August tarot reading
when the hustle helps, with a reflection on magical workings, the reversed Two of Pentacles, and the reversed Magician
In August, I’ll become a teacher again for the first time since losing my university contract in the midst of recovering from chemo. The work starts this week, with the first cohort of students who’ve signed up for a weekly writing workshop through the UVA Cancer Center here in Charlottesville. The Cancer Center is paying me for this work: $12,000 to teach four six-weeks classes over the course of the next 12 months, a sum that doesn’t replace my university income but that will absolutely improve my family’s day-to-day reality over next year. Meanwhile, the workshops are free for Cancer Center patients, survivors, and, in the last cohort, for caregivers to attend.
I’ve been quiet about the workshops since the contract first came through, mainly because I was worried no one would sign up for them. Since I got sick and then lost the academic job I’d held for the better part of a decade, I’ve really struggled with my relationship to and confidence in my work and all that it entails. (An ability to pay the bills, an externalized daily schedule I can rely on for both peace of mind and a topic to complain about with friends, a sense of myself as supported in my attempt to contribute something of value to the world with the only non-clumsy, mostly non-burdensome part of my body, which is my brain and its capacity for the written word).
Probably neither the cancer diagnosis nor the lost job were referendums on my ability to teach students how to encounter life through writing, but sometimes I can’t help my own self-suspicion. I’ve battled a tide of bitterness and seethe for a long while now, at the way I’ve felt betrayed by both body and vocation. Feel sorry for yourself long enough, though, and, in my experience, you can begin to externalize that sorry state. Over the past few years, for example, I’ve found myself self-sabotaging efforts to get paid for writing or teaching work in the midst of apparently striving for these exact goals. Colleagues helped me with pitch edits and agent query letters, only for me not to follow through on my end. Collaborative efforts to teach outside the university with friends fell apart. Projects that I’ve initiated with colleagues over the past year and a half have languished in, to use the corporate speak of the ad agency where I absconded to in the midst of my graduate program for a while, “ideation mode.”
There are plenty of structural problems to blame for my professional failure. There’s also a personal1 one, which is an antagonism toward ambition, born of familial and cultural rebellion that sometimes seems politically valiant but actually isn’t all that great for me.
What I’ve come to realize, after years of equivocating over hustle culture2, is that there is something of salvation for me in hustling, actually, especially when that work is attached to an endeavor that feels linked to who I am and why I’m here rather than a need to perform competence or get paid under capitalism. It’s kind of like an inverse of a dumb-but-true platitude I used to tell my yoga students before savasana ended each class: “there’s no meaning in motion without rest,” I’d say (so sanctimonious, so cringe, I miss and blush for that little post-rehab-love-and-light weirdo). But the opposite has also turned out to be radically true for me. There is a kind of grace involved in the hustle for me, a spirit that makes itself known in the ceaseless motion of my mind followed by the attempt to render its churnings into written narrative, a story that moves something—for myself, maybe sometimes for others, too. I’m so much less of an asshole on the weeks where I find myself reading and writing with as little interruption possible; sometimes, through this mundane effort, I can even reach a brief state I’d call healing, healed, whole.
“Oh woe, oh damn! Confound it! And my poor family. I am remote when in spate, but when not in spate, I am just plain MEAN and grumpy,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote to her friend Eleanor Cameron about the miserable insufficiency of the moments between finishing one book and starting another. Life was better for her when she was working, when she didn’t feel subjected to the “loose ends quality” of the summer or her children’s holiday breaks, and when I read about this aspect of her work while on a miserable vacation last month, I double-underlined the sentiments, seeing myself and breathing a bit easier for the reflection that my mood, if not my health and finances, would, in fact, improve when I returned home to my mostly reliable routine of writing, seeing clients, mothering, and divinatory ritual, all of which I consider aspects of my true work in this world.
