Due to the vagaries of circumstance and fortune, I spent a period of my adult life reading Tarot cards at parties as Madame Lavinia. I look back on that time and wonder if that was yet another unplanned detour from my still mysterious life purpose, or part of the big plan. It had begun by accident: an agent who knew I dabbled in Tarot called me in hysterics, their psychic was sick (couldn’t she have predicted that?). Could I, would I throw together a gypsy costume and read cards? “I can’t do that! I’m not psychic!” But no excuse would deter her from her conviction that a phony seeress was better than none.
I sat at this party feeling like a cross between a con artist and a blithering idiot. “You’re going through some big changes at the moment,”
“Things have been tough, but it’s all going to change,”
“You need a change.” Whenever I was at a loss as to how to interpret the cards, I just had to couch my oracular pronouncements from the perspective of change and I was on a par with the Delphic Pythoness. Somehow, word got around and next thing I knew, (although I should have seen it in the cards), Madame Lavinia was booked for events ranging from corporate picnics to graduation parties.
Now that we live in a gilded age where “it’s all good” and I’m constantly reminded to be grateful for the abundance I’m manifesting as I flow downstream in my canoe that is attracting all the things I want in my life, and I’m no longer allowed to whine or wallow in self pity when somehow the law of attraction has gone awry, I rarely read my own cards anymore. After all, why bother reading your cards if you know that everything is always going to turn out well? That bad is the new good?
Of course, we all want change for the better. In the past, during particularly dreary days, before I realized that “all change is good”, I’d pull out the cards and say to myself, “Yes, things are pretty Sh%*#@y right now, but they are about to change.” Then I’d lay out the cards. When the spread dared to intimate more of the same misery, I would quickly gather them up, saying, “Clearly I haven’t shuffled enough. Give me something better than that…now!” Deep inside however, I always believed the first reading, and would inwardly hear one of my Mom’s many negativity mantras, “Things always get worse before they get better.”
Now however, I just have to remember to re-frame my attitude toward some of those negative cards and make it positive. For example, there’s one called the Tower. It shows screaming people leaping out of a burning castle or skyscraper. One could say, “Uh oh, there’s a catastrophic change ahead.” But if we re-frame it from the new, “everything is beautiful” perspective, we could say, “You are about to experience a magnificent opportunity to liberate yourself from old attachments.” One of my favorite doom and gloom cards is the 10 of swords. A person lies face down, stabbed in the back by 10 swords. The Tarot historically defines this as ruin, betrayal, utter despair. What a wonderful time to treat yourself to a massage! Better yet, let’s look at the therapeutic quality of being punctured. Maybe it’s just that a few sessions of acupuncture are in your future.
All the great philosophies tell us that change is inevitable. The I Ching is actually called The Book of Changes. Just when you think things couldn’t get worse, they do. Although when you’ve been knocked up side the head by the 10 of swords, be comforted that even this can be interpreted positively, there’s no place to go but up!
There is a Persian folk tale about a caliph who charged his ministers with the task of finding something that would always make him smile. Of course, he threatened them with death for failure. On the appointed day, the ministers presented him with a ring. When he looked at the engraving, he smiled. On the ring was written, “And this too shall pass.”
Change is inevitable, whether you do anything or not. If I don’t drink my opened bottle of wine, it will turn into vinegar. On the other hand, if I forget about the apple cider in the fridge, it becomes hard cider. See? It’s all good.
While there are people who create change, thrive on change, are addicted to change, from movie stars re-arranging their anatomy to people who need to move every two years, I would argue that even their need to change is habitual and connected with trying to make things predictable. Truth is, even though we know change is inevitable, most of us fear, abhor, despise, run away from even the thought of change. As if that would do any good.
However, when do you let change happen and when do you initiate change? Or is even my decision – whether it’s a fashion fit before a party or quitting my job – really mine, or am I just a random particle bouncing about according to laws I don’t understand?
Everything is always changing, even when we don’t notice it. I imagine a conversation between two rocks sitting on the bank of a river.
“Hey.”
“Hey what.”
“I’m eroding.”
“I’ve noticed you’re looking thinner. You look great!”
“I dunno. I could probably still lose a bit on the bottom.”
“Well, you better be careful. Try to change too much and you’ll do something radical. Did you see what Al did?
“How could you miss it? He went right over the edge of the bank.”
“Well, he’s been on the edge for a long time. I warned him.”
“Yeah, but to just go like that.”
“Crazy, huh.”
“Hey, he’ll survive, he likes to take chances. Anyways, let’s face it, you never know when change is going to hit you. Look at Ilsa, man.”
“I know, she totally cracked!”
“Who would have expected Ilsa to fall apart like that. She was such a rock!”
“It’s always the quiet ones.”
“And now she’s in pieces. I don’t think she’s going to be able to get herself back together.”
“Well, she was no spring chicken.”
“Yeah. We got time.”
“God willin’ and the creek don’t rise.”
“I hear you, man.”
When we decided to leave NJ for the mystical mountains of Asheville, I felt reborn. I ran up and down stairs, packing boxes, organizing yard sales, giving things away. I couldn’t wait to start over. Whenever I began in a new school, a new camp, a new job, it was an opportunity to try again, to re-invent myself. All the missteps of the past were completely erased, like an angel coming and wiping all the black marks off my soul after a really good confession. No one in Asheville would know I’d ever been a mime, or a fortune teller. I would have no past, except what I was willing to divulge. Of course, as the saying goes, wherever you go, you take yourself with you. So many times in the past the same mistakes, the same fears had leapt in to cause a re-run in my life’s movie. Now, once again there was the possibility that I could succeed in becoming the new me.
The other day, one of my students came a bit late to class. “Please start without me,” she said, “I’m going to the bathroom to change into something else.” For just a moment, I experienced a little thrill run through me. What was she going to change into? In that instant, I imagined her emerging as an illuminated superheroine, or one of the witches in Macbeth, or a bunny rabbit, even as my prosaic self accepted that she was merely changing from her jeans to sweats.
While I packed our house in NJ, I barely noticed that my husband Ron would slip out of the house in the morning and return in the evening without so much as packing a box. I assumed he was busy packing up his studio.
But he wasn’t. He was sitting in his studio, paralyzed. A week before the move, I asked him how it was going and Ron assured me he was almost done. When the movers arrived at his studio, they not only had to finish packing his stuff, but they had to order another truck because Ron’s “few boxes” amounted to another whole move. Even after everything was gone, the house was empty, the studio was empty, the new family was waiting outside, Ron just stood in the house.
I asked him if he was scared. “No, why?”
“Because you’re standing stock still in the middle of our former house.”
“Huh?”
“It’s time to go now. We’re moving to Asheville.”
“Right, right.”
To this day we, or rather I, joke that Ron’s heels left skid marks on the floor in our old home as I dragged him to his new life. He doesn’t think it’s funny. And of course, now that he’s here, he claims he couldn’t wait to leave NJ.
We’re settled here in Asheville. People found out that I was a mime, and they think it’s cool. My garden is slowly evolving to look like my garden in NJ. I have moments of road rage on Patton Ave. So I guess I’m feeling pretty comfortable. I decide, why not read my Tarot cards? They come up – two of disks: change, five of cups: disappointment, The Moon: fear of the unknown. I quickly gather them up and say, “Clearly I haven’t shuffled enough!” Then I tell myself, it’s all good, this too shall pass, and I put my paddles into my canoe and hold on tight.
Truly brilliant Lavinia…as always…
Did you hear we just bought a house near my mom in Hampstead, NC? Details to follow…..