Signs in the Cards
Meditating on synchronicity, tarot, and the deaths of my infant siblings
Before I draw anything from my tarot deck, I first strike a match, listening for the hiss of a tiny flame leaping to life so I can light one of the candles I keep nearby. I open up my journal, with the white marbled cover and golden spine that brings to mind temples and originally made me grab it with the intent to record thoughts about scriptures or general conference. Then, after slipping the cards from their casing, I knock on top of the deck three times to reset it from the last reading. I can’t say for sure if this actually does anything, on a physical level, but it’s a habit-turned-ritual that seems at the very least to bring my awareness in a little closer.
The query on my mind right now is synchronicity (when multiple events, occurring separately, still somehow feel meaningfully related). These little instances of seeming coincidence have always felt quite overt in my life — like having a vivid dream about being approached by a myriad of woodland creatures, and then the following afternoon spotting a pair of crows hopping on the ground, framed between two aspen trees. An omen . . . or a crowmen! I tried to creep closer and sneak a picture of the strikingly symmetrical scene but the birds startled and fled anyway just as an orange butterfly fluttered in front of me like a leaf. Or, that week where I kept checking the clock just in time to read 1:43 (143 was a symbol loved by Fred Rogers, since each number of it counts out the letters in “I l-o-v-e y-o-u”).
Of course, a glance at the calendar on my wall reminds me why the topic of fate and signs might feel so pertinent today. There’s a pattern that’s loomed over me since I was a short-but-spindly youth, the one I haven’t wanted to think about because of the way it’s rewritten the whole fabric of my life: September.
More specifically, Saturday, September 8, 20011 is the date that crashed my family’s world to a sudden standstill when my baby brother, Dominic, went into cardiac arrest at Lagoon Amusement Park. It’s been over two decades now, yet the memories — from those tense and surreal minutes after getting off the bumper cars, of staying with my aunt and then with a neighbor, about making posters to put by his hospital bedside — sometimes still sting with such fresh and raw clarity that they may as well have happened last week.
Or even right now, my chest and limbs tighten as the recollections resurface. I try to redirect my thoughts, but it’s harder to hold on to the few things I can still fuzzily remember from the months while Dominic was alive: his thick pouf of brown hair, my brother and I making him laugh by popping up from behind the back seats in the car.
There’s a pattern that’s loomed over me since I was a short-but-spindly youth, the one I haven’t wanted to think about because of the way it’s rewritten the whole fabric of my life: September.
I don’t recall if I even noticed the calendar alignment in 2007, when a family friend showed up at our door while I was babysitting and said gravely, “Your sister’s really sick.” Bridget’s heart had stopped, too. She wasn’t even two months old — I barely knew her at all. Immediately I felt a strange sense of resignation, like if something this awful and unbelievable already happened once, and I had been braced for death ever since, why would it not happen again? Why not have it happen on another Saturday, September 8?
My siblings passed away a day apart, separated by six years, on the 14th2 and 15th. If my life had a script writer, its editor would surely balk at how unrealistic and unlikely it all is: “And they both share names with saints, too?! Seems a little heavy on the foreshadowing.” But like my mom once pointed out, no matter how improbable the odds, the outcomes may as well be a coin toss: either it doesn’t occur, or it does. And in this case, in this universe, it did.
Running my fingertips around the smooth, cold, gold-shimmer edge of the cards, I allow myself a moment of doubt: will this really give me a meaningful answer? Tarot always seems to. But one of these times, surely, the luck will run out and I’ll pull a dud and ruin the magic. I like to think I still have a healthy amount of skepticism for the practice (knowing that maybe the cards only speak by reflecting my own psyche back at me); and, at the same time, there are too many times I’ve felt directly heard and spoken to, even in surprising ways, for it to only be random. Once I suggested to my spouse, a data nerd, that we should make a spreadsheet to compare the number of entries in my deck guidebook about slowing down and resting with how many of them I just kept happening to find. I am, apparently, not very good at taking this particular repeated advice.
The train of thought pulls my attention over to my bed, where my kids have flocked to be close to me while we each play in our own worlds. In the same field of vision, I can see the dolphin plush that teenage-me picked out from the gift shop during Bridget’s hospital stay, and also these two beloved goofballs (alive, breathing, thank God) huddled up under the blanket, giggling about some game on their tablet.
That’s the size I was, I realize, looking at my son. That’s how old and how small I was when Dominic died. Somehow, at that tiny age, I stood face-to-face with the grisly details of mortality — everyone is fragile and can be gone at any moment. And, if my siblings had something genetic going on, that might mean I’m susceptible, too. Maybe I’d pass it on to my offspring. Despite years of therapy and anti-anxiety medications, I haven’t been able to un-memento mori ever since. The threat of becoming bones, or having to bury someone else’s, feels to me like the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors: a bizarre, ugly shape that fills and haunts the image no matter where else you try to look. Though it’s ever-present, September is when it becomes most visceral. And even though every 8th since has passed unremarkably (at least, so far), I still feel a deep kinship with Billie Joe Armstrong’s ballad about just sleeping through the whole damn month.3
With a long exhale, I bring myself back into my body once more. The candle still flickers wordlessly on the window ledge. I take a deep breath, finally ready to delve into the deck.
