stage_directions raze you should not be a raised platform designed to support my weight and the weight of however many other bodies need to be held at any given time. you should be two hands made smooth by friction in all the places other hands would develop thicker skin out of spite. you should be the shape the sky makes when the sun kisses the clouds and everything stops for just as long as it takes one breath to come and go without calling attention to itself. you should be the gnarled arm of an old tree bent at such a severe angle it looks like a threat in the dark. something whispered with bad breath and good intentions. something to run from and dream about later. you should be grass that's grown long enough to forget what it's supposed to be. you should be every thought that gets lost in the narrow space between action and indifference. you should be "love my way" by the psychedelic furs. you should be the sound richard butler makes when he runs out of things to say. a feral howl repeated four times before flo & eddie sing the way a synthesizer sings when it's trying to make your ears believe it's a voice. you should be a flushed face showing all it means to conceal, the curtain that would cover it cooked by a network of nerves barking orders at a body that does what it's told. at the very least, you should be open to suggestions. 210920 ... tender square i stumbled upon a recording i thought i’d lost when my old iphone had gotten corrupted earlier this year. i opened my voice memos app yesterday and all my previous files were there, including the last tarot reading i got with cathy in march of 2019 that i had completely forgotten about. michael and i went to see her at the crazy wisdom bookstore because i wanted some insight into where my future was heading, with wanting to know whether or not i would be accepted into the mfa program i applied for. we’d sat for short readings with cathy several times over the years and we appreciated her gifts. she was a wiry woman with tanned, taut skin. she wore her grey hair in a ponytail beneath a ball cap and dressed like a teenage tomboy even though she was in her sixties. she had this no-nonsense air about her, like she was a former east coaster; she didn’t really look some someone who dabbled in divinatory practices but she had this way of reading the cards with an accuracy that spoke to what we were feeling. we’d gone to see her for this final reading because, for a while now, she had been mentioning that she was moving to hawaii and we sensed she was close to achieving that goal, and we decided to do more in-depth spreads than what we had before. my card flop was full of major arcanas. i don’t have the photo i snapped of the spread anymore but in the recording, her first reaction was “the cycle you’re in doesn’t end,” and she drew a few more cards to get a further sense of what my direction could be. “this is some fairly intense energy,” she said and pointed to the first card, death. “this is a card of getting mastery over—you’re dealing with issues of comfortability with all the parts of you that are different and don’t quite mesh well, with the current reality, the current system, things like that.” cathy went on to say that the more that times are changing, that role of confronting self would become more important because there were many others in the world who are comfortable with things no matter what. “you’re not someone who is comfortable with that,” she stated. she told me that issues were coming up in relation to that card, that i was getting pushback from other people and their demands of wanting me to do things for them. “this is the universe’s way of saying ‘we need you to push back against this more.’ it doesn’t want you to play nice anymore, it wants you to kind of fight the good fight, whatever your good fight is.” cathy went on to describe other cards that were working in relation to the death card (cards that she doesn’t identify in the recording), and she described my way of moving through the world as having a step-by-step and moment-to-moment quality at its core. she said i worked in this way because it made it easier for me to accept changes as they came into my life. “because once you really fully accept that,” she said, “it’s kind of like ‘watch out world’ because things are going to change and i think it’s going to make people’s heads spin.” she referred to the death card as being a symbol for transformation: “the fact that this is in your conscious being right now means it’s also looking at ‘okay, what needs to shift, what is preventing me from growing and doing what i need to do so i can achieve what i want to achieve.’” as she continued with the reading, she pointed to a card that encapsulated what was around me. “for you this is more kind of magnetic energy of the moon. and it feels like you do things, or in the past you’ve done things, more by, almost by feel—not necessarily by intuition but i’d say more by feel through how a situation should be resolved.” when referring to an (unnamed) card that related to my subconscious, cathy said that oftentimes, in readings she gave, it meant that the seeker had too much on their plate. “this is strange,” she said. “i don’t get that impression with this one. this feels like you need to put more on you, but not more of the things that you want on you—not other people’s stuff but more the things that you want, that you should have control over. there’s enough of other people here, but it feels like this card is saying ‘she needs to do more,’ but you need to be the one that’s driving it—not other people.” she went on to describe the contrast between the inner and outer being. she characterized me as someone who has been accepting of the way things are and the way that people are, that i am someone who shifts with the world and how things are. she described this gradual “shifting and shifting and shifting” as being employed for other people’s comfort level, so that they could become accustomed with me being the “true essence” of who i am: “which is again, more of a rebel,” she said. “looking at what’s leaving you versus what’s coming in—this is a little bit of that kind of supporting and enabling and helping the world and everyone else around you. what’s coming in, in this shifting, it feels like it’s shifting it onto you. whether it’s the world and things going on around you that are