What are the odds of pulling the same tarot card two days in a row? After careful shuffling. The Hanged Man. The hanged man hangs by his right ankle from a living tree branch. According to the message in my guide book, his predicament is of his own making. He has chosen this state of his own free will. He has suspended himself in order to discover a new perspective and new way of seeing the world and himself.
His is the moment between transitory void and a decision. The gap between choice and manifestation.
These explanations, in and of themselves, require meditation to grasp.
How can I help? The TV asked. Well, not the TV. A spirit guide? An ancestor? I came back to the worn cushion on my couch to find a message on my TV screen, like a thought bubble, on the lower left corner. How can I help? It asked. I thought I had sat on the remote. Butt pushed some button I never knew existed. Then I saw the remote sitting on the coffee table, unmolested. So, where did the message come from? How can I help? With a pop, the message disappeared. Was Rod Serling standing off in the corner, grinning, engulfed in a cloud of swirling cigarette smoke? How can I help? Well, it would be very helpful to know who the messenger is. Is it you, Hazel? Someone else? Someone orange or yellow? Am I losing my mind? Is this what madness looks like? Is that what I’m manifesting? Madness? How can I help?
I’ve been asking for a story. I now realize that I have many stories. What I don’t have is the courage or confidence to write them. Is that one of the many gaps I need to cross between choice and manifestation. Building indifference to the abyss, abolishing the notion that a story unpublished is somehow a failure. A work invalidated is a work that doesn’t really exist. If a tree falls in the woods…If a story is written but never read. I am climbing out of that groove. The groove that questions all of these things. The groove that keeps me frozen. The whisper that says you’re not any good. The bubble that wants to help is saying, write them down anyway. Get them out of you. Just get them out. So many stories, swirling like that cigarette smoke, stories begun and abandoned…
The boy who crawls out his bedroom window when his father gets home from prison. His alcoholic father. The friends he meets by the railroad tracks. What did Charlie say today, that he was not cool like the bad boys, but he was quick. A rogue. What happens to this boy? What occurs to bring him face-to-face with his demons?
The girl who moves here and encounters a ghost of a sick little girl and meets a loving family.
The horse who knows what his rider does not…that the town they are returning to after being at war is much changed and little resembles the town he left 18 months ago. That women don’t stay frozen where men leave them. Ragtime. Men who leave home to go on grand adventures, leaving their women to pine for them and await their return, but the women, in the absence of rulership, develop their own pyche, their own lilting tunes.
The girl who is nice to a boy everyone made fun of. When he dies, she inherits his tackle box, which is magical and takes her to other worlds.
Get them out of you. Like Vincent VanGogh, you know that you only have a limited amount of shelf life left. Write. Cook. Have a clean house. Make jewelry. Stop hanging from a tree, pretending it’s comfortable.
