V. H. King's Ink

You’ve spent your whole life aware of how harmful ideas can be when weaponized against human dignity. You have struggled with the Right Way to Be—human, spirit, aligned. It is time now to untangle yourself.

Listen instead to what your body tells you, to what your heart longs for, to the unmet needs where you are hungry. As you listen, lean into the most natural expression and fulfillment of these things. Understand the answers will not come at once, and will not all, not always, be the same.

Allow yourself to be cared for in new and unique ways, and realize that you are not as awful as you think. You have not failed; you have not disappointed anyone or let them down.

God is not ashamed of you.

The Rust Belt Arcana from Belt Publishing explores the impacts of the region’s industrialism on the natural world. Using the deck seemed fitting, in light of the disastrous storms leveling entire towns and gauging through cities recently. I’m thinking of St. Louis of course, and London, Kentucky, and the 7 tornados that sprawled through the middle of my state in a single evening.

Night Visions Tarot—a black-and-white monochrome iteration of a deck by James R. Eads—is a relatively recent addition to my collection. The deck’s theme of shadows works well for me when I am feeling particularly out of sorts. It knows what to do with rage and despair, with hopelessness and failure.

Putting these two decks in conversation with each other, I wondered where I’d be prompted to focus my attention. I am not surprised at the Swords from the Night Visions deck. These echo my inner anxiety that I need to figure out the One Right Way to write and make art in an accessible and sustainable way. I know better, of course. I know there’s not a Single Answer, but I am so often caught up in wanting to avoid causing harm in a world that is so full of hurt. There are Many Ways to Do Good, but I often wonder if I am doing enough.

What stuck out most to me in the spread was a phrase from the Five of Swords: lay down your sword, and follow the butterfly. In the Prisma Visions iteration of this deck, the orange and black butterfly in the foreground of the card is reminiscent of the monarch. This not only tied particularly well into using the Rust Belt Arcana, but also directed my thinking about the rest of the spread.

I find here an invitation to openness, flexibility, and patience. In holding space for what dies, we honor what is alive. The caterpillar, transformed, becomes a butterfly—but the butterfly does not punish itself for what it once was, or for not becoming a butterfly sooner. It does not fret over having bigger or more colorful wings. The butterfly knows it has a long journey of its own: a great undertaking fraught with ever-shrinking places of rest and nourishment.

The migratory patterns of the monarch butterfly stretch across the entire continent. Although these migrations are multigenerational, few of the individual butterflies survive the entire trip. Some go northward to produce offspring, and it is up to these young ones to travel onward to those places their ancestors once knew, or perhaps never saw, but knew must be reached.

Significant conservation efforts along the monarch’s migratory path have created places of rest and nourishment, and it prompts the question: who are the people, where are those places, where rest and comfort are offered to you? Do you accept the care and compassion extended to you there?

I am prone to making the care I receive contingent on somehow making sure it’s not “wasted”, as if I must make it worth someone else’s while to care for me. Those who love me best have no need of this; they care just because. In a society that equates one’s worth to their productivity, their bank account, their digital influence, their curriculum vitae, their published works and polished awards—it can be very hard for me to remember that there are people who care with no expectation of getting something in return. They do not need receipts. They do not need proof. And so I have to ask myself: do I need those things?

Do I always need to defend myself? Do I need to cut myself off from community and connection just because I don’t have a formalized rhetoric explaining my art philosophy, my writing process, and my spiritual beliefs? Do I need such a dogma in the first place? Have I not seen all the ways intellectual elitism, in both religion and academia, have brought bloodshed and heartache? Is that really how I want to measure my worth?

Here is what I know: the ache of my inflamed joints, the heaviness of my tired muscles, the sun’s warmth on my skin, the dense fog of my disorganized mind. This is what I have: a profound resonance with stories and places, with images and colors, with numbers and symbols and concepts. I can write and paint here. I can honor my purpose and calling with this. I am this person, whoever and however I have found myself to be, for now.

And when I am changed, when I transform, when I journey, when I transcend, when I lie down, when I pass on, when I hold back, when I can’t give anything, when I am tired of everything: in all this, I am loved. It is a gift as much as it is the price of being alive.

You will be loved.