit on the other side, no other internal world to enter.” The Lovers card calls for a deliberate maintenance of “the other side”, the autonomous Self where the monolith resides in us. Unlike the touch by God’s finger in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, The Lovers brings us forward to validate our own worth of loving. It is not God, or anyone else who can love us into life. It is our Self--as Perel puts it “Our sense of self-preservation inspires vigilance against being devoured” that has the ability to choose ourselves first, so the power to love.
In an interview with Bill Moyers, Toni Morrison talks about love: “People don’t want to get hurt. They don’t want to be left. They don’t want to be abandoned, you see. It’s as though love is always some present you’ve given somebody else. And it’s really a present you’re giving yourself.”
7_Chariot: The Art of Oppositions
In Psychology, cognitive dissonance describes a state of having inconsistent or even contradictory beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors in a person. For example, a smoker might acknowledge the health-related risks from smoking cigarettes but smokes nonetheless. According to Leon Festinger, those inconsistencies could cause tremendous psychological discomfort and confusion in us. Human beings, as a product of evolution, seek to reduce such contradictions at all cost in order to live and function properly in the world.
But life in itself is full of contradictions. Every moment that we are living, we are dying. Every moment passing by with angst, we entertain ourselves with some banter. We laugh so hard that it makes us cry. We cry so hard that we start laughing. It seems inexplicable, but coping with the nuances of two opposites in life at times could be effortless. It is the beauty of the Chariot. Ruled by Cancer, the Crab with a hard shell and soft tissues, the Chariot embodies the paradoxical harmony brought together by the two ends of a spectrum. It is never an inclusive way to comprehend the external world based on a solely “black-or-white” perspective, but when it comes to the opposites inhabiting within our own Self, the inclusiveness emerges from the juxtaposition. We could be carrying sorrow of an old friend’s passing but simultaneously feel content with what had happened to him. We might not agree with our partner or parent’s political views (and hate them for it), but still love them for who they are. The Chariot is here to nurture us with the wisdom of the oppositions: ultimately the consistency is not reached by coercing the opposites into convergence but embracing the emotional ambivalence in life through acceptance and understanding.
8_Strength: Facing the Absurdity of Life
In the myth of Sisyphus, Camus argues that there is a fundamental conflict between what we want from the universe and what we find in the universe—”The absurd is born out of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world”, as an atheist existentialist’s view. Humans try to live a life with meaning in an objective, indifferent world. There is no God, so there is no absolute vantage point from which human actions or choices can be said to be rational. We will not find meaning of life through a leap of faith, by placing our hopes in God. Living with the absurd, Sisyphus who was punished all eternity to roll a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down to the bottom when he reaches to the top, is a true embodiment of the Strength card. Although being punished, Sisyphus’ free will and choices led him to where he was. He can not ever “solve” the absurdity in his situation. The only action he can take is to take responsibility and live his life to the fullest.
We all will die, like Sisyphus knows that the rock he pushes up will roll back down eventually. The question here is not of the existence of God, but what we do then, as a human in this absurd world? We can believe in the existence of Higher power/God, but it is crucial to know that God is not the solution to the predicament we face in life. We are. The true strength is to understand that, even though we might have family and friends by our side, this lifetime journey is ours, alone. To accept the existential “loneliness”, and to be able to commit to living a life to its fullest, is what the Strength card presents us.
The beauty of Strength is in the accepting of what we can not control yet still show up for yourself and choose to thrive.
9_Hermit: Casting out nines
There is a simple way to check errors in mathematical operations by removing (casting out) nines. For example, I add 35917 to 54861 and get 90778. To check if the result is correct, let’s remove any 9’s and any group of numbers that add up to 9 in the first number 35917. We get 7 (remove 9, and 3, 5, 1 which add up to 9), which is 35917’s digital root. Same thing to 54861 and we get 6. How aout 90778? We get 778 after casting out 9, and then add 778 together until we get a one digit number: 7+7+8=22, 2+2=4. Now add the first number’s digital root 7 to the second number’s root 6: 7+6=13, 1+3=4, which is the same as the result 90778’s digital root. We know that the addition was done correctly!
We withdraw from the world into ourselves when things are not quite aligned, as an innate mechanism of error detection in our life. The Hermit, the ninth card in the major arcana, is here to check in with us. “One of the best feelings is losing attraction for someone who doesn’t value and treat you with respect.” @thefemalewarhol says. But how? What do we do to un-tie the tanglement? We all know when someone is being wacky with us. But we just can’t quit them. Easier said than done. Thoughts go everywhere. Emotions disrupted. We over-analyze, on top of all the other mess in our head. So we take ourselves out for a walk, we get quiet, we take time out. Maybe after a day, a month, or even a few years, somewhere in between those empty spaces, a tiny crack would open to us. We would fall through it, drip by drip, and come out to the Other Side. It is the side where people move on, wounds taken care of, tears wiped. The Hermit is there with us all along. It is us that we lost in compromises; it is us that we traded for lukewarm love; it is us that we left behind.
Taking in more time, we reset. Casting out nines, we re-align.
10_Wheel of Fortune
work in progress
11_Justice
work in progress
12_Hanged Man: The Practice of Detachment
My mother used to say “Do not zhí-zhuó” to me. Zhí-zhuó in Mandarin means persevere but with a slightly negative connotation. To persevere is to stay persistent in a situation with opposition or discouragement. It is a virtue. Zhí-zhuó, however, is a clinging version of perseverance. Claws are out; pride is in the way, twisted. When zhí-zhuó gets stuck in the head, we grab on desperately--the relationship that isn’t working, the plan to study abroad that fell through, the dream of becoming someone else that was unsustainable. In the state of zhí-zhuó, the battle is already lost. “But what if..” like haunted echoes, we hold onto that whisper hoping for the outcome we are so attached to. The spirit has gotten rotten. Our mind is disintegrating into mulishness. The decay has begun. Ineluctable.
