On Praise & Celebration
Lucille Clifton
The first time my dad sang our family’s praise song to me I was applying to college. At my competitive public high school, the pressure to “succeed”—perfect SAT scores, etc.—was intense to say the least, and the whole year I imagined I could feel my first grey hairs sprouting (even though they wouldn’t until years later, in 2020, specifically). The application process left my anxious and ridden with imposter syndrome. Who was I to be applying to the top institutions I had chosen? My insecurity was only augmented by my peers’ racism—I was a hardworking and good student, but they assumed I would get in not because of this but because I was black.
I was so desperate to get into a good university because I was conditioned to believe that this determined my worth. At that time in my life, I had never felt less sure of myself or my accomplishments; I felt that didn’t have the authority to determine whether these had any value. The authority lay within the institution of the college admission process.
My father rarely speaks about Yoruba culture to us and, because these moments are so scarce, they are each crystalized in my memory, as sweet and nostalgic and immaculately preserved as a honeycomb. In my memory, when he sang our praise song my bedroom filled with light. Like any magic spell, the praise song had an aura of brightness, power, and potency about it. The only way I can describe music I really enjoy—quite clumsily—is to say that it entered my body. I felt the praise song in my body, too, like the overcoming, purifying force of a ray of sunlight.
The tradition of praise songs in Yoruba culture originates from worshipping the orixas. Most families have a patron saint, and ours is Ogun, the deity of agriculture, war, weapons, and tools. In singing Ogun’s praises, we open ourselves to receiving the deity’s blessings. In singing Ogun’s praises, we also sing our own.
I hadn’t ever thought about praise beyond the context of the personal, even though across cultures praise often manifests in the context of the divine. I was reminded recently of our praise song and for the first time considered its spiritual significance. I immediately connected this tradition with what I know about praise in Christianity, particularly in Black church. Yoruba beliefs and practices have survived in the Americas’ black diaspora in many more obvious ways—Umbanda and Candomblé in Brazil, Santería in Cuba—but the connection to Christian praise is both more sublte and to me equally powerfully. Praise songs in Yoruba praise the gods with the request that the gods protect the singers, and similarly, praise in the Christian context is addressed to God and invites God’s good works into the space. At the same time, offering praise in both contexts invites the speakers into profound expression of celebration and joy.
Maybe the ritual is to ask for a remedy, but it’s clear that the cure is also found within the act of asking. There is so much fulfillment and joy in enacting celebration. In being agents of praise. I believe that due to our culture’s competition, hierarchy, and individualism, we are obsessed with being on the receiving end of praise. We want to receive accolades, celebration and loved. These yearnings are understandable, and at the same time, I imagine that being agents of celebration, praise and love would offer just as much healing as receiving them—if not more. Our ancestors knew that we didn’t need to wait to be celebrated. We needed to celebrate ourselves. Creating celebration and offering praise imbues us with narrative authority—the authority to decide what is worth of our attention and worship.
I love Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me,” because it reminds us of the potential to be rooted in joy irrespective of circumstances. She invites her readers to share the space of praise and appreciation with her: the poem ends “come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to killed me and has failed.”
Our accomplishments, excellence, and accolades are all worth celebrating. Our love and families and friends and communities are worth celebrating. And so are more mundane aspects of our experience—our survival. Our getting up each day. The astrology of the months ahead is so, so difficult. To navigate them, we need to be rooted in celebration of what is joyful. We need to be agents and recipients of our own praise.
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Astrology & Mythmaking
The Blossom of Youth by Ladislas
Czachórski
I’m obsessed with myth, and not in the way, or not exclusively in the way, that you might think. It’s true that astrology is a tradition rooted in different mythologies, the kind of mythologies that involve deities and origin stories and archetype. But I’m not so interested in these particular stories as much as the way that astrology operates as its own mythological system, and as such creates opportunities for people to interpret their own stories.
