Isidore the Farmer and Ordinary Life
Hi friends,
I hope you’re well! I am well! I usually send this email out on the first of the month, but I made this one a few days late so I could make the little announcement that my family and I are moving back to Austin this summer. This has been in the works for awhile now but we had to keep things under wraps for reasons pertaining to my husband’s job. For those of you who have been around for a long time, you’ll remember that I am from Texas and that we lived in Austin before moving to NYC four years ago. This is not going to be one of those insufferable "why I’m leaving New York" essays, but I will say that, while there are so many things I love about NYC, I do not love the kind of soul-sucking job my husband had to work in order for us to be able to afford to live here, and eventually it wore us down. Also, I had never lived up north before moving to NYC, and it turns out that I get seasonal depression during actual winters! Who knew! Personally, I’m tired of it! We bought a sweet house in a sweet neighborhood, we’re moving in July, and I and my kids and my burned-out husband and my fragile little brain are *very* excited to be going home to the sunny south.
In more newsletter-y news, I've been on a few podcasts recently to talk about tarot and Christianity. If you're interested, you can listen to me ramble on about God and the cards on Nick Kepley's In Search of Tarot and Sarah Corbyn Woolf's The Ecstatic Rabbit Podcast.
As I was sorting through saints for the month of May, my first thought was Joan of Arc, whose feast day is the 30th. Joan of Arc was my confirmation saint way back when, and I’ve had a lot of thoughts recently about the archetype of the girl warrior that people love so much, and how she’s been sort of detrimentally flattened to an archetype. But to be honest, I don’t have the time for that kind of research right now (I am neck-deep in book writing), so I’ll have to save her for another time. Besides, lately I’ve been less interested in the grand and dramatic saints and much more interested in the saints who did astonishingly little. Which brings us to Isidore the Farmer.
Isidore the Farmer is an 11th-century Spanish saint. He is the patron saint of farmers and Madrid, among other things, and his feast day is May 15th. He was born to simple and devout parents, and he lived a simple and devout life, working as a hired hand in the service of the wealthy Madrilenian landowner Juan de Vargas. He gave most of what he had to the poor, and he went to mass every day. There are a few miracles attributed to him, mostly involving angels doing his farm work while he prayed at church. He lived a very ora et labora kind of life, praying and working, and he found sainthood in that simplicity.
In the winter of 2019, right before covid hit, I fell into the weirdest depressive existential crisis of my life. My kids were both in school full-time for the first time, and I felt like I needed to be doing something or making something or being more. Like I needed to be productive and useful in some way, like I needed to somehow earn my right to continue existing in the world. I won’t go into details, but I will say that I spent a few months waking up every morning in a cold sweating panic and then wandering around the city while my kids were in school, feeling completely unmoored. I think what was happening during that time is that I had spent several years caring for small children, and then they didn’t need me as much, and I felt like I had empty hands but also like I wasn’t allowed to have empty hands. That once my children didn’t need me 24/7, obviously I needed to find something to do with myself. More specifically, I needed to find something to do with myself that would seem interesting and useful to the vague other.
I eventually pulled myself out of this. Therapy helped. So did the movement from winter into spring, because, as mentioned above, the winters in New York make me feel like I’m dying. What also helped was saints like Isidore the Farmer. Saints who were saints for nothing particularly extraordinary, who lived quiet and devout lives. I’m still clinging to this kind of sainthood. The ordinary holiness, the sanctity of small things. I’ve written about this a little bit, but it’s something I keep coming back to, because my life is ordinary and small, and I want to feel comfortable in the smallness. And I feel like the arching theme of the last decade of my life has been about this: that my vocation is a small one, that sanctity can be found in little things, that I can spend my life baking bread and digging for worms with my children and writing here and there, that that’s a Good Life. Put on paper, all of this seems painfully and embarrassingly obvious, but I’ve really struggled to feel like I am allowed to live a small and quiet life doing mostly nothing of particular interest. And I do get the impression that other people struggle with this too.
This month I’ve started writing the court cards for my book. For those of you unfamiliar with tarot, there are four suits and each suit has four court cards: the Pages, the Knights, the Queens, and the Kings. For each of the sixteen court cards, I’m choosing a saint which I feel embodies the archetype well, and I’m writing about the way they match and what they have to teach us. My favorite thing about this is the way it levels the playing field of the court cards, because there’s an annoying tendency among some tarot readers to turn the court cards in a hierarchy with the Pages at the bottom and the Kings at the top. Logically, this makes sense, but also, who is to say that the Pages don’t have as much to teach us as the Kings? In my book, the Pages are represented by saints like Isidore the Farmer--saints who lived ordinary lives and found sanctity in the day-to-day, saints who leaned into small sacrifices and simple joys. I want to give the Pages their due, because they may, at first glance, seem less interesting than the bold Knights or the mystical Queens, but they hold the same right to the kingdom of heaven. God loves them all the same, and God loves us all the same. God loves us when we lead armies into battle like Joan of Arc and God loves us when we give what we have to the poor and God loves us when we have mystical visions and God loves us when we show up for daily mass.