Sowing Seeds of Grief
Learning to cultivate hope with the Star
Cry me a river
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This is it. Our collective Strength card moment. We are being asked to grapple with sociopolitical change while all the excitement, shock, fear, rage, and grief is roaring to be let out from inside us. Strength wants to know: How will we digest and integrate all these damn feelings with tenderness, vulnerability, and softness?
In times like these we turn to the Star, Strength’s teacher card, for guidance.
The Star is the bearer of water, the Aquarian dreamer, the holder of hope.
In tarot, the element of water relates to our emotions, dreams, intuition, and our connection to others. The Star knows how to work with water, and teaches us to listen to the watery wisdom flowing through our bodies when we’re in the forest fire of our Strength card feelings.
In the sequence of the major arcana, the Star comes after the Tower, which represents a moment of swift and rapid change, one that breaks apart our old world view, rips down our protective walls, and forces us to recon with reality’s naked truth. Fun stuff, huh?
Luckily, the Star is an expert in the realm of healing. It teaches us not to despair but to plant our seeds of grief in the watery container of our bodies (for what are stars but points of light seeded into the rich soil of the night sky?).
When we plant our seeds of grief, we are making a promise to the future. A promise to nourish these seeds with our soil, to warm them with the light of our of joy, to water them with our tears so they will grow into something else entirely. Hope.
Contrary to popular belief, tears do not beget more sadness, they cleanse us of it! So if you’re in tsunami town for the next little while, know that it’s okay. Because what do we get when we mix freshly sown soil with a bunch of water and a dash of existential reckoning?
We get a shitload of mud.
No mud. No lotus.
The Thiền Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh famously said, “Without the mud, there would be no lotus.”
The lotus flower—a symbol of strength, resilience, and rebirth—grows from muddy pond water and emerges pristine, radiant, and beautiful.
Its seeds start as small, dark things, lying dormant at the bottom of ponds, lakes, and other bodies of water, sometimes for years.
When conditions are right, germinating seeds take up to two months to sprout (hmm, what else will be taking place in two months time? cough inauguration, cough the shift into Star season, cough a move to collective thinking under Aquarius).
Stems push through the mud, swimming through leagues of water to unfold on the surface, petal by petal, each coated in a protective layer that repels evidence of all the muck they’ve just climbed through to be born.
What if our muddy future is the perfect place to plant our seeds of grief?
What if the emotions we’re swimming through are the Star’s way of watering our hope?
What if now is our time to germinate?
No shit
Apparently mud and shit have a lot in common 💩
In the On Being podcast episode “On Nature’s Wisdom for Humanity,” host Krista Tippet speaks to the cofounder of the Biomimicry Institute, Janine Benyus, about the ways nature teaches us humans to heal in community, creating lotus-like results in the process. It turns out, the seed of all healing is contained in poop.
Benyus first describes what happens after a Tower moment unfolds in nature.
(Transcript edited for clarity).
“If a rain forest gets cut down, the way [regeneration] starts is that there might be a stick, or a little rise and a bird lands and it poops something out. This is how it really starts. This is how the seeds…get in there.”
“They come in and…[spread] out as quickly as they can [to] cover that ground. Because [with] healing, the first thing is, don’t let the good stuff go. And that’s why you scar over so quickly.”
“And what they’ve done is started to soften up the soil, started to put nutrients in, and the next group is the shrubs and the berries. And they start to put down roots. They’re going to stay for a while, and then they start what’s called facilitating. They start shading little seedlings, keeping wind away, creating.”
“It is a progression of making way, making things more and more fertile for the next cohort to come. So there’s this incredible generosity and everybody’s got their place.”
According to Benyus and, you know, Mother Earth or whatever, regeneration happens in little islands that spread and eventually meet.
“When people ask me, how are things going? I’m like, well, I think the circles of healing are starting to grow and they’re starting to grow towards each other. And if we were to reach out our hand in the dark at this point, we might find another hand.”
What if the shit we find ourselves in is rich in rebirth?
What if it contains the seeds that will spread across the barren media landscapes, the scorched earth political positions, and the landslide repercussions of ferocious finger pointing?
What if this shit has everything we need to heal?
Join, or die!
Benuys’ “circles of healing” feel directly connected to the work of Robert D. Putnam and his seminal book, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.”
The central thesis goes something like this: Clubs make democracy work.
No not that kinda club.
Let me break it down.
Participation in clubs (like bowling, mahjong, writing, archery, etc.) = increased social interaction = higher “social capital” = more civic engagement = a happier, healthier democracy.
In the U.S., club attendance has been on a downward trend for the last seven decades, landing us in the political moment we’re in today.
The film Join or Die further explores this trend and the ways clubs have played an integral part in the health of democracies. As mentioned above, clubs foster social capital, but WTF is that, mate? Social capital is the glue that brings people together around common interests, goals, and values.
Through the lens of tarot, social capital is the head cheerleader of The Star’s mod squad supported by Three of Cups, Three of Pentacles, Ten of Cups and Ten of Pentacles.
If social capital is the what, clubs are the how, acting as anecdotes for the siloed grief that has become pervasive in western culture.
While Putnam spent the majority of his career studying the decline in clubs, he later returned to his research with a question, “When were clubs on the rise?”
It was the “Gilded Age” of the late 1800’s. Narcissism was the posture de rigueur. The economic gap was the largest it had been in decades. Waves of new immigrants were coming to the country. And political parties were more divided than ever. Now doesn’t that sound familiar?
The advent of clubs brought people, and therefore the country, together.
Maybe a club is just a hopeful seed that plants connection, to sprout a circle of healing, that grows into the world we want to live in.
What group can you join?
What club would you start?
What world could we build?
Circle of Hope Spread
Take a moment to plant all you’ve been feeling. Grab your tarot cards and see what sprouts.
What lives inside the seed of my grief?
Where can I plant it?
How can I nurture it?
What communities can I call on for support?
How can I cultivate hope from what grows?
On my shit list
On Being’s “Nature’s Wisdom for Humanity”: The whole hope-filled shebang.
Join or Die: Watch it! But do it with your coven ;)
Hope in the Dark by Rebeca Solnit: Written in 2016, this book makes a radical case for hope during shitty times.
Remember: we’re in this shit, but we’re in it together.
XO
ALTARU TAROT
I am finding so much hope in your words! Thank you!