In this bit of something different, Ada Wish (@a-wish) talks about trying to find ways to express an unnameable feeling.
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The Eight of Birds
This is a card drawn from Rachel Pollack’s Shining Tribe Tarot.
I enjoy using tarot as a form of meditation and reflection. Giving myself prompts and seeing where my subconscious mind grabs onto them in order to better understand what is happening beneath my surface.
I have a small handful of decks, but the one I always connect with the most is my copy of Rachel Pollack’s Shining Tribe Tarot.
For those who are unfamiliar with Rachel Pollack, she was a transgender mystic and expert on tarot and divination. This isn’t the first time she has appeared on this show. In addition to being an accomplished tarot writer, she wrote some iconic comic books, and we covered her entire Doom Patrol run on a previous episode.
Rachel Pollack passed away in April of 2023, but I keep wondering what a woman who dedicated her life to learning how to pay attention and look for the signs would think in this moment. As I am writing this, it is the week before trumps second inauguration, and checking in with my body, I have a deep sense of dread sitting in the pit of my stomach. Despite knowing things are bad, I am not sure what else I can do in this moment.
So I sit in silence, and wait for the cards to be revealed.
The card, The Eight of Birds means, amongst other things, anger, difficulty expressing feelings, and oppression,
the need to remember and create one’s own truth,
and for artists it can mean the need to find your own way of expression.
The art on the card, is a woman drawing stars beneath a volcano (representing her rage), flanked by birds (representing her liberation).
The woman’s path to liberation is through the volcano.
She must pass through rage and find words not only to express what she feels, but to create language for things that have never been named or for which the words have been forgotten or erased.
I find myself unsure of what to say right now.
Like literally, I feel like there isn’t a word for this exact calm before the storm.
Maybe some lost queer-German slang from the last days of the Weimar Republic, that roughly translates to “I am aware that everything is fine right here and right now, but there are blood-red clouds on the horizon, and we should all probably be doing more about these Nazis.” But if there was a concise word for that, then it is lost to time.
I find myself spinning my wheels in the interim.
Starting paintings and projects that don’t seem to go anywhere.
One thing I find myself doing is recording my thoughts in quiet moments throughout the day.
These aren’t particularly meaningful moments or profound thoughts, just mundane check ins. The quiet rituals of my life. Making bread, patching clothes, petting my cat, going to the gym, and sitting and listening to the trickle of the aquarium filter.
Listening back over them, I feel like the beauty of the recordings isn’t in my words but the background noise in these gentle moments of self-care. The sounds that would normally end up digitally reduced and cut out for clear audio.
The rush of an anxious breath released, the rumble of a cat purring, the whisper of a thread pulling torn fabric together, and the crunch of breaking freshly baked bread.
I think these sounds are maybe the sounds of my trans survival in a time of raging fascism and looming societal collapse.
They are the breaths and the breaks between acts of defiance and liberation that will define the language that I will have to find to speak my liberation into reality.
When I find myself anxious and spiraling about if it is still safe to go to a place, or panicking in the grocery store about how much flour to buy before prices rise, or laying in bed worrying about how my wife and I will feed our many misfit animals if food prices go up;
I’ll stop, and listen for the sounds of a language that communicates without words.
The rush of an anxious breath released, the whisper of a thread pulling torn fabric together, the crunch of breaking bread with neighbors and loved ones, and the rumble of a cat purring. Oblivious to the world around them. In those moments I’ll let listening be my language, and wait for the empty moments between the silence, where I can speak my liberation into existence.
PURRS
Hey everyone, this is Ada Wish. This was a bit of something different. We have a whole series coming up with Katie and I, but this year I also want to play around with some other things and see what feels right.
Let me know what you though by finding me on Bluesky at “A dash Wish”, like the letter a, a hyphen, and the word wish.
Please back us on patreon.com/totally trans to be the first to get our upcoming series on evangelion, and buy our merch and my art at SplendorQueer.com
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BYE
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