Mythologies by Roland Barthes is one of the books that most changed my life, because it made everything so clear. In it, Barthes presents a definition of myth that has little to do with folklore. Instead, he defines myth as the story arises when an image or idea comes to symbolize an entire ideology. One of the clearest examples from the book is his analysis of the cover of a French imperialist magazine, which shows an African youth saluting the French flag on the cover. In his analysis, the image of the young man becomes the signifier, what points to meaning, and the signified, what the image represents on its most fundamental level, is the young man himself. Together, the signifier and signified make up a sign. But that sign itself has yet another layer of meaning, which in this case is propagandistic: the presence of a black, African soldier on the cover of a mainstream French magazine in 1955 signified racial equity under the French empire, French benevolence towards its African colonies, and those colonies’ acceptance of and respect for the French empire. (We don’t have to look too hard at all to find modern-day equivalents—check out those “listening & learning” posts from early June. They signify something beyond support for Black Lives Matter. They signify the goodness of the entities that posted them; they signify their awareness; they signify, particularly on behalf of corporations, the desire not to be left out of a trend.)
If you haven’t figured it out already, Barthes is primarily interested in exploring myth as propaganda, and Mythologies shows the extent to which untrue stories about marginalized people pervade our world. This, of course, is something that scholars across disciplines, not to mention many ordinary people, know intimately, but I think something about Barthes’ framework makes it easy to recognize assumptions and interrupt them. if you are interpreting a picture of someone, or indeed the presence of someone, to signify anything beyond that person’s existence—if you are telling yourself a story about them—then you aren’t engaging with reality, but a myth.
Of course as Joan Didion said we tell ourselves stories in order to live, and there’s no way to be a human on this earth without engaging in some form of mythmaking. It’s not a question of whether we engage with reality through the filter of myth, but whether those myths serve both us and the truth. Oppression in all its forms is maintained by a powerful series of myths that do justice neither the truth nor any living being. At the time I started using astrology in my life, I was struggling to disbelieve these myths. Although I knew intellectually that they were untrue, I lacked the language that I needed to write new stories.
Astrology is a language, and as such it is a sign system; with astrology we can make myths. It’s a system of mythologizing in which, arguably, we have more agency. Although the planets, signs, houses, and aspects are all signs in the linguistic sense—symbols that are attached to meaning—the process by which those signs take on their own secondary significations and become myth gives us much more agency on the individual level. Each birth chart is unique, and ultimately, each person living out their birth chart is the ultimate authority on the myth that is made of their specific combination of signs. Astrologers, because we know are familiar with the language of this framework, can point folks in the direction of their own mythmaking. But the power of writing, the power of understanding, lies within each person. As such, astrology allows us to reclaim self by reclaiming narrative control. It reminds us of our own protagonism.
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Celebrating Black Art for the New Moon in Cancer
In an essay on Zora Neale Hurston, Zadie Smith writes openly about her aversion to reading the copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God that her mother had gifted her when she was young. “Why, because she’s black?” Smith recalls responding when her mom told her she’d like the book. At twelve, Smith already self-identified as an “objective aesthete,” and objected to enjoying literature not because it was good, but because it represented her.
The protagonist of Lena Waithe’s “Twenties,” Hattie, echoes this sentiment. An aspiring screenwriter, Hattie initially refuses to apply for a job working on a show for one of L.A.’s most successful black producers because the show (“My Bae”), in Hattie’s mind, is trash. When her friends tell her that she should like the show, and should “support black shit,” Hattie responds that she thinks it’s better to “support good shit that just happens to be black.”
Both Hattie and Zadie Smith emphasize the importance of appreciating black art first as art and second as black. Later in her essay, Smith highlights the critical disservice that mainstream discourse does to black art by overemphasizing creators’ race. This relegates black art to its own separate category, and from this sidelined position, black art isn’t posed to represent the universal, while white art is assumed to do exactly that. Representing black artists because they’re black is reactionary, and inherently insincere. The alternative is to recognize that there are many good, talented black artists, and that they’ve been overlooked because they’re black. This form of representation is motivated both by equity and by a commitment to art itself; as such, this representation is sincere, and therefore sustainable.
Monday’s new moon in Cancer is an opportunity to reevaluate and deepen the intentions set around a month ago. The last new moon, at zero degrees of Cancer, was a solar eclipse. It arrived in the middle of a moment of worldwide activism to protect and support black lives. Being an eclipse, it invited rash, quick responses, without requiring a lot of forethought. Around a month ago, there were mass campaigns to follow black creators on social media; random celebrities publicly declaring their support for the Black Lives Matter movement; and countless corporations pledging to “stand in solidarity” with black employees or complete diversity trainings or be “more inclusive.” Many, many generally apolitical people dipped their toes into movement work and began to build awareness of inequity. This a good thing. But is it sustainable?
This new moon sits in a opposition to Saturn, and is exactly the opposite of reactionary. Saturn demands that we give things the time, planning, and depth that they need. This new moon asks for recommitment to the changes that so many initiated at the beginning of the month. It asks for representation—and reparations and abolition work and repairing internalized oppression and culture change—to be sustainable. And sustainability demands that we see with complexity.
When I think about what I would like to see in terms of a sustainable anti-racist cultural shift, primarily I imagine a world in which black art has more space. But having more space doesn’t just mean that our TV shows and movies and books and essays have the space to exist. It means they have the space to be complex. Part of unsustainable representation—patronizing black art because its black—is that it demands that creators represent blackness in a particular way, or that they are committed to depicting blackness specifically rather than the universal. Of course there are (and have always been—Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Chinua Achebe, Jamaica Kincaid) black artists who are already doing this work. One show I love that for me represents, as Hattie would say, “supporting good shit that happens to be black,” is Michaela Coel’s “I May Destroy You.” For me, the show is utopic: it is peopled almost exclusively with black characters and, importantly, never feels like it is trying to make a point even as it engages complex questions of race, power, and gender. Coel’s intention seems to be to ask questions rather than answer them. By gifting her characters nuanced moralities, personalities, and responses to power, Coel has created an incredibly human and humanizing show.
More black art like this, and funding for more black art like this, is the backbone of transformative, sustainable cultural change. That’s what this new moon asks us to commit to. It asks us to remember the complexity (and humanness!) behind social justice work. It asks us for deliberation in addition to decisiveness. It asks us to remember that even as we advocate for clear, specific collective action, we are still required to engage in complex questions with no clear answers.
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How the Language of Self-Care Is Used to Uphold White Supremacy
I’ve recently had the experience of being in white-majority wellness and social justice spaces, particularly a trauma-informed yoga training that I completed last week. As a queer black woman living through this moment, I feel very vulnerable and sensitive, and upon entering the training knew that I needed a lot of care and attention in the space. It was necessary for us to spend time unpacking racism as a group, and on the surface, our discussions seemed to prioritize the safety and wellness of all group members. But later on in the training, I noticed a tendency for some white people to use the language of wellness and self-care culture to uphold white supremacy within the space.
This has also happened to me with white friends in my personal life. As anti-racism and other forms of social justice work have become more widespread, so have the cultures of self-care and wellness, and the two intersect in ways that are sometimes helpful and sometimes problematic. Because self-care and wellness culture have become so popularized—which for the most part is a good thing—I think there’s a tendency to use terms that originate in these spaces without engaging with their complexity. Without seriously examining when and why we’re using terms like “self-care” and “boundary setting,” particularly in social justice spaces, it is easy to use them to bypass serious engagement in the work of equity and to harm people of color.
For instance, if a white person finds themselves “setting a boundary” the minute a person of color expresses anger or hurt, this is not setting a boundary—this is tone policing, a white supremacist tool that has been used to silence and dehumanize people of color, black people in particular, for centuries. This centers white people in the space and normalizes their experience of fragility while pathologizing the person of color’s experience of emotional expression. Similarly, if a white person finds themselves retreating into “self-care” or “triggered” the minute a conversation enters the (for them) uncomfortable topics of white supremacy and racist violence, this is not self-care, but avoidance. Caring for oneself is not the same as caring for one’s fragile ego, which is threatened by engaging with the harm perpetuated by white supremacy.
Engaging in this conversation is tricky, because the language of self-care culture is set up to be indisputable. Everyone is supposed to practice self-care; critiquing someone’s misuse of the term or concept can easily be viewed as harmful. But it is exactly the indisputable quality of this language that makes it so amenable to gaslighting and other forms of manipulation. White supremacy has a long history of misusing and changing language to disguise its true intentions. Politicians stopped talking about race in the late 20th century and started talking about crime. It’s much easier for the mainstream to accept criticism of an openly racist administration than one that is “tough on crime.” “Crime” in the public imagination is indisputably bad. Similarly “self-care” and “boundaries” are things that, within certain subsets of our culture, people are indisputably entitled to, on the terms that only they individually can name. It’s much harder to criticize someone for, in their words, “setting a boundary” than it is to criticize them for tone-policing that they haven’t strategically re-branded as a form of self-care.
