Make a Wish!

Pisces 2 & 3 // on magic in the real world.

It’s mid-March in Ohio, and you can tell. This morning we woke up to clouds and snow flurries, followed by gusty winds, and now the sun is shining bright. The birds are singing and the earliest buds are popping - forsythia! hyacinth! - even in the midst of snow flurries. I’ve been busy with carpool and two dance recitals this month and my spouse traveling again, so I’ve had much less time for writing. This post will combine the final two decans of Pisces and round out my YEAR of tarot-inspired writing. I’m so proud to have completed this project, and I’m planning to do it again as our new astrological year begins today with the spring equinox! Thanks for being here, thanks for reading. XO Linds

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Last week we celebrated my spouse’s birthday and I love that he was born under the decan¹ which corresponds to the 9 of Cups - the card of wishes granted! Sam is the gregarious half of our relationship. His favorite thing to do is surround himself with people he loves to enjoy delicious food and good music (preferably at full volume). Even better if it’s all 3 at once! Which is exactly what we did last week to celebrate his 40th birthday.

We are the perfect example of opposites attracting. Sam loves a crowd, a party, loud music, big laughs. My favorite thing to do is anything quietly and alone. Sam is the life of the party - he is generous, and imaginative, and big-hearted. Like the figure in the 9 of Cups, he likes to “eat, drink, and be merry.” The guy on the card looks like a great host, right? He’s smiling and reclining in front of a full bar!

It also seems like a coincidence that the rainbow of shining cups behind him almost looks like a row of candles on a birthday cake! When I watched Sam close his eyes and make a wish as he blew out his candles last week, I smiled knowing that he was probably dreaming up something really big. He was probably wishing for something I couldn’t even imagine.

9 of Cups RWS deck & 10 of Cups Tarot for All Ages

This card (and it’s neighbor the 10 of Cups) often come up for me when I need a reminder that hope takes courage. That even when life is difficult, when the world is on fire and suffering seems perpetual, life is still full of simple pleasures. Good things are on the way, sometimes we just have to be brave enough to wish for them! For my spouse, it comes naturally to hope for the best. He assumes that the world is mostly good - and he is usually right. And it’s why, on his birthday, he was surrounded by nearly a hundred friends - because he welcomes the good and invites others to appreciate life too!

I, on the other hand, tend to see problems before possibility. I tend to clench my fists and grit my teeth. I tend to cling to my time and energy, instead of leading with generosity. I need a reminder that wishes do come true, and that it’s ok to take a risk and ask.

I wonder if some of my complicated feelings around wishes is that I was raised a woman in fundamentalism and taught to eschew all desire. And what is a wish but a secret longing. A magical desire. I don’t remember making wishes as a child. That was probably because we believed in the power of prayer. Who needs wishes when you can go straight to the Source and ask for what you want. And wishes were probably too magical for my caregivers, leading down a slippery slope of golden coins and wishing wells and fairy godmothers (witchcraft!). Even though prayers are really just wishes wrapped in holy language.

I think I also have some very protective parts² who learned early on that it is safer to not get your hopes up. Better to plan for the worst, than hope for the best and have your heart broken. This inner skeptic is very rational, and she refuses to be disappointed. She is capable and also very controlling, bless her heart.

Leaving fundamentalism also gave me an allergy to spiritual bypassing³. After being raised to believe that God was my personal BFF, I have a pretty strong reaction to magical thinking. Wishes and love & light can sound an awful lot like thoughts and prayers⁴ which is maybe the MOST bypassing bullshit of them all.

No, Jesus did not get you that parking spot.
No, you can’t manifest your next sports car.
No, it is still appropriation if you *know* you were an indigenous person in a another life.

So where does that leave wishes?

My kids requested a picnic-dinner while their dad was traveling last week, and so I bought a bunch of different types of meats and cheeses to make sandwiches. My youngest had never had bologna before - and was a big fan! And it reminded me how when I was growing up, my maternal grandmother never fed us lunch meat sandwiches because she told us that she ate so much bologna as a kid that now she couldn’t even stand to look at it! She was the youngest of 9 children, in a house that was full of love but not much else. She retells fond childhood memories - roller skating in the street, having lots of siblings and everyone living close to each other - but she also talks a lot about being very poor. Stories about not having any shoes, or having to line the soles of her roller-skates with cardboard so that they would fit or her father walking to work in bleak Ohio winters because they couldn’t afford a car.

One of my grandmother’s fondest memories was of getting to go visit her grandmother who lived about an hour out of the city. She told me how every time they went to visit, her grandma would slaughter a chicken and make homemade chicken and noodles. This is a core memory for my grandma and she still makes this meal for us to this day. It is her specialty for family gatherings and it is one of her most obvious expressions of love for us.

