TAROT IN THE WILD: 42

So, how the hell are you?

Illustration by Sandra Boynton. For more of Boynton’s work, click here.

How are you?—that basic, most reflexive, most polite of greetings in the English language—now precipitates the most uneasy of exchanges.

This awkwardness lives not only on the tongue but, for many of us, throughout mind and body as we struggle with how truthful to be, how detailed to get, how deep to go, or whether to answer the question at all.

This question now elicits a selection or combo of heavy sighing, shoulder shrugging, eye rolling, hemming and hawing or, depending on one’s perceived trust of the questioner, an outright rant on all going sideways in our world. I’m almost never hearing those two little words, I’m fine, anymore, and I don’t remember the last time I said them—or, at least, the last time I said them without serious qualification.

Only some of us continue to fool ourselves into believing that HOW WE ARE lives right over here separate from HOW EVERYTHING IS somewhere way other there.

For most of us in the United States of Dissociation—and elsewhere, for other reasons—this has become a shitty time to be alive. And, yeah, I’ll say it plain, because the lack of honesty, the avoidance of looking at reality, is exactly what got us here.

For folks in the US now, when we wrestle with the question How are you?, we’re doing so within a society that has long discouraged meaningful exploration of that very question. Now the Trump regime has launched its blitzkrieg of threats, cruel punishment, and silencing of anyone courageous enough to take a whack at that question and begin answering it frankly, in public, and in depth.

All this bears implications for the practice of divination or any counseling or healing practice. Most clients book a consultation seeking help with a matter of personal, individual concern. But clients who book with me should not be surprised to also hear how their lives are unfolding against the backdrop of our challenged communities, societies, and world.

Which is to say, my practice is not “Good Vibes Only” spirituality, tiptoeing around difficult, controversial issues of contemporary life. Some folks would consider me too “political” and say these things have no place in spiritual work. Others understand that spirituality and creative imagination are forever intertwined with the condition of the world and offer medicine to heal and transform what ails both our personal and communal realities.

For better or worse, none of us exists apart from the societal and world fabric that gave rise to us and sustains us, restrains and harms us, or cushions and comforts and lifts us. This is baseline intersectionality. For better or worse, you and your environment create and profoundly depend upon each another.

No man is an island, poet John Donne asserted before taking his thought deeper.

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

Check this out. When you think of it, though, that tells us we kind of are islands.

Islands only appear to be separate chunks of Earth when we view them from afar or when we inhabit them.

Below the waters, islands are one Earth.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa