Yesterday Fern and I taught a four hour workshop on divination. I’m finding one of the great gifts of teaching is the figuring out what it is I actually know. It turns out I know a lot about divination, about engaging in an ongoing conversation with the divine. As I prepared for teaching by typing up a long list of methods of divination, I marveled at the ways humans have embarked on decoding the messages of everyday life. This conversation with the divine, listening to the forces of nature, looking for what is being communicated, has been going on throughout human history, in every culture. Listening to the wind, watching the patterns of birds, noticing chance remarks of strangers, all of these have been established practices of divination. This looking at life as a dream, and interpreting it as such, this is as old as the hills.
In the past year or so, Reya and I both have realized how for the most part we don’t rely on our tarot decks anymore; just paying attention to how life unfolds is like doing a spread. My iPod divination continues to be a daily practice. (Today’s spread was Hang on to Your Love, by Sade, Fight for Your Right to Party, by the Beastie Boys, and Volunteers, by Jefferson Airplane) One of the books in my training as a psychotherapist that’s had real staying power for me is Viktor Frankel’s Man Search For Meaning. Frankel survived the Holocaust and his book’s premise is that it is the search for meaning that helps us survive the worst of human conditions. Besides helping us survive amidst atrocities and horror, the search for meaning enriches and illuminates life in it’s most mundane of aspects. Divination means actively engaging in this search for meaning.
More important than learning the meaning and correspondences of tarot cards, numbers, planets, and lines on the hands, is opening up to the basic idea that the earth and the life force are constantly revealing their sacredness to us, showing us patterns, whispering mysteries, and transmitting information. Learning to listen, opening our eyes, feeling and sensing what information is being communicated, this is the ongoing work and challenge.
At the end of our workshop we asked the participants to create their own method of divination based on what they know, what they tend to pay attention to, and what they love in life. One woman painted names for parts of the body on rocks. Then she threw the rocks out, doing a divinatory reading by which names were turned up and how they fell out. It was an incredible reading, involving the closeness of the liver, and where the heart, eyes, and kidneys lay. Another, who is a cook, did a deck of cards of foods. She asked me if I wanted to know about my love life. I pulled three cards representing the issue, the challenge and the outcome; lemon, potpie, and yeast. I understood this perfectly, and the way the cook interpreted this was dead on. It appears things will be getting pretty lively, although I'm also thinking my love life might result in a yeast infection of some kind. Another, a bird lover, did a deck of birds, and again, the reading she did for another was clarifying and enlightening. Canary, Cockatoo, Mockingbird; each of these carry as much archtypal information as any card in the tarot, especially for one who knows and loves birds.
Today is gorgeous and sunny. Ilyse suggested we clean out my car. She helped me wash it, vacumn it, and clean out the accumulated junk. I’m getting help and assistance from loved ones to be behind the steering wheel in a new way. I’m going forward carrying no unnecessary baggage, mindful of leaving the garbage behind. Today I thought about how important it is to hang on to the love in my life, to fight for my right to party, to continue to be my ecstatic self, and how this all helps in making me a volunteer in recreating America. As the refrain for that song goes; “gotta revolution, gotta revolution”. Yes, indeed. The revolution is well started.
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