When I think about my grandma looking at my young family, she sees a wish granted. She sees her family thriving in a way that her younger self could’ve never imagined. A wish realized in the form of her great-grandchildren being safe, and provided for, and bologna being a rarity on the dinner table. Sometimes wishes come true that we didn’t even know we had - like little moments of beauty, hidden in an ordinary life.

Beauty does not reserve itself for special elite moments or instances; it does not wait for perfection but is present secretly in everything.”
John O’Donohue

This week I watched my tween perform in their school dance program with tears in my eyes and thought - this is a wish granted. As I’ve grown as a parent, my longings for them have shifted. The things I was told to want as a parent (obedience, conformity) have evolved to a wish for a world where they are free in their bodies, able to express themselves with joy - without fear or shame or hellfire.

Adrienne Marie Brown says, “the limits of our imagination are the limits of our world.” Maybe a wish can be turning our attention towards our imagination. Asking ourselves, What could the world be? And maybe it could be a reminder that what we give our attention to grows!

What wishes have already been granted in my life? Where can I actively work to realize a wish that I may not even hope to ask yet?

Turning my attention to the sweet moments, the wishes granted, and the sacred here and now, can be as simple as looking at my kids, or looking out the window. The earth gives so many opportunities for joy. Like the rainbow in the 10 of Cups - which is the final card of our astrological year - beauty glimmers in everything, in secret and not so secret ways.

My bachelor of science degree taught me the mechanics of photosynthesis, but I can’t explain why trees have been my companions since I was a child. I understand, mathematically, why the tilt and turn of the planet gives us weather and seasons. But I can’t explain why the movement of the planet is like a synchronized clock with my heart. Why is one of my earliest memories of laying on my back on a humid summer night staring up at an inky black sky full of stars? Why do birds - hawks, tundra swans, wrens, enchant me? Why, when I spy them as fleeting as a rainbow on a spring day, do they bring me instantly back to myself?

A marsh full of red winged black birds, tundra swan & Canada geese! The cacophony was magical. (You can hear lift off as some swans take flight near the end of the recording)

Wishes are vulnerable. You have to put aside your cold rationality and expose your soft tummy to the world. You have to choose, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, that there is magic⁵ out there. I need to remember that it is just as possible for something wonderful to happen as it is for something devastating.

If wishes are longings, this card calls me to ask - What is my heart longing for? What sort of world can I imagine - and with my imagining, call into being? How can I courageously open my heart to hope?

Crescent shadows from the last solar eclipse in 2017!

In a few weeks, there is going to be a total solar eclipse and the path of totality will go right through our corner of Ohio. I am geeked. I ordered our protective goggles months ago, and I’ve been stock-piling library books and making my kids watch space documentaries on weekends. And even though I could explain to you the mechanics of an eclipse, and how the moon is only 1 of nearly 200 moons in our solar system that can perfectly occult the sun⁶, and how we have the technology to predict the path of the eclipse precisely - I still feel giddy with anticipation for this once-in-my-life event. It is going to be magical. And I will count down the days, and drive to my parent’s house for a better view, and I will dance with my kids in the crescent shadows. And in that liminal darkness, I will turn my face to the sun and make a wish.

1. If you’re new here, or to astrology: a decan is a 10-degree subdivision of an astrological sign. In order to give fuller interpretation, ancient astrologers subdivided each sign into 3 periods of roughly 10 days. These divisions offer subtle astrological differences to the sign and each have a corresponding planet and minor card from the tarot.

2. “Internal Family Systems is a transformative tool that conceives of every human being as a system of protective and wounded inner parts led by a core Self… Just like members of a family, inner parts are forced from their valuable states into extreme roles within us. Self is in everyone. It can’t be damaged. It knows how to heal.”

3. Spiritual bypassing is using spiritual ideas and practices to avoid or side-step life’s challenges that lead to real growth.

4. My spirituality has come a long way since my days of praying “in Jesus’ name” and expecting my wish to be granted. I’m more interested in my spirituality calling me to action and imagination. And action that brings healing to myself, my family, my community in the here and now. These days I say fewer prayers, and more “So be it! See to it!” like Octavia.

5. Katherine May wrote recently about MAGIC - and I wholeheartedly agree!

6. The sun is 400x further away from us than the moon, and the moon’s diameter is 400x smaller than the sun’s. Which means they look the exact same size from our view on earth. Let this small bit of wildly coincidental trivia BLOW YOUR MIND today.