a vigorous imagination
I have been trying to match the horrors coming through my screen of atrocities and war crimes by vigorously imagining the world I hope we will live into.
I have, at other times in my life, scoffed at the frivolousness of hope. And I still do hold out this word tentatively, because of the ways it is sometimes used as a way to sidestep the present, and all the present holds. Peace takes more discipline and skill than war, and I have found that hope is often used in magical thinking to forget that fact.
But now, when a peaceful future feels all but impossible, I am turning to the discipline of vigorous hope. Not passive hope. Active hope. Vigorous and diciplined. Living in ways that allow me to belong to the future I long for, to borrow the phrase from writer Maryla Rose.
A peaceful future feels impossible in the face of all these greedy wars, but humans are impossible creatures. We’re multicellular organisms: individual cells held within a dance of polarity within a singular body. More than multicellular, we humans are ourselves multispecies: we are made of more bacteria cells than animal cells. Our ability to walk makes a laughing stock of some of the more basic tenets of physics. We are strange and wild and all but impossible, and here we are.
I don’t know what the future will hold. People I hold as my own teachers are worried, and that worries me. Perhaps we have already lost our last chance at saving ourselves, and if not, we’re certainly in it, and collectively we seem to be failing at the work necessary to ensure a future that I want my godchildren - any children - to live in.
It would be easy to feel hopeless, and there are times that I do. I worry and wonder about the world the children I love so much will grow into, and I grieve the children who’s lives are being destroyed by these wars. I wonder, perhaps more often than I should, how it is that out of all the possibilities on such a generous and spectacular planet, that we arrived here.
When I am confused by where or what to do, I turn to the stories the body offers, or to the stories of the Tarot. Out of all the many possible guides we have to choose from, these are the ones I choose to orient my life by.
On November 22 the sun will move from Scorpio into Sagittarius. In the cosomology of the Tarot, Scorpio is represented by the Death Card, and Sagittarius is represented by Temperance.
Scorpio season being the season of Death makes sense. Scorpio season, October 23-November 21, contains the traditional celebrations of Samhain, Halloween, and Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. In the northern hemisphere, it marks the close of the growing season, when the leaves have fallen from the trees and the world begins its long, cold sleep. And guided by the Death card, we are urged to let anything fall away that is no longer in service of life.
In this Scorpio season, we’ve watched the horrors of apartheid and power-hungry leaders who see human lives and the land itself as mere collateral damage. We are witnessing the failure of extractive ways of living on the Earth and violent ways of living with each other. It has died. If we cling to it, we will rot and fester.
Sagittarius season, from November 22-December 21, is guided by the Temperance card. A card of quiet contemplation and prayer, that might seem antithetical to the stereotype of the gregarious Sag, always traveling and always the life of the party. But while those stereotypes can hold some truth, the magic of the archetype of Sagittarius (says this Sagittarius) is the optimism that is rooted in believing that the best outcome is possible. Temperance then, is not just a card of quiet contemplation and prayer, it is an archetype that urges us to pray for what we want, rather than to pray that what we fear doesn’t happen.
It takes effort to pray in this way. It’s far easier to focus on all that is wrong and shout that it should stop - and this is what we must do in moments of crisis. But beyond that shouting, what do we envision for the future? How can we live our lives in such a way that the future we long for is anchored to this present moment, in whatever small, tender ways? This is the work of the grounded optimist. This is the invitation of the archetypes of Temperance and Sagittarius.
It can feel impossible to do this, especially while heartbroken. But we are impossible creatures. We are multicellular, multi-species organisms, trillions of individual bacteria and animal cells held within the community of one singular human body, with more atoms in just one eye than there are stars in the entire galaxy. We are held within semipermeable boundaries of cell membranes that are possible because one part of them is drawn to water in ways that would have them dissolve, and another part is repelled by water - we are made of the paradox of a perpetual push and pull, even at the levels of our very cells. There are so many reasons a life-form as strange as us shouldn’t exist, and yet, here we are, for better or worse, in spectacular abundance. We are proof of the possibility of impossible things. And so when I am trying to practice the vigorous imagination required to believe that another world is possible, to practice the deep patience and presence required to hear her breathing, I remember that these are impossible times, but I am an impossible creature.