Six months ago I was invited to Torino, Italy, to take part in a project called Luck Upside Down/Quando La Fortuna É Capolavolta at Studio Abra. I was asked to show some of the cards that were made for When We See You, as part of a larger project that featured a group exhibition and a lively programme of workshops and talks, curated by Marta Montoni and Paolo Volpe.

I spent two weeks wandering Torino feeling spellbound by the city of the Devil, as it’s known. Torino is one of the world capitals of the occult and once home to Italy’s royal family. It’s a city of decaying beauty surrounded by silver blue mountains and punctuated by an impossibly rising star -ascending from the Mole Antonelliana building housing the National Cinema Museum. 

The exhibition opened on the night of a lunar eclipse. In Vedic astrology, solar and lunar eclipses are seen to symbolise the opening of a dragon’s mouth and the whiplash of its tail. The dragon’s mouth, Rahu, opens a portal with a solar eclipse while Ketu, the dragon’s tail, closes it with a lunar eclipse. Potent signs of change, destruction, beginning and ending abound in times of eclipses. 

This time in the world feels increasingly volatile. Beyond the horizon of the silver blue mountains there is violence and suffering. I hear an aid worker on my Instagram story describe an ‘avalanche of suffering’ descending from the Israeli bombing of Gaza. When Israel suffered a surprise attack from Hamas on the borders of the city several weeks before, there was a warning that the Israeli response would be disproportionate – but the ferocity of the bombing seems to have shocked even seasoned analysts. Outside my apartment, I see the words ‘PALESTINA LIBERA’ scrawled in big letters with spray paint.

I started When We See You in 2021 in Glasgow, in the midst of a third national lockdown due to the global pandemic of Covid-19. I had been learning about Tarot cards since 2019 but the space and boredom of lockdown encouraged a deeper connection to the cards. I began pulling cards and writing advice from them to myself daily and some of these texts became blog posts. I wanted to draw the images to understand them better, in particular the Tarot de Marseille deck, and I found drawing brought a more intimate, embodied understanding of these mysterious images. 

The decision to make art about the cards with collaborators came spontaneously. I remember seeing some handmade paper that Connie Hurley, soon to be my first collaborator, had made on Instagram. She had drawn a border around the middle and marked the uneven edges, leaving an empty blank space. I thought they seemed like little cards waiting to be filled in. We met over Zoom and I asked her if she could make some more paper and interpret the borders leaving a space in the middle. We pulled three cards together: The Chariot, Strength, and The Magician. We created the cards over post, with handmade paper and colouring pencils – soft edges and uneven borders. 

Working in another’s material and idea allowed for unexpected juxtapositions. At the opening in Torino a woman asks to speak to me. She is Ukrainian and sees that the ‘World’ card, made with Lisa Rytterlund, has the Ukrainian word for ‘World’ – світ – is inscribed on the card. The card was made in ceramic by Lisa, in the image of a Molotov cocktail.

In spring of 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine had began, and Lisa wanted to acknowledge the precarious state of the world when we re-created a card about the ‘World’. The Ukrainian woman tells me she assists the army in radar detection, and that she is on a break in Torino visiting friends. After interrogating our motivations a little, she tells me seeing the word for world in her Ukrainian language as she entered the exhibition was an unexpected emotional surprise, that it made her feel seen and connected to the art – she thanked us for thinking of Ukraine.

Art communicates in mysterious ways and its effect can not be controlled. In the Summer of 2021 I made the Lovers and Tower card with Tamara Macarthur. I made the cards around the time of a powerful eclipse in Gemini, and met Ruby, who within six months would leave Glasgow and move to Norway with me. You could say the Lovers and Tower together could be a portent for a life-changing relationship. I found drawing cards and turning them into an artwork has a strangely affective quality to my life, like the essence of the cards begins to generate a new reality. Anyway, since making those cards with Tamara nothing has been the same since.

I find myself within another eclipse portal. I’m feeling reflective of this project and of beginnings and changes and endings. Leaving my Masters course last year, the last work of art I made was the Moon card with Clea Fillipa. My time was ending in school, and I was feeling misty and tired. I had been drawn to Clea’s practice since arriving in Bergen for its watery and metallic materiality -as well as a kind of alchemical elemental quality. 

