Pulling cards is one of my many rhythms—not routines because there’s no consistency to it (the difference is for another essay)—when I need a reminder that an unending space transcends my material perceptions and is waiting to guide me. There’s no “I” if I let go, even just a little or for just a little while. So, I pull a card (or two) when the pressure in my head starts to build to a crescendo, and it’s time to remember that this ego called “I” hardly knows anything at all.
I digress.
When I pull a card, I ask the same question each time:
“What am I being called to remember?”
This is my favorite question because it offers my favorite answers.
Today I pulled:
I open the little booklet that comes with the deck and read,
“The challenge of life is to … let life crack you open … To allow what is falling to fall away.”
I laugh as I read it, brought back to beauty. I am in a new space of falling away. Cracking open. I know what it’s like to crack open and stand, raw and vulnerable, in the negative space once occupied by an addiction I can’t stand to hold but desperately believe I need to survive.
But the thing about cracking open is there’s no going back.
“And one day, in the not-too-distant future, you may just bless the thing that broke you down and cracked you open because the world needs you open.”
Staying open is staying alive to the unknown, the vibrant ache, and the possibilities unfolding into discoveries.
I’ve been closed in the sense of surrender. The writer in me steadfastly believes that I can crack open far enough to heal the wounds with words alone, but this card calls me to go below the words.
Yet I resist; I prefer words and open a passage from Rumi, who also reminds me to go below the words.
“It’s happening for me, not to me,” used to piss me off. It doesn’t, now, because it shocks me back from the place I go to—that long corridor of dark thinking characterized by blindness to everything so wondrously happening all around me—into a new place.
The place of knowing there is water somewhere so long as I keep knocking.
“One day, not too far from today, you will look back at the transformation and be blown away by the poetry of life.”
Beautiful. This is the card I needed right now too.