Tiny Tarot Story
There is a very special train that only comes to town once in a while. It moves so fast you can't hear it as it passes, flattening the tops of trees with wind. There’s no schedule, so don’t bother waiting. Some people try to attract it, hope it picks them up. But asking, “Please come get me, I’m languishing,” a hundred times a day is no guarantee the train will come. It has a will of its own.
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The train picked up Rebecca on a Wednesday. It moved so quickly she didn’t know she was even on a train. All she knew was that things were happening. She met a charismatic woman on a walk, and then the woman offered her a job, and then on the walk to the office she collided with a rollerblader, and then the rollerblader was adorable, and then she learned he was single. Rebecca felt her life was one big, “And Then.” Which, coincidentally, is what the train is called.
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Rebecca could not sustain life at this speed for much longer. In a matter of months she’d moved out of her parents’ house, switched jobs, and started dating a man with a hoop earring and the ability to inspire instant serenity. The shell of her musty old life was somewhere decomposing. Still, sometimes, she grew wistful thinking about her nights alone, watching Bravo. The adventure was still ahead for that woman.
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Rebecca’s son, years later, grew four inches in a few months. His body ached with growing pains. Rebecca realized her 29th year was a lot like her son's 15th summer. It felt sudden, all the change. But it also felt fated. She still had room to grow–and there was a system in place to get her there. Call it a train. Call it fate. Call it a gust of wind. It was the push she needed, and it brought her here.
Eight of Wands Musings
“Things happen. That’s all they ever do.” So goes Dawes’s aptly titled song, “Things Happen.” The song is right: They do, relentlessly, even if the “things” that are happening seem dull or quotidien simply due to their overfamiliarity.
Sometimes, at the end of a gray day in quarantine last year, I’d have a recurrent thought: Nothing happened today and I’m afraid nothing will happen again. (Though during that period, I also experienced a bone-deep longing for stasis—for nothing to happen, because if it did, it was likely to be bad). The thought was the byproduct of an illusion. Things happened! I made coffee, I did work, I texted a friend. That counts.
But those items did not fall into the category of Big Stuff, and that was the stuff I was longing for. What brings the Big Stuff into our lives?
I believe that’s where the Eight of Wands comes in, a card in conversation with the big forces that impact our little lives. There are no human figures depicted the Eight of Wands, and yet I sense people immediately before and after the picture. Perhaps the wands are headed your way. Perhaps you threw the wands. Either way: A force was applied, and now they’re headed somewhere.
We frequently can’t see the “before” and “after” moments of any given moment in our lives. The Eight of Wands are the events headed our way, right before the collision. The decisions that other people (or you!) made five minutes ago, a month ago, eight years ago, 50 years ago, 100, that are now having repercussions in your life.
What if people’s decisions made a noise, as they occurred? Say that noise were a chime. What if those chimes, constantly ringing, reminded us that we exist in a web with other people, whose decisions created consequences? And what if we stretched that web to include the natural world—plants and animals? The Eight of Wands might not be so mysterious, in that case. It’d be the noise of the world in motion.
Things are coming your way—but they’re not coming out of thin air, even if it seems like it.
Reflections
Journaling Prompts
Imagine your life were a train. Where are you sitting? What’s the view out of the window? What do you want the next stop to be? How is the car decorated? How fast are you going?
What was the last thing you felt happened to you—that you had no part in it? Write about it. Was it fate? Or was it the byproduct of the butterfly effect?
Start a Story
Write a story of your own inspired by the dynamics present in the 8 of Wands, starting with this sentence. If you email me your story, I’ll share it in the next newsletter.
The man was given an arrow. Think of a target, and he’d be able to send it anywhere. He stood outside the front door and pulled back the bow.