The Tarot Cure

“The clock in the back of the deserted house (everyone’s sleeping) slowly lets the clear quadruple sound of four o’clock in the morning fall. I still haven’t fallen asleep, and I don’t expect to. There’s nothing on my mind to keep me from sleeping and no physical pain to prevent me from relaxing, but the dull silence of my strange body just lies there in the darkness, made even more desolate by the feeble moonlight of the street lamps. I’m so sleepy I can’t even think, so sleepless I can’t feel.” This episode begins with a restless nights for two literary alter-egos: Fernando Pessoa's Soares and Richard Matheson's (I Am Legend) Neville. Pessoa grapples with insomnia, intertwined with alcoholism as well as various existential anxieties in Fragment 31 of The Book of Disquiet, a meditation on sleep, death, and the nature of being. Neville, the protagonist of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, finds himself seemingly the last human on Earth, haunted by the undead. His struggle for sleep mirrors Pessoa's, hinting at a similar psychological issue: the manifestation in his life of the Death Drive as explored by Freud in his 1922 essay "Beyond The Pleasure Principle". Also, a fascinating historical footnote: Pessoa's role in crafting early advertising copy for Coca-Cola in Portugal, resulting in a government ban on Coca-Cola imports that lasted for over 50 years.

"Sadly, or perhaps not, I recognize that I have an arid heart. An adjective matters more to me than the real weeping of a human soul. But sometimes I’m different." -Fernando Pessoa -- Every so often, I sit down and write a letter to Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet and writer.I not only write but also send each letters to the postal address where Pessoa spent the last fifteen years of his life before dying at the age of 47 with cirrhosis of the liver - most likely due to the alcoholism. He hasn't written back to me yet, even though I put my own name and address on every missive I send (Steve W., 111 Ruskin Gardens, Kenton, London, HA3 9PY). One day he, or someone very much like him, will perhaps write back. I live in hope.

The second part of my Tarot Cure Pilgrimage to Treadwell's Bookshop to see if one of their finest Tarot readers (Madame Kalathaki) might have some wisdom to share with me on where my last relationship went awry, and what I need to do to keep the next one (when it comes) more enduringly on the path of Love. This episode of the Tarot Cure is sponsored Naomi Shihab Nye's Red Brocade:  The Arabs used to say, When a stranger appears at your door, feed him for three days before asking who he is, where he’s come from, where he’s headed. That way, he’ll have strength enough to answer. Or, by then you’ll be such good friends you don’t care. Links & Music for this episode: Alain De Botton on our crazy minds, hearts, souls (in love & out). Marina Abramovic on her tempestuous relationship with her former partner Ulay. Kendrick! (United In Grief) - please don't sue me/break my balls Mr Lamarr for using 30 seconds of your genius on here, ta :-) Peter Gundry - Lucifer's Hymn  Wet Leg - Chaise Longue Randy Newman - Short People SG Lewis - Finally (CeCe Peniston cover) for Monki on Radio 1  Funk The Revolution - Finally (CeCe Peniston cover)  Aydar Gaynullin plays Piazzolla's Libertango Alejandro Aguanta performs Zorba's Dance by Mikis Theodorakis's  Laura Nyro - It's Gonna Take A Miracle

In which I take myself off to consult a professional tarot reader at London's main hub for the Tarot Cognoscenti (Treadwell's Bookshop) to see if she can help me with the "stuff" that I’m still trying to work through in relation to my last romantic relationship.   One of my favourite centaurs (Alain de Botton) also shares with us his theories on Romanticism and Love, whilst Marina Abramovic digs into her infamous, and all-too-thorny relationship with fellow performance-artist/lover/muse: Ulay. 

Before falling in love with the Enneagram, I had a thing for Tarot.  And so I decided to put this thing into a podcast called The Tarot Cure.  Here's an Omnibus edition of those episodes, spanning the length and breadth of my 50th year.  It was a good year :)

Sophie (psychotherapist, single) asks a burning question that her friend Steve (psychotherapist, also single) might also like to have answered: "Will It Ever Happen For Me?" -- This episode of The Tarot Cure is sponsored by two poems:  REQUEST Please love me And I will play for you this poem upon the guitar I myself made out of cardboard and black threads when I was ten years old. Love me or else. -Franz Wright THE HOUSE OF BELONGING I awoke this morning in the gold light turning this way and that thinking for a moment it was one day like any other. But the veil had gone from my darkened heart and I thought it must have been the quiet candlelight that filled my room, it must have been the first easy rhythm with which I breathed myself to sleep, it must have been the prayer I said speaking to the otherness of the night. And I thought this is the good day you could meet your love, this is the gray day someone close to you could die. This is the day you realize how easily the thread is broken between this world and the next and I found myself sitting up in the quiet pathway of light, the tawny close grained cedar burning round me like fire and all the angels of this housely heaven ascending through the first roof of light the sun has made. This is the bright home in which I live, this is where I ask my friends to come, this is where I want to love all the things it has taken me so long to learn to love. This is the temple of my adult aloneness and I belong to that aloneness as I belong to my life. There is no house like the house of belonging. -David Whyte

