The 8 of Wands
I recently went for a Tarot card reading. I didn’t know anything about Tarot until I read an essay written by a novelist who himself had learned to read Tarot. That same week, a friend of mine mentioned that she, too, reads Tarot. I found the serendipity too fun to pass up, and so I scheduled a reading. I was especially curious about the storytelling aspect of the cards as they are pulled from the deck, the stories that can be read by looking at the illustration of each card itself, and the stories that can be pieced together once the pulled cards are arranged on the table. I looked at the reading as an adventure in storytelling.
The grounding card I pulled was called the 8 of Wands. Inherent in this card is a sense of travelling forward on a journey, a purposeful direction. As opposed to casually wandering or meandering, in this card the story I saw was my sense of curiosity, the internal force that propels me along my journey towards the next thing. Always the next thing. What I might, on a lesser day, chalk up to restlessness or just being nosy, instead now looked more like a mission.
I’ve spent a lot of time traveling back and forth across the country the past year, excavating and resurrecting and weaving together stories of different women crafting their own journeys amid the realities of each one’s time and place. Revolution. Rumor. Reputation. Injustice. Determination. Love. Poetry. Badassery. So much to think about. After finishing my last book, I didn’t know how or where or when I would find my next muse. I have now been living with the ghosts of these amazing women for over a year, and can’t wait to share their stories.
