Omens and the Art of Living

X Wands from the Deviant Moon Tarot

Here’s something I wrote mostly in July. I didn’t get around to finishing it until the school year started, for all the reasons you can guess, plus the twelve other things I wanted to say about omens were all trying to edge their way into this post and I had to look sternly at them.

What if we have an instinct to find omens and traces of our stories in the world?  I know people who’d never consult Tarot cards or look for a sign, but when you talk to them, they’ll scry into you like a magic mirror, as if your every expression and shifting tone of voice might be a clue to who they really are.  It’s as if they’ve never heard the world tell them that their stories matter, that they belong here as much as any other animal does, that they are children of the universe.

One stressful winter when I was in grad school, I kept hearing the tide roll in.  I knew the ocean was too far away to hear for real, but even so, I listened to the sea rise up as my life flooded with classes and TAing, and tsunamis washed over me in my dreams.  What if we have an instinct to find omens, and if we don’t look for them in our day-to-day living—if we let ourselves fall into the perspective of a bored audience watching from somewhere outside our own lives—what if something inside ourselves tries to draw us back in?  Hearing the ocean told me to stop pretending that stress was mundane and boring, and to stop feeling like I should just be better at life already.  There was something poetic about my day-to-day struggles, and it was worth my attention and curiosity as much as anything I was studying.  I was the main character in my story.

I’ve had the same experience with other stress mirages: I don’t necessarily take them literally, but they always point to important dynamics I’d been trying to ignore.  Synchronicity can work this way, too, like one time when I decided to ignore a splinter in my foot, only to be met with a (broken) golden tweezers in the parking lot. Meanwhile serendipity seems to happen more often when you’re already spiritually aligned and actively grounded in your life.  I think of setting an intention and then finding a cast iron cauldron by the trash or running into exactly the person I want to talk to at the grocery store.

That doesn’t mean that I want to count every weird coincidence or pattern as magic.  Coincidences run the gamut from uncanny to poetic to amusing, and I like the amusing ones and the poetic ones as much as the uncanny ones, because noticing these things makes my head a fun place to live.  I had a conversation with my husand earlier this summer related to that.  Our family made the unusual-for-us decision not to go to Fourth of July fireworks this year, and we had FOMO.  But then my husband read that this year’s show had been unusually bad: clouds rolling in from the ocean made the fireworks harder to see, and wind blowing the clouds also blew smoke back at the spectators.  “Wow,” I said, “If I were writing a fantasy novel, that’s exactly the sort of omen I’d use to show the country was in trouble.”  “Yeah,” he replied, “Good thing thousands of other firework shows across the US went off successfully!”  I thought of playing around with the question of what percentage of Fourth of July shows would have to be crappy before someone noticed, and what percentage it would take to qualify as a message from the gods, but the thing is, that’s not how omens work.  Divination works best when the omens are grounding you in your own life, not when you step outside your own experience and start running comparisons with everyone else’s fireworks.  The point is to knock yourself back into first person and out of whatever judgypants zombie Franken-perspective you’ve contrived from the opinions of family, former classmates, and reddit.  It’s not that the judgypants part of ourselves isn’t useful.  It’s that it’s not really alive.  It doesn’t care about our sorrows and delights, and its stories won’t sustain us.  

The crappy fireworks show was already sitting in this judgy discursive space when I compared it to a fantasy-novel omen. The style of fantasy omens overlaps with historical omens, except they’re too pat.  “Bad fireworks = bad outcome for country” is too much like shared gossip and too much like what you were already thinking if you were a Democrat in early July.  Also, the possibility of getting a bad omen for the country only makes sense if you think there’s a singular perspective embedded in the world that can judge what a bad outcome is, rather than looking to the will of the voters and seeing every person’s vote as legitimate.  So this kind of coincidence is fun, but it doesn’t do much to facilitate a change in consciousness.

Unlike Tarot cards.  I avoided learning Tarot for about a decade after I became a pagan, long after I got comfortable using trances as a tool to work with my unconsciousness, and long after I started cultivating a sense of where the mundane world is porous to the divine.  Tarot seemed like too much of an invitation to trick my powerful pattern-matching brain into seeing patterns that weren’t really there.  I didn’t want to trust a sleight of hand trick I was performing on myself. 

Then I actually started drawing Tarot cards, and I found out that part of what they did was kick said brain out of the melancholy groove it was in and into something broader.  My brain is going to find patterns whether or not I’m consciously practicing divination, but if I’m more deliberate about it, I can give myself fodder for richer patterns.  Tarot felt like talking to a friend who listened well to my day-to-day life, mirrored it back to me as something beautiful and worth looking at, and gently suggested new framings.  The trust I put in the cards wasn’t like the trust you’d put in a calculator to add things up and spit out an answer; it was the spaciousness of playing through possible meanings, like walking out under the sky after you’ve been indoors. 

Modern thinking: printing a pattern of colored ink onto a piece of paper does not change the nature of the paper—the meaning exists in our brains as viewers, not on the sheet—and so there’s no mechanism by which anything but random cards could be picked. 

But there is more under the wild sky than I knew from inside my room.  And also, when you’re feeling stuck and closed in and nothing’s moving inside your house, it’s good to step outside.

from Lightseer Tarot