not going to make that possible anymore, it’s going to free you to focus, but i feel like it’s ultimately going to be a good thing because i think you’ve had a lot of energy drawn from other areas that has dissipated some of your energy and so it feels like it would be beneficial for you to be able to kind of shut everything out so you can just focus on whatever it is you need to focus on.” hearing her relay this bit to me as i listen to the recording of her reading two and half years later is describing my life in this very moment, it’s eerie. i have felt like a reclusive shut-in ever since i’ve joined blather, blocking out the world and writing for hours each day, reading whatever i can get my hands on that inspires me to fill the creative well (see "everything_is_automatic.") when i held the deck in my hands to ask the silent question before i handed it to cathy to start the reading, i did not have the courage to ask what i really wanted to know, which was “will i get into the mfa program?” instead, when she asked me what my question was later in the reading, i told her that i wanted to know “am i prepared for what’s coming next, can i handle what’s coming?” at that point, she had me pull a single card in relation to the mfa question, and i think she did this because the reading she presented me with was about bigger things looming on my horizon. the card i pulled for the mfa question had someone crying on it. she said that she thought the card was telling her no, that i would not be accepted, but countered with, “you’re looking at being a writer versus being accepted into grad school and those are two different things”—meaning that the larger spread was about me fully stepping into my creative life, something that i couldn’t yet grasp at that time. (it’s funny to me now that the mfa card had crying on it, because i sure did a lot of that as i moved through the program, it was a process that nearly broke me.) “your gift right now is this one,” she said, pointing to a card that represented the principal of totality. “i think of this more as a concept of flow, and so this is what really gives you power and energy and momentum and it’s connecting, whether it’s with a person or a situation or something.” she continues, “you connect so well and in the right everything that it just clicks and so you know that, you know that feeling and that’s great because that is what is going to be more of your guiding force in the future, is kind of finding that, wherever that is, whether with relationships or work or what you’re doing.” she said this feeling of flow would help guide me into knowing whether something was the right decision or not. i have not reconnected to this feeling of flow in my life until i joined the blather community. cathy advised me that the major arcana cards are heavy hitting cards, cards that carry a lot of energy with them. she told me i was starting to wake up to the fact that i wasn’t a sheep. “you’ve tried, you’ve tried to get along, it’s just not you. you’re a different kind of entity and it feels like it’s really now time to come into that, come into that place.” cathy spoke again of that gradual shifting principle that is at work in my life. she called this process “coming into your embodied buddha-self…that being that knows only love and wisdom and always makes the right decisions. and this is something you do have control over and that you’ve been moving towards for a very, very, very long time, it’s just now you’re going to be anchoring that.” “whatever this is that is going on that you are shifting into, this is where you’ll start to bring it into full force not just inside, but to bear on your world around you. but you want to do it for you. you want to do it in a slow way, in a measured way, so that you’re comfortable with it because it’s kind of like once you come out, so to speak, you can’t go back inside. so you want to make sure everybody’s ready so whatever questions or pushback that you get you’re able to take that on in your full strength.” she told me that the result she saw in the spread was success, and that the card that followed that was a symbol of trust. “this is a great picture of what trust is,” she said. “you’re not holding anything back, you’re kind of sailing off into the unknown, but no one likes that, so you get sniping behind your back.” the final card in the spread was the card of receptivity. cathy described this card as “being able to draw to you everything that you need for healing, for success.” she described the full reading as being about finding *my* voice and what makes me different, and being able to explore and grow into and express all of it. “all of these are really powerful cards for that,” she said, motioning to the spread. “this feels like very strong energy for—it just may be a process; you just dedicate yourself to it and it’s a different kind of path.” cathy had me pull another single card during the reading. “draw a card for what can most prepare you for success in writing.” again, i don’t know what the card is that was pulled but she responded that my selection made sense. she referred back to the step-by-step gradual processing, saying “explore the ways in which you ignore the truth, in which you ignore your blind spots, ignore the things we all want to ignore.” she said it was also about “being able to be pissed off about the things that make you pissed off—it feels like you need to spend some time in that one, maybe cycle back to that one; i think you’re not as pissed off as sometimes you need to be.” she talked about channeling all that energy and focus into “being the best that you are and letting that flow through you, unimpeded, with no one holding you back.” she told me that all of this would take time. she told me that i needed to be comfortable with the contents of the spread of my major arcana cards before i could jump into that unimpeded flow with writing. “the more you get rid of the stuff that is standing in your way, that impeding you because you know what that feels like, the more you can follow that, that’s going to be your sweet spot and for you it will feel like it just draws you along.” “it’s like the image of going with a river,” she described. “where you’ll just be drawn along more effortlessly because there isn’t any of the stuff that was previously standing in the way.” 210930 what's it to you? who go blather from