Clea offers The Moon card to be drawn on a silver steel plate, with an aluminum sheet seeming to reflect water. I scratched into the resistant plate for 3 days – finding the image in the darkness of the metal. In my own life it feels like I’m entering a world of darkness and uncertainty after a period of study and stability – the card is my entry point and the Moon becomes my guide for navigating the unknown. 

In Torino I’m encouraged by my hosts to run a workshop where we can make cards together, by way of introducing the project. Rachele and Marta take me to a scrap yard where we haggle for different materials, we find cardboard sheets, gold stars, playing cards, buttons and forgotten toys. 

Back at the workshop I pull cards for groups of two – a Major Arcana card for each pair. They are encouraged to write what they see before making a card together, drawing or collaging in any way they like, filling in one half, and handing it over to their partner. It’s chaotic and silly but everyone focuses on making their cards, choosing what imagery to pay attention to, and how to leave space for their partner. After several hours we have a motley crew of stars, horses, magicians, and towers. 

After three years working with the cards in this way, it feels like it might be time to transition. I’m not sure if this is the end of When We See You, but maybe it’s a pause to the project. Unsure, I throw the IChing and ask for guidance – if it’s time to end the project. I get hexagram number 58, The Joyous, Lake. It shows two mirroring symbols, seeming to be two lakes reflecting one another. 

As cards and hexagrams are want to do – it doesn’t really give me a direct answer about what to do. Perhaps the lake reflecting back what it sees speaks to a harmonious sense of completion, of fullness. Perhaps it’s speaking to the nature of the project, of reflection, of seeing another in a card. One passage from the commentary jumps out at me; 

Knowledge should be a refreshing and vitalzing force. It becomes so only through stimulating contact with congenial friends with whom one holds discussions and practices application of the truths of life. In this way learning becomes many-sided and takes on a cheerful lightness whereas there is always something ponderous and one sided to the self taught. 

Why do we draw something? Why do we share it with others? One reason might be because we want to understand something and communicate it. Collaboration brings this communication to places that alone, we would not be able to reach and that in the end, would not be as fulfilling. And maybe trying to understand something is to pay attention to something, and paying attention is really caring about something. Paying attention to each other and the world around us, maybe that’s why we make art? 

We leave Torino early one morning and fly over the silver blue mountains. I leave and I know my time here has changed me. A star reaches for the sky suspended as high as it will go. The dragon’s mouth opens and its tail brings down another tower. The effort to order the world, our lives and our art-projects is bound to fail -when one thing ends another begins. All we have is each other; affection and relation in the spiral of ceaseless change.

In many spiritual traditions, the idea of suffering is often seen as a gateway to liberation. In Sanskrit this is known as Duhkha: Pain, suffering, distress, disease. The awareness of suffering in the body and mind, or the onset of crisis is very often a necessary catalyst for change, ‘the crack that lets the light in’ – as Leonard Cohen once sang.

Ten years ago, in response to a sudden awareness of anxiety, overthinking, and unease in my body, I intuitively began trying to do yoga and meditation. Having always been a worried kid, the onset of my early twenties seemed to unleash a wave of unease in my body – a wave of suffering.

I was first introduced to yoga by my mum, who’s luckily a yoga teacher. Having taken a few classes without much interest in my teens, I did remember something about moving and breathing in a sequence known as a ‘Sun Salutation’. After a turbulent mental period, I began trying to do these movements I remembered in my room at college from a practice sheet a few times a week. I wasn’t really sure what I was doing, and half the time I was hungover, but something about moving and breathing in these repetitive, simple movements was strangely calming to my agitated mind.

It’s the Summer of 2014. I’m in my early twenties and I find myself on an art-school Summer trip to Berlin. I was spending a few weeks wandering around the city with friends, visiting art galleries, drinking, and generally messing around. I was recently heartbroken and I felt lost. Inside my body was experiencing some kind of recurring psychosomatic pain.