I believe fundamentally that everyone has the right to self-care and that it is an incredibly important part in all of our work to build a world that is more just and safer for everyone. But I think that under the current systems of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy, it is hard for white people in particular—and other people with privilege—to discern the difference between discomfort and an actual threat of harm. Discomfort is a natural part of engaging with conversations in which people are made aware of their privilege, and accepting discomfort is actually a part of self-care, because it is through this discomfort that they can access their role in anti-oppression work. Self-care is community care. That fact is often absent from conversations in wellness spaces. But because there’s a tendency among people with privilege to perceive discomfort as unsafe, claiming self-care can become a mechanism by which they are able to avoid engaging with uncomfortable conversations.
This avoidance is justified by the idea that each person must take care of herself in order to then be able to take care of community. A metaphor that I’ve heard facilitators overuse when speaking about self-care is the idea of the oxygen mask on the airplane: fasten your own before helping someone else. But that metaphor is an inaccurate comparison: it presupposes an environment in which each person initially has equal access to oxygen, as they’re all in the same plane. In such a situation, if someone has to wait a couple seconds for someone else to care for themselves, it’s (hopefully) not such a big deal. In reality, though, white people and other privileged people have much more access to resources and care than marginalized people—and, consequentially, need them less. When white people overuse “self-care” as a reason not to engage, or to delay engaging with the difficult conversations and actions necessary to anti-oppression work, they are not fastening their own oxygen mask. They are perpetuating a system in which marginalized people must do more of the work with fewer of the resources.
If there’s one thing I’d want us, collectively, to remember, it’s that self-care re-emerged in popular culture recently due to the work of activists, particularly black femme activists. Audre Lorde re-popularized the concept of self-care when she wrote in her 1988 book A Burst of Light and Other Essays that“caring for [her]self is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." The self-care that is envisioned by activists, for activists, justifiably might look a little like self-indulgence, as people deeply engaged in activist work—especially those with marginalized identities—are shouldering, with little support, all of the responsibilities of our society, often with few resources to meeting their goals. I genuinely believe that for such a person taking a bubble bath is radical, and is an act of political warfare. But for those with more privilege who are less active in political movements, self-care should have nothing to do with self-indulgence, or with comfort.
My hope is that with everything that’s happening, white people and people across different types of privileges can embrace discomfort more. Reframing discomfort not just as necessary, but as a form of self-care, is a huge step in working towards all of our liberation.
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Inspiration Within: The Ace of Wands & Five of Swords
Deck credit: Small Spells Tarot
It’s easy for conversations about Venus retrograde to focus only on relationships. Romance takes precedence in our collective understandings of the planet of love and the erotic—which makes sense, as romantic relationships occupy an unduly privileged position on the hierarchy of relationships our culture values and understands. While dating, sex, and this particular type of love are valuable and certainly worth exploring during this time, I think this retrograde cycle is also an incredible opportunity to explore our relationship to creativity.
In her classic essay, “Uses of the Erotic,” Audre Lorde writes:
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information…The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.
I would argue that ignoring the creative aspect of the erotic is one of the ways in which we misname it, and enable it to be used against us. An erotic that necessarily depends on something or someone outside of ourselves to be experienced is inherently less empowering than considering it as something that originates from us, and that we can express independently. By limiting what we allow ourselves to understand as the erotic only to what we see externally represented as “erotic”—sex and romance (especially between straight and cis people) we cut ourselves off from an enormous source of inner power and wealth.
That’s why this retrograde is an invitation to reinvestigate our relationship with our own creative erotic. Because hopefully none of us are out and about meeting new folks, the quarantine is especially conducive to exploring this branch of Venusian energy. The Ace of Wands always shows up as an invitation to look for inspiration, to explore what ignites our creativity. I think there’s also an invitation to reframe inspiration with this cards: while we often refer inspiration as something that comes from outside of the self, it might be more helpful to consider it as something that originates inside, but that we’ve forgotten; and that, once we see something outside of ourselves that reminds us of our inner artist, we remember our creativity and can work with it.