Most of the time, what we could not let go of is our ego. When we put effort into something, we want to see the result. The thought of coming home empty handed is more than unfathomable. The thought of our whole-hearted love might not be reciprocated keeps us awake at night. Unsettling. We are held hostage by the attachment to the validation of what we long for. The Hanged Man is here to tell us the bitter news: the perseverance has gone sour. Poet Charolyn Forché says in an interview: “The greatest cure for depression or that kind of trauma is not...to try to withdraw into the self ...for me the greatest cure, the thing that pulls you out of it, is doing something for others outside of yourself, and committing to something that is beyond yourself.” The remedy applies to zhí-zhuó too. Oftentime what we need to detach from is nothing but our own Self. I was so zhí-zhuó over someone years ago. Naturally I thought in order to move on, that person was what I needed to let go of. Phone number blocked; social media unfollowed; walls built up. But the memory creeped back in uninterruptedly when I saw someone that swings their body so similarly to that person when laughing. There is nowhere to hide. He never left. Suddenly I realized that he was not the enabler. I was. It’s my Self all along that was doing the attaching. His existence on its own is just as pure as mine. Only by releasing myself from the prison of the Self, I am able to set free from that person, that thought, that unexpressed relationship.
My mother never asked me what I was zhí-zhuó over with. Maybe she was trying to escape from her own as well.
13_Death: Let’s talk about death, no really.
Have you thought about the quality of your death? How well do you want to die? Most of us would say: “peacefully”, “painlessly”, “regretlessly”, or “contentedly”. The first two are about being mentally and physically at ease; others are about living the best out of our lifetime. In another word, having reached the highest potential of our physical, mental, and materialistic state when we die is considered as “good death”. Death card asks us: are you living up to the good death?
I became a vegetarian with a plant-based diet in the summer of 2020 after reading Dr. Greger’s How Not to Die. I choose to eat well because I want to die well. Paying attention to what we feed our body decreases the risk of getting chronic diseases or cancers significantly. This take on death applies to other facets of life as well. We make a bucket list because we want to die with no regrets. We pursue and define happiness tirelessly because we want to die in peace. I once saw a quote on the internet from an unknown source: “What would your life become if you committed to living as a fully expressed version of yourself?” Death is ultimately the direct reflection of life. Eventually we will all die, like the three figures in the card, waiting to go through the tunnel to transition to the other side. When it is our turn, are we going to be content like the first person, hesitant like the second, or so regretful like the last?
Death is never about death. It is about life.
14_Temperance
work in progress
15_The Devil
“Life in itself is neither good nor evil, it is the place of good and evil, according to what you make it.” —-Montagine
16_Tower: The Structural Changes
Idea 1: disconnect one day of the week from your phone/computer. Tower card can indicate something sudden occurring in our lives, big or small. The lesson and advice it is giving, however is how can we structurally and behaviorally adjust ourselves so when the unexpected happens, we are aligned and grounded for the challenges.
One suggestion is from Sharath Jois, the Ashtanga Yoga lineage holder. In his recent book, Ageless, he encourages yogis and everyone else to turn off our gadgets for one whole day in a week if we can. “To have a balanced life, we must be judicious about how we use our gadgets. Our gadgets lead us into an attractive cyber world, but remember, it is all maya. An illusion. See how you cut out stress by taking a break from your phone just once a week.” “Spend your Sunday with family or by yourself. Perhaps you can use this time to think about the other aspects of life, perhaps poetry and philosophy, indulge in a hobby, get in some RnR or just simply unwind in a park.”
Tower is not about any upcoming catastrophe. It is a reminder of how to become structurally sound, physically, mentally and spiritually as a human being.
17_The Star
work in progress
18_The Moon
work in progress
19_The Sun
work in progress
20_Judgement: The Godless resurrection of the self through the lens of accountability
The day has come.
You rise from the dead,
taken into the presence of God.
Judgement given.
Sins forgiven.
You leap into
Heaven.
Mischiefs do happen.
No one is perfectly splendid.
The belief of resurrection as such discards the autonomy of the self by delegating our authority to something other than ourselves; abdicating the responsibility for one’s actions and therefore, the accountability for the consequences of those actions, which in Sartre’s eyes, make up who we are. “Existence precedes essence”, Sartre claims that we enter this world (our existence) without any fixed or predetermined purpose given by God. With nothing to limit us, we take actions to become who we are and make the world we want to live in (our essence). As he puts it, “...man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world--and defines himself afterwards.” This tremendous burden of responsibility that one self has to bear, according to Sartre, is the paradoxical price to pay for the indisputable freedom in human life.
Judgement card calls upon a process of a “Godless resurrection”--the resurrection of one self, for one self, by one self. The nature of the debate here is not of God’s existence but the absence of God. If it was not God who pre-determines our essence but our own actions and choices, the earnest approach to resurrect the dead in us---the wounds never let heal, the guilt crowding in the back, the lessons never learned, would be to hold ourselves accountable. With the Judgement card, we are asked to face ourselves with honesty. Being able to resurrect ourselves from the past is power. Being able to admit our own mistakes without feeling worthless is power. Only by doing so, are we able to fully take charge of our own life and leap into The World card.
The day has come.
You rise from the dead,
taken into the absence of God.
Sins presented. Accountability
claimed.
You moved on.
Mischiefs do happen.
No one is perfectly splendid.
21_The World
work in progress