It was during this time that I would visit my first yoga shala, called Astanga Spirit in Kreuzberg. Early one morning I nervously enter a room full of people practicing. Everyone is moving at their own pace rather than being led by a teacher, they have memorized the sequence and move in complicated and graceful flows in a seeming trance of focus. There is an intimidating yet intoxicating atmosphere – the sound of everyone’s breath creates sounds like waves rising and falling against sand.

I stumble awkwardly through a sequence of postures the teacher gives me.

After leaving my first class, I remember the colors on the graffiti walls of Kreuzberg seemed brighter – a lightness had entered my body, and clarity and ease in my mind had miraculously taken hold. This was a different feeling to my previous experience of yoga – there was something deeper, an intense yet nourishing – almost shimmering feeling of tiredness and calm had washed over me.

The series of postures, movements, and breath techniques I would learn here would stay with me.

This intense, dynamic movement yoga practice is known as Ashtanga yoga and comes from Mysore, India. It became popular in the 70’s when Western travelers happened upon a shala and a teacher – Pattabhi Jois -and the transformative, therapeutic practice he was teaching.

The practice involves deep breathing known as Ujjayi breath, which opens up the body and calms the mind through a series of postures, known in Sanskrit as Asanas. 

As you breathe, move, and focus your attention, a profound inner heat is generated. The synchronization of breath to movement is known as a Vinyasa, here, a space of healing forms, where old wounds, patterns, and toxins both physical and mental have the chance to leave the body. 

The Devil card of the Tarot de Marseilles speaks of a world of knots, animality, and suffering.  A devil made of parts animal and human, with many faces, stands powerfully between two goblin-like creatures, bound by cords. With their tongue sticking out, the devil beckons us forward, making a strange symbol with their hand. In the other, they hold a staff with rabbit ears attached to the top. 

Binds, dominance, and fear pervades the imagery. The two creatures seem to be enslaved by the dominant devil, with ropes around their necks, they seem submissive in their stance. The devil has a face on its belly and eyes on its knees – like an exotic bird in a mating ritual it produces a hypnotizing display.

Anonymous of Meditations on the Tarot writes about the card: 

‘The fifteenth arcanum of the Tarot is that of the generation of and the enslaving of so-called “artificial demons” – It is a warning that we certainly have the force to generate demons but that the use of this force will render the generator a slave.’

Anonymous

In Anonymous’s reading, the demon of the Devil card has not enslaved the two creatures, but rather is created by the two creatures, by their ‘will and imagination that is perverse or contrary to life’ – The enslaved creatures’ excessive, perverse ‘will and imagination’ ie. thoughts and behaviors – has created the demon, which now rules them – in other words, they have enslaved themselves.

In this reading of the symbolism, the generation of demons can be read simply as a lesson on the dangers in the thinking mind of humans; the dangers of addiction, rumination, and overthinking, forces that run contrary to the healthy flow of life. The animalistic body of the demon tells us we are in a world of primal urges, fears, and desires – the depths of our being.

In the animal body of the subconscious are fears that have the potential to imprison and entrap our body toward coping mechanisms and addictive behaviors of different kinds. As Jessica Dore writes, this is understandable, and not to be condemned – managing the biological, social, or psychological feelings of suffering through whatever means available is a natural, and often self-preserving act.

But when we engage in addictive behaviors and overthinking to avoid feeling the ‘big feelings’ in the depths of our body – our deep fears have the potential to grow and inflate, creating engrained bodily and psychological patterns that maintain suffering.

‘we slip a chain around our own necks every time we make certain thoughts, feelings, or sensations bigger and more powerful than they actually are’

-Jessica Dore

Samskara

In yogic philosophy a Samskara is a subconscious imprint – It is the belief that every moment a trace is being left on our body; by all the words, experiences, and people that come into our awareness.

Like a web or a pool of water, our body is viscous, non-solid – more like a phenomena of activity than a solid object. When something falls into this phenomena of activity – like a traumatic experience or a hurtful word – it stays there, like a rock thrown into a lake. The heavier the rock, or the more traumatic, or repetitive the experience – the deeper the mark. 

