'The calm mystery of what is'
Phil Christman's How To Be Normal; literary and astrological guidance for the week ahead
Welcome to the Saturday newsletter for paid subscribers, with esoteric and literary guidance for the week ahead. Today we’re talking about books and offering reading suggestions for the astrological signatures this week. Have a question for the tarot? Send it my way, and I’ll answer it as part of a two-card tarot draw for the next Saturday offering.
I began reading Phil Christman’s How to Be Normal at golden hour on a very normal, mostly bad day back in ye-olden-days of 2022. It would be a few months yet before I received my second cancer diagnosis, but everything already seemed wrong, despite the ash-tree sunlight warming the porch of our old Nebraska house. I didn’t have an appetite. My best friend was sick. My toddler was going through a sleep regression. No one was sleeping well, really—spring pollen and ragweed and expectation gunking up our dreams and nasal cavities. The dogs were barkier than usual; the medical bills as usual overdue.
I knew enough about Christman’s book to know it wasn’t going to offer me instructions on normal living, nor was it going to indulge in my nostalgia for a past that never existed. I’ve never been much of a nostalgic person—childhood mostly sucked, young adulthood mostly worse—but the before-and-after of the first bad diagnosis left me yearning for the “before” of cancer, even if its hallways were littered with trash.