The five of swords, in turn, is a reminder that we don’t need to benchmark. I’ve always understood this card to be about competition—the sense of scarcity that impels us to look towards others to understand what we should like, how we should present, what we should create. Your creative energy is your own. Your art is your own. Only you can make and think and invent and write what you, uniquely, write. I’ve often found that a powerful self-sabotage technique I use is looking for “inspiration” as a veil to really sussing out who I consider to be competition. Comparing yourself to others is detrimental to the power that lies in the potential of the creative erotic. Get in touch with it as we move towards the end of Venus’s retrograde. That’s what this transit is really about.
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Closure: The Eight of Cups & Ten of Wands
Deck credit: Moonchild Tarot
Inspired by an essay Elena Ferrante wrote for the Guardian, I wrote on the topic “clean breaks” the other week, and was surprised to discover that I don’t think I’ve ever broken cleanly away from anything in my life. In the column, Ferrante writes, “I’ve always felt the joy of upheaval, and maybe that’s why my relatively recent discovery of the suffering inherent in change has made a deep impression.”
I, too, love upheaval. I create conditions in my life that lead to constant change. Easily bored, once I feel that I’m done with one phase of life ends I throw myself into another. (I even do this with books! I never myself time to marinate in one after it ends; within literal hours, I’m on to the next.) My goodbyes, even if heartfelt, are rushed and half-baked; I find forgiveness incredibly difficult, for myself and for others.
That’s why, if anything, my breaks are filthy.
A season of many retrogrades is upon us and coupled with the eight of cups, we’re all being invited into (hopefully clean) breaks. As we navigate this moment of collective crisis, we are of course as a society needing to move away from very many values and practices and systems but that kind of breaking, which will be messy and too long and too slow, is not the kind of breaking I’m talking about.
I am talking about intimately personal breaks. More likely than not, the endings that we need are internal. The eight of cups addresses some of the most subtle transformations possible—the card isn’t about leaving behind something that is obviously and acutely painful. Instead, it helps us to recognize when we need to break away from something that is comfortable, even pleasant, but not vitally fulfilling. This card isn’t about escape; it’s about pursuit. And because pursuit often feels superfluous while escape, conversely, often—but not always!—appears essential, this card can be a tricky one to work with. It asks us to leave behind what we know that at one point we liked. What we know that at one point was enough.
And it asks us to do that slowly, remembering to appreciate everything that the habit or relationship or home or job we’re leaving behind has given us. Because leaving is painful, there’s such a tendency to rush through them. The eight of cups wants us to linger, but without indulging the illusion that maybe we shouldn’t leave anyway. It asks for a slow, thoughtful goodbye.
The presence of the ten of wands reinforces the slowness of the process that is being asked of us. The burnout card of the minor arcana, the ten of wands shows us when we’ve taken on too much. Rushing from one phase of life, identity, job, or even habit to the next leads to burnout. I know from experience. So many of us know from experience. Taking time to be in the in-between space is revitalizing, even if incredibly uncomfortable. Give yourself space to absorb the lessons of cycles that are closing out. You have the resource of time, even if you think you don’t. Closure is a gift.
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Rushing: The Eight & Nine of Wands
Deck credit: Moonchild Tarot
The mind likes to move quickly, even when the body doesn’t. If left to its own devices, the mind would leave the body behind. Just now, I stumbled upon a free video sharing service—the pitch is that the platform will allow you to “become faster than typing.” Typing itself being faster than writing, and writing being, if not faster, then a more optimized and efficient way of spreading information than its predecessor, oral tradition.
I have carpel tunnel. This is because when I type my mind seeks to leave behind the limitations of the body: aching muscles and tendons in my wrists and forearms. Even if I were to address this by, for instance, creating content only via video, I doubt I could ever speak at the speed of an idea—and I think this is the aim of inventions that seek to optimize the way we produce information. To enable us to create at the speed of thought. To remove the obstacle of slowness that the human body presents to channeling inspiration.
We will never be able to do this, of course, and if we could the results would be disastrous. Thoughts are messy, nonlinear, and for the most part, total nonsense. Having a good idea gives us the illusion that most of our ideas are good; that if we don’t work quickly to channel, immediately, what is inspiring us, then it will escape our grasp.
I think that this is true in the moment of inspiration, but once the electricity has past, many of us cling to the illusion that speediness is a virtue. That moving quickly is the only way to be creative. And, because of this, we miss out on the opportunity to develop the diligence and discipline that genuinely support creative practice.