Why do our burning questions burn in the way they do? I try to answer this by looking back at the phenomenon of PostSecret, and how burning questions often tap into core needs, longing, and yearnings such as the yearning for orientation, meaning, coherence and understanding, as well as self-direction, competence, belonging and connection. [This episode also features an Intro to a new Tarot Cure offshoot: The Burning Questions, where I sit down with a guest to have a chat about a question that is burning within them: be it a personal issue or one related to a topic close to their heart. Some kind of creative intervention is then applied to each question (a tarot card , a poem, a piece of music or art) in an attempt to "try to love the questions themselves - like locked rooms, or a book written in a foreign tongue (Rilke)", but also with the hope for some magic, insight, and an interesting conversation. Listen to The Burning Questions [on Spotify] [on Apple]  -- This episode of The Tarot Cure is sponsored by the following passage from Letters To A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (translation: Charlie Louth): “But all the same I believe that you need not remain without solution if you hold to things like those now refreshing my eyes. If you hold close to nature, to what is simple in it, to the small things people hardly see and which all of a sudden can become great and immeasurable; if you have this love for what is slight, and quite unassumingly, as a servant, seek to win the confidence of what seems poor – then everything will grow easier, more unified and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the intellect, which, amazed, remains a step behind, but in your deepest consciousness, watchfulness and knowledge. I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear one, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually,, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future." -- Music: Hania Rani – Live from Studio S2 Sting - Fragile (Piano Cover) Celestial Sphere by David Crowell

Are you getting huffy and puffy about online dating? Or maybe One Of The Other Things We Tend To Get Huffy and Puffy About (the list is endless)? If so, this one is for you: giving birth to Max, poetry vs. evolutionary psychology, incense vs. incensed, and Cain versus Abel. All with added Hot-&-Spicy Jungian Sauce :-) Thanks, as ever, to Sophie for her FFA (Free Free-Association) of The Five of Swords. Each FFA involves Sophie, freely-associating around the episode card which until that moment she had never set eyes on before. I see these FFAs as buckets of cool spring water from The Well of The Collective Unconscious. This episode of The Tarot Cure is proudly sponsored by Satya Nag Champa Incense, "the world’s most commercially successful incense blend. The first secret recipe for Satya Nag Champa was formulated by the founding family of Shrinivas Sugandhalaya and has stood the test of time as the most beloved floral incense in existence. To this day, every incense stick is hand-rolled in our factory in Byatarayanapura, Bengaluru." AUDIO EXCERPTS: A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships by Ogi Ogas & Sai Gaddam This Jungian Life - Episode 84 - Anger This Jungian Life - Episode 153 - Resentment Notting Hill - "Just A Girl" Scene MUSIC: David Crowell's "Celestial Spheres" Sting: "Fragile" (piano cover by 낮사람) Photronique: Boom, Boom Meredith Monk, Facing North

This episode takes a walky-talky dive into my favourite scene in the Wizard of Oz: "The Wizard Revealed", exploring the healing powers of Hierophants & High Priestesses versus that of Persona-fied Schmucks like toi et moi. This episode of the Tarot Cure is proudly sponsored by KURKURE NAUGHTY TOMATO SNACKS: "A sweet and sour tomato flavor with just the right amount of chili powder. Kurkure is a perfect 'namkeen' snack which makes one fun-loving and quirky. Made with trusted kitchen ingredients, it is a perfect tea time snack. Kurkure Naughty Tomato has the taste of tangy tomatoes blended with spices which gives it a sweet, tangy and spicy flavour. It is an embodiment of endearing human." (description supplied by PepsiCo India, with thanks).   Thanks, as ever, to Sophie for her FFA (Free Free-Association) of the card. Each FFA involves Sophie, freely-associating around the episode card which until that moment she had never set eyes on before. I see the FFAs as buckets of cool spring water from The Well of The Collective Unconscious. Music: Photronique: Boom, Boom Right Said Fred: "I'm Too Sexy" - Pointless Celebrities '90s special Performance DoGa Kalyan: Symphony: III. Scherzo  Andrew Byrne, "Striking" (for Strings & Chopsticks) The Tallis Scholars perform Josquin