These imprints determine the course of our life and if not resolved, we will continue to return to these marks, like tracks in a forest path. As we return to old marks, we re-open the old wounds, making them deeper each time we trawl through. 

In this way, the body is but ‘the crystallized history of our past thoughts, actions, and emotions ‘ as Greghor Maehle writes. The body and mind become hard and solidified over the years as the tracks of time and experience weave into the fabric of tissue, muscle, and bone.

In many yogic philosophies, it is believed that we carry not only Samskara scars of this life but also ones we have inherited from our past lives. It’s believed a deep Samksara scar, like an intense trauma, can be passed down multi-generations.

Our bodies are made from old material – flesh and fiber linked from body to body. Woven into our tissue may be unresolved suffering we have not lived through.

~

The Asana practice of Ashtanga Vinyasa was designed to release from the past conditioning of Samskara and arrive fully in the present moment.

Working directly with the physical body as a ground for therapeutic work. the practice involves the systematic folding, unfolding, tightening, releasing, inhaling, and exhaling of breath and body.

As the practitioner becomes immersed in a long practice, a profound vibration begins to ring through the body, the breath seems to permeate the fibers of tissue and muscle, and the blood feels like it pumps in new ways, opening locked currents of energy.  

Life is a constantly changing set of phenomena and our bodies are no different. That which arises wishes to pass away. The binds of rumination, addiction, and stagnation keep our minds stuck on a track, crystallizing into a stubborn immovability, an unwillingness to feel the big feelings of life, to experience the changing currents of experience.

In the changing forms of the moving practice of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga there is the potential to enter into the oceanic flow of life, a flow of energy that can burst through blocked channels of energy, currents that can pierce through crystallized thought patterns.

‘The vinyasa practice is the constant coming and going of postures, the constant change of form, itself a meditation on impermanence.’ 

-Greghor Maehle

Becoming free from the entrapments of the body

Tapas in Sanskrit speaks of the purifying heat of disciplined spiritual practice. The practice of Ashtanga Yoga builds heat, a heat that if burned regularly, can banish demons from the entrapments of the body. The heat of the practice brings demons, be they physical or mental, to the surface where they can be seen, which is the first step toward banishing evil spirits.

‘Good does not combat evil in the sense of destructive action. It “Combats” it by the sole fact of its presence. Just as darkness gives way to the presence of light, so does evil give way before the presence of good.’

Anonymous

As Anonymous writes, the best way to become free of the darkness is simply to turn on the light. The process of unraveling the suffering of the body is lifelong and multi-generational and so the practice of yoga is a space that must be entered with regularity for its light to keep burning. A devoted spiritual practice, when done with the right intention, has the potential to burn a flame so bright that darkness simply cannot exist anymore. A heat hotter than the Devil’s flame.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Text by Jack O’Flynn

‘The Devil’ artwork was created by Jack O’Flynn and Bergen based multi-media artist and performer Clea Filippa.

Materials: Textile, pigment, pencil, gouache, copper wire. 2024.

Sources:

Anonymous Meditations on the Tarot TarcherPerigee. 1980

Jessica Dore Tarot for Change Hay House. 2021

Greghor Maehle Ashtanga Yoga: Practice and Philosophy 2007

When we see you

In a silver reflection

Dogs howl to raindrop tears

To connect, to be lost. to change

~

 A crayfish is lying still in a calm body of water. A dog and a wolf are nestled between two towers. A moon above is reaching the center of a beaming sun as large pointing beams radiate down. On the moon’s surface, a human face can be seen, looking down with a half-smiling expression. The animals are howling and feeding from raindrops falling.

~

I am sitting by an inlet of sea near my house in Bergen watching the sun reflecting on the water, forming prisms of light that bounce and mesh in the liquid fabric. I clamber in and duck my head under. The water is icy from the winter and I quickly climb up a rusty, uneven ladder feeling mollusks and clams huddled together in strands of seaweed. I read that the Moon in ancient astrology ruled fountains, streams, springs, docks, rivers, and lakes, among other bodies of water. I grew up near the sea, and often feel calmest by the blue of the ocean. Swimming in the cold water wakes me up, as I shiver and shake, the cold shock creates some kind of equilibrium in my body. Perhaps water immersion is a port-way to a connected, tidal state of being.

