Uh…… yeah.
I’m writing this late on Election Day eve. Or technically early in the morning, but I haven’t been to bed yet. And I need to get there soon, so this may be short. But I committed to a weekly post and so here we are.
I’m not gonna lie, I’m anxious about tomorrow. I’m scared. I’m hopeful and excited too. I’m an entire bundle of nerves, wrapped around a ping pong ball bouncing everywhere. I’m a mixed metaphor and I don’t even have the patience to unravel it.
I’ve already unfriended someone on social media just for being a little too 2016-era bro-y for my taste. I’m not sorry. I’m having guests visit on Wednesday and my house is a mess and I’m having complete executive dysfunction reconciling these two things. I can’t focus and I can’t sleep and I can’t move. I had potato chips and wine for dinner.
How are you?
Yeah, it be like that.
Honestly, I would have been surprised if the card I pulled for the week wasn’t a sword.
Swords are air, and air is the mind. Words, communication, clarity, boundaries. The strong rush of thoughts and ideas, the tight gasp of fear. Air is the swirl around an election season, as each candidate and pundit and reporter and all of us choose our words carefully or clumsily, shooting our virtual arrows across the sky. Air fills the mental rabbit holes we chase down as anxiety gets the best of us, pushing us deeper, farther away from reason and reality. Air is always with us as we breathe in and out - the choice to make that a calming, deep and intentional one or not is always within our power. That’s easy to forget sometimes though, eh?
Three of Swords shows us a bleeding heart stabbed with three swords, a painful image even in this very sweet and childlike deck’s version. Keep in mind here that this isn’t predictive - this says nothing about what the outcome of the election might be. This is about us. Because let’s be real - we are already wounded. From divisive politics and civil rights atrocities and war and oh yeah, that global pandemic that is still raging? Yeah, we’ve been through it. This heart is all of our hearts. And it hurts like hell, doesn’t it? And the worst part is feeling powerless in it all.
This morning, I tried. I read a book about voting rights to a class of preschoolers, because that’s my day job. I talked about fairness and diversity with them, hoping that planting that seed in their little minds now will eventually help bring about a brighter future for us all later. And all the while feeling the stabbing whisper in my heart: it’s not enough.
I know this is part of my wounding: the not enough-ness. The fear that time is running out, that it’s already too late and everything is spiraling into chaos and ruin. That my messy house is a microcosm of the world and we’re all paralyzed with too much despair and overwhelm and animosity to really do anything about it. Everything is so BIG, so complicated and impossible. We’re all these minor, insignificant specks in a vast ocean of humanity, drowning.
It sounds like a lot of feelings, right? And that would normally be the realm of the cups suit. But this is swords here, and that’s important to remember. These wounds are stories, just like the book I read to my kids today - they’re ideas, thoughts, winding and thorn-filled paths I’ve gone down in my mind. Doesn’t mean there’s no truth to them, nor that they don’t hurt. But we can take these swords out and tend to the bleeding. And tell a different story in the process.
And breathe. In, and out. Again. All night. All day. Election or not.
I will clean my house tomorrow night as I watch the results begin to roll in. And I will laugh or cry - or probably both - with my dear friends the next day, remembering what’s wonderful about us. We’ll breathe together, because we have to. We’ll tend to our wounds, because we have no choice. But how we do so is always within our control.
We can choose kind, loving words. We can tell stories of hope and grace and passion and justice. We can take all the time that we need.
It’s not everything, but it’s something.