Hello Reader,

TW: This edition of The Sporadic contains references to death, grief, a little sex and infidelity, which may be triggering to some people.

How does the air feel around you? Late spring in London feels like mid-July right now. It’s tempting to attribute the energetic shift to the changing seasons: spring handing off to summer, ready to take over. Why not attribute it to the Sky Ballet?! Yes, yes, they all contribute. But something else is also shifting, from my vantage point that’s what I call collective energy and from the Tarot, it’s XIII - Death that keeps turning up.

To begin and end without fear

People often find Death and The Tower concerning, but I think it’s wasted emotion. A tip: follow the yellow…there is some benevolence at play here, it’s not as bad as it seems. If the imagery or symbolism makes you uneasy, don’t worry, hold my hand while we talk about them.

You can also read this sporadic musing on Substack

Looking at our experience more broadly, it’s no coincidence that our human culture consistently speaks of duality, and in our survival under capitalism, we seek to avoid hearing the message. Back in the 2010’s, YOLO (you only live once) was a big thing; a WEASAL!! I screamed inside as fledgling social media influencers, e.g. us and our friends and family and every stranger with an account… were subjected to the ‘adventures’ of what everyone individually classified as hashtag yolo. No famine or fast, just good vibes only. But what does living once and enjoying it have to do with being on an extreme journey to spiral ever upwards; spend, collect, and outdo each other? Good riddance…

Zooming in on a practical level… There are four seasons, but we could reduce those to two, fertile and fallow, then there’s day and night, which we fight with artificial light to accommodate our modern lifestyles, a struggle that plays out most dramatically in the quest for quality sleep and labour productivity. There’s even the ‘coming and going’ – our very real arrival on the planet and our inevitable departure. Life is a cycle, but let’s think of it as a collection of mini-cycles; there are infinite ways to break life down into such once you start to look for them. We seem to fear the abrupt arrival of change, yet the evidence suggests we’re dab hands at it! Riddle me that!? Well, in my opinion, Death is no different, with the caveat that we don’t (normally) survive the big death to tell everyone what happened and look forward to doing it again…

And that’s why I think we’ve needed to bring death into the human form - visualise its anthropomorphisation - the process, the event, the moment; at least three distinct aspects of the thing. We needed to see it as something we can make tangible – to gaze upon it and allow ourselves to find safety in a cerebral fight or flight; yes I can defeat it or kick it down the line. In the twentieth century, visual culture had us tripping, or as the young ones say, ‘crashing out,’ over death; fear as the driver. Anyone of a certain age only has to think about the health and safety videos from the 80s and 90s. Add to that the imagery of our beloved horror films and you can clearly see we really lean into the fear, for our pleasure and to our detriment. Where is the gentler fearlessness, the courage to balance this out? Why such a paucity of popular culture around la petite mort? Why did we relegate this sublime and survivable momentary carnal death to the wastelands of the pornographic, only for it to be distorted, caricatured and abandoned!

The variety of imagery of death in cartomancy speaks to the story narrated by the spirit of fear. In the montage, I’ve placed the cards so you can see those three distinct aspects; the process captured by the stilled action of the scythe, the event portrayed in the arrival of Death on his horse heralded or held by the holy man in yellow with the golden dawn breaking on the horizon and, the moment anticipated before the drop of the guillotine, and in the faces of those at a loved one’s bedside. What is certain is that after death, life continues. An individual cycle ends and begins in ways we can and can’t understand, and our individual and collective cycles must accommodate this transition. We have to learn to live differently; grief comes to help us understand the reality.

This here is short and simple, I cannot do justice to existence in a Substack post. We spend our lives reconciling with grief and death, but this is enough for our purposes today. The central message here is that we live within constant cycles of beginnings and endings.

Still holding my hand? Thank you for sticking with it – let’s zoom right back out to the archetypal level. Embracing that we are in constant cycles of living and dying – you renew your entire stock of red blood cells every 120 days - it’s not so frightening to see that when Death turns up in a spread it’s, almost certainly, 99.9% not indicating a literal death. This card turns up and tells us something about our position or our question in a cycle. This is not a time to be afraid; this is a time to see that you have chanced upon a process in time when fundamental change is in the air. This is what I can feel while surfing the energetic waves at the moment, here on Terra Firma and in the aether. If you are feeling it too, reach for the archetype without fear. On a small scale, there is joy and pleasure in the cycle and on a big scale, grief is a better companion than fear to help you through.

An uncomfortable truth

Circling back to my opening trigger warning, I promised you infidelity – so I’d better follow through with my promise/threat!

Now working with ancestors is my favourite process in lightwork. By ancestor, I mean anyone who is connected to you, in an incarnate or disincarnate lineage, and has crossed over. We can go deeper another time. I enjoy it so much that I have been working on ways to do this with other people, and this month, I had an ancestor come through who was insistent on speaking about their infidelity. Mind, at the time I was in the aether, so I didn’t realise I was meant to share it; the photo is a bit wonky. I really didn’t want to stage a new one and ruin the vibe.

This ancestor wanted to explain the circumstances of their infidelity; they wanted it to be explicitly acknowledged; this was what was important – hear me, hear this slice of my truth. I used to enjoy saying, ‘in an incident there are always two truths and then there are the facts.’ I enjoy that even more now that I’ve got some law under belt!

Often, we are so unwilling to deal with the collection of complicated emotions that surround an episode of infidelity that we shut down any discussion around it. Luckily, conceptualising emotions is one of my strengths (lol), so we took a dive with Belline to see what needed to be said! I share it with you so you know that when we do ancestor work, when you speak to loved ones wherever they are after they have passed or not, remember they were once just like you – incarnate, imperfect - here on earth!

Q: What do you want to share with us about the circumstances of this relationship?

A: It was a relationship of joy and compassion. She was an intense, loving woman, and we communicated clearly about the situation and about us in it. My home life was set about with difficulties - real problems - and in this relationship, I felt the safety of love.

The bookend

Again I reached out to my friend, the Devourer of Books, for a literary recommendation. I said, ‘read this draft’ and she sent me a photo of the quotation above and then pinged a couple of ideas back at me.

Here they are:

• Treacle Walker by Alan Garner (HarperCollins, 2021)
• Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune (Tor, 2021)

I asked a couple of other friends and this is what they recommended:

• Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (Doubleday, 1979)
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (Alred A. Knopf, 1987)

I went for poetry, I have soft spot for poetry:

• If They Come for Us by Fatimah Ashgar (One World/Random House, 2018)

Assuredly available at all good book stores and wherever you get your audio books!

If you feel inclined, let me know your recommendations, your sky ballet insights and such, and maybe how the energy is moving for you!

Love, Cate xx