Your One Wild and Precious Life

Some birthday reflections.

I hope you are all having a slow and restful Sunday. Tomorrow is my birthday, and I am feeling particularly reflective. This last year has taught me so much about myself, so I thought I would share some of the things that have been at the forefront of my mind lately.

Gentle reminder that, if you are enjoying what you see here, to please let me know by liking, commenting, restacking, sharing (and tagging on IG!), or purchasing a monthly paid subscription for $5. This helps support my work and keep the writing machine (me) going. You can now also book individual tarot sessions—more on that here.

Thank you for reading and supporting me. I am so grateful. <3

---

Merce Cunningham dancing at Black Mountain College captured by Hazel Larsen Archer

Reflect on where you live, the work you do, the people who fill your days, the places you learn, and how you spend your moments of joy. Do these things bring you happiness? If they don’t, what would you change?

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”

— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

It may seem obvious to say that the way we fill our days is how we ultimately live our lives, yet it’s a truth worth repeating. Many of us hold a tangled belief that our real lives haven’t begun, waiting for them to take on some particular shape. But seeing life through this narrow lens only wastes precious years. We tend to dismiss the mundane—the simple routines of brushing our teeth, grocery shopping, and taking the dog to the vet—as if they aren’t part of 'living.' But they are. This is life, in its quiet, uncelebrated form. Perhaps this is why so many face an existential crisis upon retirement: they’ve spent years believing that their true life would greet them on the other side, once the drudgery of the ordinary had passed, but they are met with the very same.

I am, at my core, an earth sign. I wear a pentacle charm around my neck every day, paired with a little angel with my name engraved on the back. A part of me gains a certain pleasure from the widened eyes of those who mistakenly think it to be a pentagram (satanic panic is still alive and well in 2024, unfortunately), but mostly, I wear it to remind myself of my earthly nature. Many think the suit of pentacles in tarot only pertains to money, but it encapsulates all earthly delights: the realm of the physical and tangible. It is a grounding suit. The material world that surrounds me is extremely influential on my well-being. I am highly sensitive to my environment, and I require beauty. That might sound shallow or vain, but it really isn’t. Beauty, to me, is freshly washed crisp cotton sheets or my favorite coffee mug, stained at the lip from use. A vase I purchased at a thrift store sparkling in the sun, full of flowers from the garden. The prism hanging in my window scattering rainbows of refracted light around my home. The sheepskin rug and cushion I meditate on every morning near the window, so I can feel the cool air on my skin and listen to the birds sing their ecstatic song. This is the suit of the pentacles: the physical and material things that bring you joy, the things that build your world and make up a significant part of your life.

This is why it was so easy for me to get caught up in the rat race long ago. I always felt as if I never had enough money, and I was continually looking forward and craving the next thing. Instead of sitting and reveling in all the beauty that surrounded me, I was consumed with money (or lack thereof) so that I could buy whatever obsession came next. Because that was how I saw life: a never-ending series of achievements, a continuously moving goal. Since 2020, I have swung back and forth between these two belief systems. I went through phases where I feel content and certain I have more than enough. But these periods, unfortunately, were usually punctuated by phases of excessive materialism—a never-ending cycle, or so it seemed. The Devil, in tarot, can signify an excessive concern with the material world and often shows up to remind us when we have swung too far in that direction.

The Devil card from the Pagan Otherworlds deck by Uusi

I was this way until a few months ago. Until I had such a striking moment of clarity that it all began making sense, provoked by the loss of a significant amount of my monthly income. In the wake of it, I stopped spending money almost entirely. I stopped feeling compelled to go out for dinner regularly, get drinks, or buy myself the latest object of my desire. Something had finally clicked into place: none of these things, in all my life, had ever led me to the joy and contentedness I so deeply craved. It took me years and years to get here, but now I see the world through entirely new eyes.

I am currently reading God of the Woods by Liz Moore, and one of the characters asks her sister if she thinks coming from money somehow stunted their growth and capped their potential because they never had to strive for anything. I want to acknowledge that I fully understand this kind of thinking is a slippery slope, and I know it is not black and white. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t fantasized about all my debt being paid off so that I could finally be free—I do very much want that, for all of us. We all deserve the kind of freedom and security that money brings. Still, this character’s question was thought-provoking. I did not come from money, but I thought about how my life might look if I had. I wouldn’t be in student debt, but I likely would not have felt compelled to pursue psychotherapy, a choice that changed the trajectory of my life. I would probably have all the material desires and beautiful clothes I wished for, but I might not have had the chance to develop a sense of personal style (which took me years to do and is only now solidifying at thirty-one years old). My home might look different, and my old bathroom in my rented house with permanently stained grout would no longer be the bane of my cleaning existence, but how much would unstained grout change my life in the grand scheme of things anyway? And what would I end up sacrificing in my current life, the life I love so much, for the trade-off of a sparkling bathroom?

Our imperfections, these small glimpses of our humanity, make us who we are. And by Annie Dillard’s logic, those small “failures” are what end up creating the composites of our lives, our homes, our work, and our wardrobes. We are trained to look at everything we do and only see our failures and shortcomings, to point them out, and to figure out ways to eliminate them. We don’t immediately see all the ways these “failures” have alchemized our lives into what they are. Shortcomings, going without, being forced to find alternative ways to do or achieve something—all of these decisions and constraints shape us, and we will spend the rest of our lives endlessly creating ourselves. What an incredible thought. I used to think about this a lot when I was recording music. I always wished I had access to someone who knew what they were doing, who could mix everything beautifully and make the final product sound perfect—but my favorite parts of all my songs are the unexpected sounds and discoveries that came from my mistakes. And, if we’re being honest, I prefer the voice recordings I make on my phone to any of the recordings I make with a fancy microphone or software.

But I want to steer us back to my original question: are you happy? If our lives only amount to the mundanity of our day-to-day, strung between our failures and shortcomings? I think I am. I dreamed of becoming something bigger, something more important, of leaving some legacy behind. But that preoccupation with and the pressure of leaving a legacy kept me bound, and I never ended up doing or creating anything at all. I believe that when you begin living without the constant worry of what will come next, your life truly begins. Because you no longer have the lingering doubts—that incessant fear of making the wrong choice clouding your vision and dictating your every move. You can stumble forward freely in the world with the understanding that you are held and that every decision you make only aids in the creation of yourself and your reality. When you start seeing the world that way, there are no wrong decisions.

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

---

In case you missed it:

• Last week, I wrote about being afraid to do things but doing them anyway.

• Last month, I wrote a collective reading for the start of Virgo season.

• I am posting my daily tarot pulls on Notes.

I have also started offering one-on-one tarot sessions and written tarot readings. You can learn more about them and purchase a session here.