On Hope and the Star
Hi friends,
I hope that you’re safe and finding some kind of joy, however small, wherever you are. My little family and I are doing okay right now. My sons started fully remote 1st and 2nd grade a few weeks ago, and things are going well so far, mostly because my father-in-law is handling the remote learning. He’s an excellent grandfather and a retired school teacher and also much more patient than I am. (It feels a little strange to talk about my kids at all in these monthly emails because I never talk about them on instagram, but I like to share a little bit of what my life is like and my life kind of revolves around them! So!) Anyway, we’re extremely lucky, considering the circumstances, so here’s hoping the fall goes smoothly.
Despite my current life circumstances feeling tenuously okay, I’ve been carrying around a lot of dread lately. Do I feel flashes of happiness? Yes. Can I generally get through my days? Yes. Do I feel deep joy or contentment? That’s a harder question to answer. Like everyone else, I’ve spent the last month watching wildfires ravage California and hurricane after hurricane after hurricane form in the Atlantic. (We’re already at Greek names?!) I feel like climate dread is something that’s been creeping up on me for a long time, but this summer it’s felt present all the time, impossible to ignore. It’s obvious now that we’ve reached a turning point with climate change where the best we can do is try to mitigate the worse effects. Every day I play with my children, who love the world so much, and every day I think about the world I’m leading them into, and every day I feel essentially powerless to do anything about it. We’re losing so much.
I’ve been holding on to The Star a lot lately. (I talked about this a bit on Instagram a few weeks ago.) It’s very easy to feel hopeless about the general state of things, to feel nihilistic about the future as we watch what sometimes feels like a slow-motion apocalypse. The tarot’s Star holds us to hope in the face of all of this. For me, it feels less like a sweet suggestion and more like a command. A charged moment every time I pull it, as if it’s telling me, “God gave you the world, don’t you dare give up on it.” And I’m finding examples of this wild-eyed hope everywhere I look, as long I remember to keep my eyes open. In the last line of the Nicene Creed, which I hear in my head every time I pull The Star: “I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” In Gerard Manley Hopkins, who reminds us that “the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.” In this New Yorker profile of Susanna Clarke, where she talks about her new novel as being an anti-horror novel, by which she means that horror novels always have a horrific secret at the center of them, but what if the secret at the center of things was joyful instead?
Eucatastrophe is a term coined by J.R.R. Tolkein, from the Greek words for “good” and “destruction.” (It’s a cheesy word, but Tolkein was a cheesy guy.) He uses it to describe the moment in a story where you think things will descend into tragedy and instead they wrench themselves into joy. Tolkein believed that this happy ending--this sudden, joyous turn--is the true function of all fairy tales. It reminds me of how, in the tarot, The Tower and The Star are situated right next to each other. There are tragic catastrophes, but there are also joyful catastrophes. That’s what The Star is, the catch of the heart that hope brings. If we believe in one kind, we must believe in the other. This is my task for myself, to better balance the two, to hold fear lightly and to give hope the weight it deserves.