This Week's Writerly Tarot: The Four of Swords

Well, hello there. This is me crawling out from under the worst migraine headache I've had in almost three decades. It was so bad I was convinced my skull was going to crack and shatter and shards of bright pain-light would escape. There was nausea, agony, weeping incomprehensibility. I couldn't make words. My world was a double-visioned, ever-tightening vise of pain.

So I didn't draw any tarot cards. I didn't do anything but crawl under blankets in a mercifully dark and cold room and let painkillers and ice do their healing work. And now I am back among the living. But I have gotten so very little work done. This always makes me uncomfortable, to be starting with a backlog, already behind schedule for the week.

And so—as I sometimes do—I pulled a card deliberately this week instead of drawing one randomly. This week is definitely a Four of Swords week.

Here is what I had to say about it last time it appeared:

That's the advice from the Four of Swords, another one of those cards where the nature of the suit—in this case the active masculine properties of the Swords—is at odds with the number of the card. Fours are about stability and foundations—think squares—and as such, like to arrange all the ducks in a row.
Easy to do when the ducks are dead. But ah, there are depths to this particular dying, which of course isn't about physical death at all. There is tension in this card between action and passivity, and it is best resolved by remembering how the tarot looks at death.

And how does the tarot look at death? As transformation. Which means that this card isn't about being dead as much as it's about feeling dead, and sitting with that discomfort long enough to realize that, hey, you actually aren't dead, perhaps you're just being very very still, which can feel the same way.

When I look back at this migraine, I brought it upon myself. I pushed beyond my normal limits, which normally wouldn't have been a bad thing, but which, when coupled with events out of my control—a series of thunderstorms, especially—turned into a small horror.

The Four of Swords asks us to recuperate. It requests that we lie in effigy for a while. This may feel like wasted time, worthless seconds ticking by and nothing getting done. My Virgo soul is recoiling at the thought, even now. But as much as I like to check items off a to-do list, today I have to spend some time out of the world and in my body. My slightly-broken but rapidly healing body.

And so I will.

This week, you might be inclined to push past barriers, through limits, beyond obstacles. Which is all very well and good. But make time to retreat as well—into yourself, into a moment, into silence and solitude. Be passive and receptive, but protected and secluded as well. It may feel like death, like the walls of a coffin around you as the world pays brief respects and then moves on with its bright agenda.

But it's not death; it's simply stillness. Welcome it for a little while this week. Tomorrow and tomorrow will welcome you back to the stage. Today...rest. It will be good for your soul, I promise.