This episode discusses our core existential fragility through a pink child's bracelet found on the side of the road, the violent and sometimes even bone-breaking choreography of Elizabeth Streb, as well as my mother's recent mishaps with "The Jaws of Fate". This episode is sponsored by Dorianne Laux's poem What Is Broken: The slate black sky. The middle step of the back porch. And long ago my mother’s necklace, the beads rolling north and south. Broken the rose stem, water into drops, glass knobs on the bedroom door. Last summer’s pot of parsley and mint, white roots shooting like streamers through the cracks. Years ago the cat’s tail, the bird bath, the car hood’s rusted latch. Broken little finger on my right hand at birth— I was pulled out too fast. What hasn’t been rent, divided, split? Broken the days into nights, the night sky into stars, the stars into patterns I make up as I trace them with a broken-off blade of grass. Possible, unthinkable, the cricket’s tiny back as I lie on the lawn in the dark, my heart a blue cup fallen from someone’s hands. -- LINKS: Elizabeth Streb talks about her work.  Maggie Nelson's The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning. Chase Eagleson acoustic cover of Sting's "Fragile".

In this episode I wonder, to use that line from Larkin: "What are days for?" Parcels of time we hold in our minds when we opening our eyes after being off-line, asleep. Days where we either feel on-track or off-track with those experiences, states, fulfilments we all desire to have more of in our lives. I also get a phone call at 3am from Hannah who I haven't spoken to for some time.  Does she still believe I'm some kind of demonic trickster (à la "Conchis" in John Fowle's The Magus)? If so, why is she now calling me?  Links:  Interview with Ajahn Sucitto about Unseating The Inner Tyrant Kaveh Akbar reading "Vines" "I don't know if people change..." from Jerrod Carmichael's Rothaniel Turn! Turn! Turn! (Pete Seeger) Thanks to Sophie for her FFA (Free Free-Association) of the card. Each FFA involves Sophie, freely-associating around the episode card which until that moment she had never set eyes on before. I see the FFAs as buckets of cool spring water from The Well of The Collective Unconscious.

In this episode, Sophie delivers an impromptu free-association on The Queen of Wands from a semi-recumbent state (hence the superb quality of the F-A, dream-like?), whilst I ponder Max's gender metaphysics and admire some spindly trees on a walk.  Thanks to Sophie for her FFA (Free Free-Association) of this card. Each FFA involves Sophie, freely-associating around the episode card which until that moment she had never set eyes on before. I see the FFAs as buckets of cool spring water from The Well of The Collective Unconscious. Links: Tree, Tree, Tree by CARMEN GIMÉNEZ-ROSELLÓ [poem] Tree, Tree, Tree by Fred Rogers [song] Baby Bushka playing Kate Bush's Running up that Hill

This episode is mainly about the incredibly young (only 22!) and goofy Elvis Aaron Presley's performance of "Don't Be Cruel" on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1957.  It also delves a little into why vegans don't (or shouldn't?) eat honey, and whether we'd change our behaviour towards people and things, if they had an SUC (Subjective Unit of Cruelty) measure attached to them.  Thanks to Sophie for her FFA (Free Free-Association) of this card. Each FFA involves Sophie, freely-associating around the episode card which until that moment she had never set eyes on before. I see the FFAs as buckets of cool spring water from The Well of The Collective Unconscious. Links: Initial quotes: Ed Winters on why vegans don't eat honey [video]; Maggie Nelson's The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning "I Have Got To Stop Loving You" by Ai Ogawa [poem] Lucille Clifton Reads Three Poems Music: -Ave Maria (Tomás Luis de Vittoria) -Don't Be Cruel (Elvis Presley)

Why do we do one thing, rather than another?  Why do we sometimes struggle to commit to certain kinds of behaviour, whereas others come naturally?  Why do we procrastinate and self-sabotage?  Once you've understood how the Winner Takes All mechanism works in your mind, as well as the "mind" of our 400 million year-old ancestor, C. elegans (aka: the nematode, or roundworm) you'll be on your way to understanding all of the above. As well as the Five of Wands archetype ;-) Links:  Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos (by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam) Ogi Ogas interview with Michael Shermer Chaise Longue by Wetleg

An exploration of The Emperor archetype through the sex lives of Orthodox Jews and the sublime wittering of John Ashbery. Thanks to Sophie for her FFA (Free Free-Association) of this card. Each FFA involves Sophie, freely-associating around the episode card which until that moment she had never set eyes on before. I see the FFAs as buckets of cool spring water from The Well of The Collective Unconscious. -- Links: What Is The Language Using Us For by W.S. Graham John Ashbery Interview with Alfred A. Poulin Jr. (November 27, 1972). Leaving The Atocha Station (Ashbery Poem) Discussion of matriarchal religions from the Nearly Numinous podcast. Magnum and Higgins doing their shtick. Papa Can You Hear Me (Yentl) - piano cover Black Betty by Leadbelly Larkin Poe's cover of Black Betty Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' cover of Black Betty

