The Star – 10.01.23
Hope is like mushrooms
Image Description: A hand holds Pamela Colman Smith’s The Star from the Rider Waite Tarot deck. The card features a woman kneeling with one foot on the water, and her other knee and foot on land. She has two water jugs and is pouring one into the water and one onto the earth. Prominently, there is a bright yellow star and several smaller white ones. At the bottom of the card is the the label, The Star, and at the top is the number 17 in roman numerals.
I’ve been trying out sharing my tarot card pulls with a broader community. I have found that recently I have a lot more to say than just a quick blurb. This is my next experiment on where I might try posting longer content about my journey with tarot and mental health. Today’s card is Pamela Colman Smith’s The Star.
Spoiler alert: Descriptions of scenes from Netflix’s The Sandman.
I really liked the Sandman series put out by Netflix last year which I watched with one of my partners. In it, there’s a scene where Dream (AKA The Sandman) and Lucifer (played by Gwendoline Christie 🥵) play a game (video linked) for possession of Dream’s magic helm which has fallen into the possession of one of their demons.
In this game, they have to find a way to one-up each other with descriptions of antagonistic forces for Dream to win his helm back. Lucifer plays the forces of entropy and decay, choosing her crescendo as the darkness waiting at the end of the universe. It seems like Dream is beaten. As he lays on the floor, tinged by the weight of darkness, he is consoled by Matthew, his raven. He then reaches for something in that moment despair when all feels lost.
Dream utters the words “I am hope,” and in the moment where the audience is watching the darkness that the devil called forth to thwart Dream’s plan and steal his helm, a light breaks out and wins the game. That visual has sat with me since I first watched the show, and every time I pull this card. Hope is powerful, and in Neil Gaiman’s opinion it seems, infinite.
The other day I went on a walk with a friend, we got some coffee and talked about the difference between optimism and hope. I’ve been talking about hope as a discipline for more than a few years to friends and family. I think part of this is my religious upbringing.
Among the poor evangelicals where I was raised hope was seen as a good thing to have. Sometimes this became toxic optimism, where we were told to ignore problems and just stay positive. Those experiences always left me longing. And what I mean when I say hope is not to ignore the problems we face, but to actually embrace them.
Recently I’ve come to recognise hope as one of the ways my neurodivergent self has coped with an imperfect world. A world where systems and rules change without warning and the powerful keep their power by oppressing the most vulnerable. What can anyone do with these situations except to hope?
Hope is like mushrooms
Over the past few weeks of house-sitting I’ve become fascinated with moss and mushrooms. I’ve been spending more time in a park recently, and been photographing the mushrooms and fungus like this one. For me, hope is like mushrooms.
Image Description: Image of a log with fungus and moss growing on it. It is decaying in a bright winter light. There is grass all around it.
Mushrooms thrive in places of death, wetness, and decay, places of letting go. Hope thrives in our dark places helping us transmute our fears and pains into new realities. Decay, like hope clears out the dying things that need to decompose so that there’s room for new life. Whenever I think about mushrooms, I think about this old Tumblr meme, in which a mushroom says to a person, “you cannot kill me in a way that matters.”
To me, Hope is an act of defiance, it infects things and breaks through them. Jynn Erso calls out to the rebels in Rogue One “Rebellions are built on hope.” It changes useless and dying things into things where life can thrive again. To me, learning to hope means learning to make space for what we envision. And sometimes this means doing that again and again, until we learn what it means to manifest.
Trauma and Loss in Healing
Learning to hope means being able to let go of the old things that we were holding onto. Maybe letting go of things we’d built up in our minds (The Tower) as the answer to all our problems and making space for what’s new. That, for me is the stuff of magic.
Being able to accept what a thing is, but also envision it becoming something else is a powerful thing, but it takes practice. I’ve done this kind of work with therapists before, who have asked me to accept that two things could be true at once.
As someone with delayed processing (I’m neurodivergent), I sometimes learn something upset me days and sometimes weeks or months after the fact. It's not shameful to be out of touch with your boundaries. Sometimes not having boundaries is the survival mechanism that kept us safe in very abusive situations. What we have to do though, is find ways to show up and build up the things that keep us safe once we do learn new things.
We often have to work out what we want to make progress. But doing this also means admitting you haven’t gotten everything you desire. Sometimes that can be scary or stressful. Admitting this was hard for me, as someone in a gender they didn’t want. Living a life they couldn’t manage.
You can think of this kind of collapse as failure, but that won't do you or anyone else any good. Collapse can make space. The alternative is to think of that disappointment, that decay as data you're working with now. It’s transmutation, turning one thing into something else.
Hope and Healing as Magic
Healing is magical. It’s in our stories, our prophets, our oldest folk tales. Great heroes of old could find cures or heal people. Magic fountains, holy waters. Being able to restore, remake, and heal is one of the most magical things there is.
The writer of the Meditations on the Tarot says “all magic…is the putting into practice of this: that the subtle rules the dense.” Hope isn’t just a feeling, it requires discipline. The discipline to keep showing up, working towards a goal, to keep at it. I suppose one word that’s more clinical for that sort of thing is process.
Healing can be hard because it requires us to admit something is or has been broken, perhaps for a very long time. I don't know what your past is, but I do know learning and listening and showing up for yourself now that you can is powerful stuff. Knowing you weren't aware, but learning and integrating now is a move in the right direction. Sometimes, learning what you really desire is the work.
For example, knowing we have negative self talk can become the place to start building positive affirmations. We can turn that very decay, the echoes of bullies and those who have harmed us into the seeds of self-care and affirmation. If that’s not magic I don’t know what is.
Pamela Colman Smith’s The Star is such beautiful card, full of promise and tenderness. The woman holds herself between two worlds. One foot resting on instead of in the water, the other on land. Hope here defies the existing norms and rules. Make way for some mushrooms, maybe they’re helping you dismantle broken things that no longer serve your needs.
Remember that healing is magical. Every magician, new and old in history, has to first recognise a need for something new, different, before they can transform the world around them, and thus themselves.