New Year, New Tarot Deck
Polyamorous Pleasures with Strength (2024) and the Hermit (2025), "Letting Go" with Joan Didion's Scare Quotes, and Emily Dickinson's Lantern
Happy new year! Perhaps you’re considering what you’d like to “let go” of from last year, and what you’d like to cultivate in the new year. I’m going to keep using scare quotes in honor of Joan Didion.
I’m not good at “letting go.” In fact, I find the phrase vague and feel skeptical by the way it’s casually tossed around. Is it just another way to say everything and everyone is disposable in late-late-stage capitalism?
The only way “letting go” makes sense to me is if it’s the physical release of the body during exercise, orgasm, or excretion. Digestion seems the best metaphor: our bodies take what they need from what we eat and “leave the rest.”
It’s harder to apply this to relationships, especially if like me, you lost a parent when you were young. To “let go” of my dad would feel like a betrayal.
In my recent Haunted Muse class, folks were on fire to talk about death. Perhaps because it’s so taboo. We realized together that Western civilization is actually the exception to the rule: we don’t have any ritualized cultural practices of continuing our relationship with the dead.
We are the dead. Our bodies are the bodies of every ancestor who lived and worked for us to be here today.
This is my way of saying: I don’t want to let go of the Strength card. Even as I begin dancing with the Hermit (2025’s card of the year), I want to keep dancing with Strength (2024’s card of the year). We’re in a thrupple, maybe?
While I believe in ethical non-monagamy with the cards, I tend to be somewhat monogamous with decks. I don’t usually work with many decks at once. I prefer instead to work intensely with one deck for a few months, and really get to know it. Then I do somewhat “let go” of it but it’s not forever: I’ll pick up that deck from time to time. Some decks just never click with me, and I really should consider re-homing them but it’s hard to “let go”!
Right now Tarot of the Cat People by Karen Kuykendall has New Relationship Energy. As is my usual practice, I interviewed the deck before beginning to work with it. In the position of “Strengths,” I pulled the Strength card. The Tarot isn’t afraid to be a bit on the nose, or perhaps it was cracking a joke. This honest, raw expressiveness is what I seek while recovering from the cult of academia.
FINISH READING ON MY SUBSTACK FOR FREE UNTIL 2/5/25