What do you love more than what you imagine is your singular life? Are you willing to take your place in the forest again?    to become loam and bark to be a leaf falling. from a great height.  to be the worm who eats the leaf and the bird who eats the worm?    Look at the sky: are you willing to be the sky again? You think this lesson is too hard for you    You want the thing you're struggling with to end.  You want to go to the movies as before, to sit and eat with your friends. It can end now, but not in the way you imagine    You know the mind that has been talking to you for so long—the mind that can explain everything?    Don’t listen. You were once a citizen of a country called I Don’t Know. Remember the burning boat that brought you there?   Climb in. (Marie Howe: What The Silence Said) Thanks to Sophie for her FFA (Free Free-Association) of this card. Each FFA involves Sophie, freely-associating around the episode card which until that moment she had never set eyes on before. I see the FFAs as buckets of cool spring water from The Well of The Collective Unconscious. -- Music: Ariel's Song No human or non-human creature was hurt in the creation of the slap sound used in this podcast.

A exploration of the The Sun archetype with a nod to these two poems: LEISURE What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?- No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows: No time to see, when woods we pass, Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass: No time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full of stars, like skies at night: No time to turn at Beauty’s dance, And watch her feet come alive to our glance: A poor life this if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. -William Henry Davies DON'T HESITATE If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when wonder begins. Anyway, that's often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb. -Mary Oliver The quote at the top of the episode is from Phillip Roth's The Facts. The Beatles cover is sung by Nicole Milik. You can find her YouTube channel here.  Thanks to Sophie for her FFA (Free Free-Association) of this card. Each FFA involves Sophie, freely-associating around the episode card which until that moment she had never set eyes on before. I see the FFAs as buckets of cool spring water from The Well of The Collective Unconscious.

A exploration of the Hermit archetype through Lizzie MacKenzie's recent documentary The Hermit of Treig. THE GREAT FIRES Love is apart from all things. Desire and fulfilment are nothing beside it. Neither body nor mind can truly love. Even if they try to lead us there. What is not love provokes them. What is not love quenches them. Love lays hold of everything we hold dear, But we are not able to hold onto it. Passion is one of its many paths but passion does not bring us to love. Desire opens the castle of our spirit so that we might find there the inner mystery of love: hidden, intangible, silent. Love does not last, but it is different from the passions that do not last. Love lasts by not lasting. Isaiah said each of us walks in our own fire for our sins. Only Love allows us to walk free in that sweet, transitory music of our pained and particular hearts. -Jack Gilbert Thanks to Sophie for her FFA (Free Free-Association) of this card. Each FFA involves Sophie, freely-associating around the episode card which until that moment she had never set eyes on before. I see the FFAs as buckets of cool spring water from The Well of The Collective Unconscious.

An exploration of The Tower, an archetype which invites us to explore and consider sudden change, upheaval, and chaos in our lives, as well as a kind of revelation or awakening sometimes associated with the word "enlightenment" as it is sometimes linked to personal transformation.  We take this journey together via the following cultural stepping stones:  Irene Solà's novel When I Sing, Mountains Dance Nichiren and his Soka Gakkai chums chanting of Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind Robert Frost's poem Fire and Ice: Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. Sessions with my shrink "Magic Mike" discussing the end of a relationship Giant waterfalls Woody Allen's opening monologue to Annie Hall Mumford & Sons' cover of Bruce Springsteen's I'm On Fire Samuel James' cover of Leonard Cohen's Tower of Song Siddhartha Gautama's first "podcast" (The Four Noble Truths, with a focus on his "thirsting" (Second Truth) of Taṇhā Siddhartha Gautama's second "podcast" (the Adittapariyaya Sutta - The Fire Sermon) which has also been turned into the following poem: ALL IS ARDOUR All is ardour burning & blaze Eye is ardour ear is ardour nose lips tongue ardour mind ardour body ardour burning burning burning away. Sound burning scent burning taste burning touch burning incandescent bone fires burning burning pleasure burning pain either neither burning away. Feel the fire that burns through this hour passion fire aversion fire delusion fire all ablaze birth and death & aging fires burning burning burning away. Contact feeling craving takes us calls to the awakened soul know then free your self from ardour find some peace while burning away.

The Death Archetype (XIII in the Major Arcana) features pretty heavily in this episode. But fear not, no one dies, and no one gets hurt. That's because Mary Oliver's poem Wild Geese, the one with the line in it about letting the soft animal of the body love what it loves, features even more heavily.  If you would like to continue on the Poems For Ma path with us, that will now be occurring on a daily basis here, as well as here.