i’ve always been someone who looks for patterns in things; my senior thesis in religious studies was, after all, a project skeptical of the act of comparison while simultaneously engaging in it. i wanted to at least attempt to make sense of the fact that snakes show up in almost every culture i looked at, and the fact that their fate was often tied up with women. and so i looked for patterns.
it’s a very human thing to do, this looking for patterns. we looked at the mass of stars in the sky and made shapes and stories out of them.
this morning i am thinking of three things: hope, trapped in pandora’s box while all the other ills escape into the world; the movie sunshine, specifically the line “we are all space dust”; ashes to ashes, dust to dust. i am trying to find a pattern.
(spoilers for a 12-year-old movie to follow.)
the garden on the spaceship icarus II burns, dooming its crew. the botanist finds, impossibly, a bit of green among the ashes, before being stabbed in the back. we see her, later, sitting with the plant cupped in her hands. it’s this image that pulls it all together for me: hope is a foolish thing, a stupid thing, but we need it.
(speaking of, as a side note, can you imagine the hope or hubris it took to name a second ship icarus, after one failed mission flying to the sun? you’d think you’d switch to daedalus at that point.)
there are some things we cannot escape. earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. our bodies will be unmade and turned into something else. in that way, nothing is ever really lost. in some ways this can be a comfort, knowing that we are a part of something much larger than we could ever really understand. in some ways, of course, it can be terrifying.
a woman dies; a plant lives. a life is a life; a death is a death. she hoped the plant would live even if she would not. the universe doesn’t particularly care either way. perhaps hope stayed in pandora’s box to save us the expectation that it would. perhaps she saved hope for humanity, so that we could look in the face of that and still want things to be better than they are. stories, like tarot cards, can always be interpreted in different ways.
may this week be an easy one, darlings.
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this week’s deck: sasuraibito tarot
this week’s crystals: milk quartz, quartz, selenite, smoky quartz