Without breaking my silence, I ask, What are moments of repetition or seeming significance here to teach me? I let the cards fall into an assorted cascade between my hands; the act itself becomes a meditation. Sometimes, one will literally leap out at me, flinging itself onto the floor or my desk as I shuffle. Other times, I hear/feel a “this one” or a “now!” and I’ll take a card from the top or bottom, or one that’s standing out noticeably from the rest. That’s part of what makes me think it’s also guided by an unseen hand — the universe? Some Spirit of Life, or ancestors? Is probability its own unfeeling god that can be worshiped with the inherent divination of rolling a dice? In any case, this has the cadence of praying: I whisper my wondering into the ether, and wait for a reply.
The card I pull now is The Magician. My deck, The Gentle Tarot, depicts this as a human figure, their features typically associated with femininity, etched out against the background of shadow as a rainbowed outline. This person reaches upward to embrace droplets of rain (gifts from heaven?) while an oil lamp illuminates the area around their feet, perhaps a tool meant to guide their paths.
After I survey the imagery, I turn to Tarot for Change by Jessica Dore to glean further potential meanings. I read this definition of magic from an anonymous author: “the subtle rules the dense.” Like these subtle (or not) signs I keep seeing. There’s a kind of alchemy, the passage goes on to explain, in transforming the mundane into the magical, pain into preciousness, adversity into growth. What I’m also getting is that living life on the automatic setting, without awareness or consciousness, is unmagical. “Becoming conscious of something presupposes a choice,” writes Marie-Louise von Franz, a Jungian analyst.4 And choosing to fully exist in the present makes that instant glimmer forever. So maybe synchronicities work like a highlighter, or a signal flare: pay attention here. Look closely. Be.
The magic was in you all along.
Well, okay. It seems a bit on the nose to ask about moments of magic and pull the card with that literal word printed on it, but that’s tarot for you — when it isn’t flat-out bullying you, it frequently responds with a big, knowing wink.
Signs from the universe, it turns out, are multifaceted: sometimes silly, sometimes cruel
Let’s try my next request, I think. Tell me about a sign I may have overlooked. (I have the thought here that, if it’s an omen, maybe it hasn’t even happened yet.)
This time, it’s the Four of Stones — an Earth-based replacement for Pentacles. Here, I see a figure kneeling in a field of dandelion puffs, which invokes the wishes made in childhood summertimes. The person is also stewarding four spheres that look like planets or large marbles; there’s a sense of guardedness. The grasses are parted by a flowing stream.
“Is water significant?” I scribble in my notes. Have I not paid enough attention during my nature walks, or perhaps I need to take more of them? When I squint, I can also make out a few teeny fish; the guidebook describes them as salmon, which could mean something about a return to home, family, and ancestral lineage. So the salmon are significant? It’s almost a meta-answer in its own way: there’s many ways to understand this story, and you get to choose. What are you deciding to zoom in on?
All right, one more. Just for fun, I hold a specific burning curiosity in my mind and address whoever’s listening: Do you have a sense of humor and awareness? The next card comes out upside down, or “reversed”: The Chariot. This is typically a “yes” or “go” card, though tarot is rich with nuance and complexity — so, if inverted, does that mean it’s being sly? Like an upside-down smiley face emoji? “Proceed, with caution”?
Of note, this particular Chariot is represented by a grizzly bear . . . standing in a river, holding salmon in its jaws. Self-referential salm-omen?! There’s the augury I hadn’t yet appreciated.
Signs from the universe, it turns out, are multifaceted: sometimes silly, sometimes cruel. Does the brutal repetition of Saturday, September 8th mean anything? Is it a predestined pattern that God encoded into the stars, the roots of our family tree, and the branches of my own DNA? Will I die on the 8th too, maybe when I’m 88 or in 2088? Will my kids? It’s a spiral staircase I could go down forever. Maybe it just happened to happen. Maybe what it means is . . . everything, or nothing, or whatever I decide it does. Like crows in the aspen trees. Like making sense of fish and figures in tarot.
These days, I don’t always know what I believe about the afterlife. It’s part of why I get so panicky about dying. And yet, when I set out a spread of cards and direct a reading toward the deceased, I can’t help but imagine that those who’ve gone before me (friends, relatives, Bridget and Dominic) are still around somewhere, in some way, still pulling on some spirit-strings just to make me smile.
Aisling “Ash” Rowan (they/him) is the author of Birds to Bones: Writings on Grief, Gender, Mormonism, and Magic, as well as an artist whose work has appeared in Wayfare, Bristlecone Firesides, and ARCH-HIVE projects. They are the oldest of eight (six living), a mother of two, and descendant of many — including pioneers and poets.
NOTES:
1. Yes, right before 9/11. On a personal level, I have always had a difficult time with the “Never Forget” mantra that gets repeated every year; there are times I wish I didn’t remember that week at all.
2. I cannot make this up: September 14 was also my deadline for turning in a draft of this essay. (I make no apologies for puns, no matter how morbid.)
3. “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” Green Day
4. Quotes from Tarot for Change by Jessica Dore, p. 39-41
ARTIST STATEMENT
Sealed, Atraditional
Relief print, openwork embroidery, linen, 10 x 10 x 1 in.
Sophia Mason is an artist and curator working in soft sculpture, conceptual sculpture, and installation art. “Sealed” and “Atraditional” are part of her MFA thesis work which explores generational Mormon feminism through a metaphor of a natural history museum exhibit. She lives in Memphis, TN.
sophiamasonart.com
@sophiamasonart
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