Blog

Let’s talk today about the principle of play. What does it mean to play with life, and how do we do that? As the Dutch cultural theorist Johan Huizinga suggested, play is by no means a facile undertaking. Quite the contrary. Remember when children are playing. They have fun and are super serious at the same time. They draw the game with great gravitas into their present physical reality. There are two cards in the Tarot that have an interesting relationship to the principle of play and to each other. Some read the fool and the hanged man as one and the same figure, though, depicted in two different moments in life. When we look at the iconography of the Rider-Waite Tarot and the Tarot de Marseille, we see that their physiques indeed look similar to each other. But one is depicted as a jolly person embarking enthusiastically and recklessly on their new journey, whilst the other one is presented as a human hung with one leg on a tree, with tied hands, unable to unhook himself.

As with any emotion, guilt, is information, pointing us to an issue we need to become aware of. It’s an insight that helps us to see our wrongdoing and enables making amends. Sometimes, though, the feeling of guilt is not so easily trackable to its causation. In some cases, it may also seem irrationally disproportional to the reason that caused us to feel that way.

Let’s talk about the newborn’s grief. We are collectively going through major shifts, having left one big chapter behind us, and started a new one. All the desires and dreams, that lit in our chests in the later years, are ready to take form. Now, as the New has finally arrived, the shapes of our desires have space for their next stage, space to get embodied.

Change comes in waves, sure. But there are moments when the realization that the change has truly come, that we have passed the threshold for sure, is fiercely obvious, at once. We’ve made it. It seemed as if the nine months of gestation would never end. But here we are. A quiver of relief washes over the body, and then a cry follows. The tears won’t end, the mouth is widely open, wrinkles encircle the face. Like a newborn baby at its first cry.