“Springtime” by Leatherface is stuck in my head, the lyrics “everything is new and everything is clean/And everything is free and there were still so many things to see” spinning around my mind like a Ferris wheel or an ouroboros, no start, no end, on repeat; the fast, gruff beauty of the song like rust and graffiti on a train car, a whistful energy. I’ve been jogging a lot lately, my body pressing against the wind, running towards the sun that’s cresting just over the horizon and peeking through the trees and setting the leaves on fire, bright and hot. I can feel my blood pulsing as I run, run, run, half a kilometer, a kilometer, a mile, two.
On the first day of spring, I run and let shuffle take over and give me a soundtrack, and today there isn’t any Leatherface, but there are the Muffs, and Jeff Rosenstock, and Taking Back Sunday. “This Photograph is Proof” turns out to be the perfect jogging song, the chiming guitars in the intro matching my pace perfectly.
When I get home, I draw tarot cards as my body calms, waiting for the sweat to stop. It is Ostara. The eqionox. Spring is here. I ask the cards what the season holds for me and for the world.
I start shuffling the Next World tarot and the Five of Cups leaps outta the deck onto the floor. I shuffle it back in, cut the cards with my left hand and draw… The Five of Cups. I can’t escape my fate, the fate of our shared reality comes flooding back in, cold and grey. In The Little White Book that came with the cards, Christy C. Road says: “Denying the truth of the circumstance feels like safety — as if silence was truly golden. The 5 of Cups is grieving… a lost sense of stability. Holding on to a memory of a projected past…” The State is disappearing people. They’re trying to get rid of libraries and rewrite both history and future. Reality is a cold, grey wave of boulders, a landslide.
The chiming guitars pulse in my head against the lyrics repeating: “I know you know. Remember more than you’d like to forget.” I draw one more card, this one from the Blind the Sun tarot, and see the Hierophant staring back at me. The Next World tarot calls them the Messenger: “the Messenger asks you to question those foundations based on fear and submission. She asks you to run… questioning the roots of the situation… and excavating the parts of it that keep you sound and allow you to breathe — the parts that rally your people and your community in moments of peace and connection. The status quo as we know it is a hateful norm no longer relevant in the Next World.” Reality tempered with hope. I feel queasy or sore when I’m not running. When I’m jogging the world fades away and all there is is forward movement and the feeling of my heart beating in time with my feet hitting the pavement and my strong, steady breathing. Bottle that feeling and carry it into action and fury. A rally to survive outta spite, survive this season, survive it all. Creating a memory of the beauty of the world, the worlds they are trying to erase or snuff outta ever existing, a better world that I know will come one day soon.
“There’s a little bit of springtime in the back of my mind
Remembers things perhaps as they should have been
Rather than the lies, rather than the cruelty”