In the Tarot, the eight of wands is the moment of inspiration. It does invite us to move quickly. It asks us to act first and think later. When this card appear, it is wise to honor the current of creative motivation. Moving through this eight, we are gifted with the transformative power of saying yes to something that we feel called to.
For me, the nine immediately following has a completely different message. I drew both cards at the beginning of this week. The nine of wands always appears for me when I’m getting way too far ahead of myself. Traditionally, the card is associated with becoming exhausted just as one is nearing the completion of a task. For me, it is about the exhaustion that is a direct result of over-ambition, of the unwillingness to work with what’s in front of me and the desire to, instead, invent and endless series of future things to accomplish. This card epitomizes unhealthy relationships to divination: drawing cards or looking at chart progressions for months and then years into the future, and becoming overwhelmed by the quantity of information and hazy predictions. Warmly, the nine of wands reminds us to tend to the task at hand.
And when moments of inspiration pass, the task at hand is often dull. It is editing, or studying, or reviewing, or creating listlessly but diligently and hoping that inspiration will come again. It’s easy to get carried away by things that excite our imaginations: this is what is supposed to happen in the eight. But when we try to maintain the speed of production or creation that inspiration demands, burnout becomes inevitable. Slowness is the salve.
That’s the message of this astrological moment, at least, when we have so many planets stationing retrograde. These moments aren’t fun or exciting, but they are necessary. They teach us the value of showing up without expectations. Of moving further and further away from attachment to the results of our process. Of creating slowly and surely.
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Retrograde Season and the Eights of the Tarot
Deck credit: Nosotras Tarot
Next week three planets will station retrograde, and we enter a dense period of reflection, reevaluation, and eventually renewal. At the top of the triangle, the page of cups reminds us to be playful with this time. Rather than allowing the new slowness of life to be frustrating, this card reminds us that slowness can also be fun. Confusion, even, can be fun. The page of cups asks us to infuse this time with the twin spirits of play and curiosity.
The two eights of the Tarot speak to the need to reevaluate. The eight of cups, in particular, is about assessing what has been acquired and recognizing that what we need is in fact something different. The eight of pentacles, similarly, is about apprenticeship, assessing our progression towards expertise with gentle criticism and the whole-hearted willingness to improve our craft.
I was reminded of the interpretation that another reader (@mysticaselvagem) gave to me of the eight of pentacles, which I found really lovely and helpful. This card, she said, reminded me that everything we’ve done—the lessons I’ve learned, the experiences acquired—goes into an enormous container to use at our disposal. No moment goes to waste. It was a beautiful message, and one I needed at the time. I was in Brazil on a yearlong teaching fellowship, and it felt important that I was there—it felt important, specifically, that I was not in the United States—and I was learning many things. But none of them seemed willing to converge into a solid shape. They were as disperse as particles of wind. And yet, this reader reminded me, they were all held together in an invisible container. They were all held together to support me. Even the spaces that felt empty held something important. And would, themselves, be contained for future use.
Retrograde periods can feel like empty spaces, but they are undoubtably of infinite use. So much happens in the ellipses of the stories we make of our lives. One of the most pervasive, harmful longings that I have is one for simplicity, a result of the magical thinking that also leads to my desire for instant gratification. Retrograde periods are the work and the confusion that we want to skip over in the retellings of our journeys to success, or to anywhere. We’re not interested in hearing or speaking about the six-hour accidental detour or the missed bus or the time that we didn’t have any idea what we were doing or even what we wanted to do and each day seemed like a distraction from itself. There is no lie more harmful than the myth that process is linear, clear from the start. We can do away with the implications that process doesn’t matter—that it isn’t the most electric, delicious part of the story, with its many humiliations and uncertainties—and that achievement, once earned, is fixed; that it looks and feels a certain way; that it is or even can be destiny.
An accomplishment-oriented culture creates a hierarchy of time. There is the time worth recounting, the time that deserves our words and attention: time in which we got something done. Then, there is time that in our stories we feel we can skip over: this is everything that happens in a retrograde. But while we may have preferences for moments that have certain qualities—moments of victory, passion, or justice—the way we understand our lives must try to negate these preferences. All moments deserve our attention, even if they do not demand it. Time operates according to its own logic, and that logic is void of hierarchy. All of the time we spend on this planet contains lessons, contains medicine, contains keys.
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