The problem, of course, is actually getting paid for or around the edges of this work. The problem, of course, isn’t only mine to have. Everyone is tired, working on inspired. Of the twenty or so newsletter readers that I’ve communicated with over social media and email since I first put out a call for stories about how people find themselves in relationship to a sense of a calling or “true work,” as I deemed it, following Rachel Pollack’s terminology in a recent tarot spread that I’ve found helpful, most of them nodded to the fact that tension arises whenever survival needs conflict (or seem to conflict) with the work they feel called to do. Anecdotally, some—writers, journalists, artists—have handled this by throwing themselves more deeply into the hustle, stretching thin and deep every aspect of their waking lives by taking on more freelance work or paid gigs than is strictly good for their (mental, spiritual, and physical) health. Others find themselves using health events or diagnoses—cancer recurrences, surgeries, birth and its postpartum period—as opportunities “for rest” from the day job while extra effort is applied to the neglected calling.
Several mentioned currently being in a fear place I also know well from experience: the day job has been lost, the debt collectors are calling, the distress around all of this has also ground most attempts at meaningful effort to a bitter halt. “I recently quit my 'make ends meet' job, as it had sucked my soul dry,” one reader wrote to me via email last week. “Coupled with my entry into menopause, I feel like one of those shipwrecks marooned in the shallows, constantly coming up against my old age and undesirability, with zero resources, inner or outer.” But this reader also went on to discuss drawing The Chariot from the tarot in response to the question “what is my true work?”—a card that for her elucidated the etymology of “work” as coming from the old English worc or weorc, which, she noted, can either mean ‘a discrete act performed by someone’ or can operate as a verb meaning ‘to set in motion.’ “These both seem to sum up the innate qualities of The Chariot perfectly and lead me to believe that [my] true work is one of faith, trust, and surrender, to move through the darkness in order to experience the light,” she wrote.
I felt moved by the email and gratified that she was OK with me sharing it. There’s so much internet discourse about how work or health or aging should feel these days that I think we sometimes forget to honor our direct experiences of these processes, these states of being within our own lives, without the need to immediately smother them in the lightly researched intellectualizing of someone else online. I’m not so sure how I feel about my ability to have faith in or even work towards an ultimate or final experience of light, nevertheless I still light my candles most mornings at five, when I’d rather be sleeping, simply to participate in the experience of dawn.
I enjoy thinking about work, too, in the context of magical rituals, commonly referred to as “workings” amongst those of us who practice them. Many of us begin dabbling in magic in an attempt to gain something, to cause something to happen through a combination of aesthetic arrangement and will that we haven’t been able to obtain through more accepted notions of work. Like many others before me, I’ve performed workings for money, for health, for acclaim. A meditative working around the spiritual nature of debt corresponded with hackers pausing our mortgage payments for several months, allowing us to catch up without penalty. Sigil shoaling helped my husband get his current job as middle school art teacher. A devotional practice to Asclepius ended with the arrival of the correct diagnosis of my cancer recurrence in 2022, along with a compassionate oncologist to lead my treatment team. These are all fine and well, but what happens, if you perform magical workings frequently enough, is that you start to tune into your own repetitive desires. And maybe, if you’re like me, you also begin to tune into how you’ve mistaken a need for white-knuckled control over your life as a true desire, a right intention in the first place.
Eventually, if you work with magic in the Western tradition long enough, you end up with the Great Work3 itself, which is not so much about levels of competency and control by cultural standards, but instead about the questions of “who am I” and “why am I here” vis-à-vis the knowledge of and communication with your Holy Guardian Angel. Which is to say, for our purposes, the work somehow leads to all those things we don’t usually incorporate into work’s definition, including faith, trust, and a resting place somewhere unexpected, somewhere we might have secretly known we were going all along.
I do believe, as Louise DeSalvo says, in “writing as a way of healing,” and this month—this year—I’m lucky enough to get paid to teach others who’ve suffered from the same disease as me to maybe think about language and living in this way, too.
Paid subscribers, as ever, get the opportunity in the comments to ask for individual tarot readings or insights into their charts as guidance through the month of August.
