It took 12 tries to get it right
because there was never any doubt about what I wanted
as soon as I was offered something different.

It’s like flipping a coin.
Sometimes it’s the decision maker
and sometimes it just confirms what you wanted in the first place
but were too afraid to speak it out loud.
Too nervous to accept that part of self
which wants things
which isn’t ashamed to admit that comfort
and bounty
and good shoes
and something more than reliable
more than fairly decent
more than it’ll do
more than oh it’s fine
Is necessary.

We didn’t get here by accident.
We didn’t wake up and find ourselves adrift on a tiny asteroid with only a rose for company.
Or was it a fox?
Either way,

We were never kicked out of a garden
And we might have pretended to leave it behind,
But it’s never
stopped
tending us.

~~~~~

Today’s deck is Leonora Carrington‘s Tarot because I love it, and because it’s her birthday. She only ever did art for the major arcana, and I don’t typically involve majors only decks because it limits the randomness of it all. But besides the fact that we nearly share a birthday, Leonora has a gift of making me want to draw so I have special feelings for her. This is unusual because I have never really wanted to draw. I was told when I was young that I wasn’t very good at it, by an art teacher, no less. I struggle constantly with imposter syndrome/perfectionism, so if someone tells me I’m not good at something, I just won’t ever do it, if there’s never a chance it will be perfect and/or people won’t recognize me as someone who draws in some weird “leave the drawing to people who know how” scenario. It was one of my “kicked out of the garden”moments. There are a few of those. I used that metaphor partly because I was raised within a religion which ascribes to it, so there are many aspects of myself which have been shaped by that, and partly because I struggle with how much what we might consider the humanity of us has become divested of the wild part of ourselves. As though wildness is allowed so long as it’s tamed. A fox can be a companion but only if it comes when we call it by a name which we’ve decided it should have.

I think there are many things to be said for letting wildness stay that way, and not just as a way to inject cautionary tales into stories. Leonora Carrington as an artists is typically within the category of surrealism, but I find her just at ease. The feeling I get when I look at her art is the same as when I take off something that is too tight which I’ve been wearing too long. This sense of dreams which shape reality to the extent that they find their way into waking through art. It’s pretty magical.