In the Moon cards symbolism, I have always felt some kernel of healing potential; a return to an embodied, cellular way of being perhaps, a way of being that water contains, that the body knows.

From crescent to waxing, to fullness, and waning, the Moon goes on a journey of changing appearances across the night sky, making contact with the planets and celestial bodies above. The changing nature of the Moon reflects the changing nature of our bodies, our emotions, and our lives. It is said that when the Moon meets a planet in the sky it amplifies and is coloured by that planet’s energy.

Like water, the Moon is an an emotional transmitter, a carrier of atmosphere. With a human face, it seems to guide us and console us in the darkness.

I remember following the Moon to Greece, when the world seemed like it was about to end. Everything was far away and the Moon seemed like a guide. Across the night sea it’s glimmering reflections seemed to light a way through caves and tavernas.

The Moon has been associated with the drifter and the seafarer. Lost moon buoys floating at sea. What happens to the lost drifters who follow the Moon? Where does the sea bring lost ships? Could the Moon be a misleading light?

Anonymous of Meditations on the Tarot writes of the Moon card as;

“the principal of reflection: just as it reflects the light of the sun, so does human intelligence reflect the light of conscience – and the latter is eclipsed when “materialistic intellectuality” prevails”

If the Moon’s face in this reading represents the human intellect, then the wild dogs and crayfish represent materiality, instinct, and intelligence. If the Moon covers the beams of the sun, with the reflection of a human face. It seems a warning is hidden in this card; Between two towers of perception, two towers of knowledge, we become howling dogs lost in our own reflection. Our intelligence becoming defined by our limited perception of the material around us. Like a crayfish stuck in a geometric stagnant pond of water, we move backward. The drops fall upward, in a retrograde movement.

But the Moon in this card could also be in union with Sun, in conjunction. giving it the potential to connect to and amplify the Sun’s energy. The Moon has the potential to connect the body, the human, and the material with the light of the sun – divine consciousness;

“The Eighteened Arcanumn of the Tarot: (The Moon) The arcanum of knowing how to pass from intelligence eclipsed by terrestrial “technicality” to intelligence illumined by the spiritual sun- i.e. to intuition.“

Intuition, as the Moon card shows is the combination of our consciousness, intellect, body, and instinct. Only when our human perception does not cover the light of the cosmic sun, but rather fuses with it can we move from ‘Materialistic Intellectualism’ to cosmic, connected intuition.

I’m back visiting my childhood home for a few days, crossing old roads as a different self. Returning here I feel a tinge of sadness, I no longer know this place like I did, I don’t know whos around anymore, there are new buildings and new streets that aren’t part of my memories. I pour a Guinness in my garden and pet my dog as the Moon finds her place in the early evening sky.

The colours of the Moon are light blue, white, pale green, silver. Tonight the Moon reflects back a silver-blue hue casting a spell over the darkness. I wonder what creatures are guided home by this light tonight: owls, cats, silverfish, mice.

I asked my friend Clea if she would like to make a Tarot card with me, last February, as a rainy mist came down over Bergen. We pulled a card to decide which, it was the Moon, she grinned ‘I knew it was going to be this one!!’ I had also in my mind been imagining doing this card with Clea, she seemed, like me, to be somehow ‘lunar’ in nature. Clea shows me what she makes for our collaboration: metal silver plates, with reflective hammered silver aluminum.

I remember hearing that the Moon’s metal is silver, as though the Moon’s rays fertilize a soil of rock and ore to give us silver. The silver night gifts lunar tears. Are the upside-down tears of the moon, silver jewels?

Jessica Dore writes of the Moon as a card that offers a balm of confusion to the demand of Western rationalities need to know, a demand which can ultimately ‘build a psychic wall’ guarding against anything which might have the power to open up a new way of being.

“To be in a state of not-knowing creates openings, illuminates new pathways, and this is ripe with potential.”

Every Moon is an illumination, a light in the dark; The Moon connects us to the transition from life to death, in the emptiness of a new Moon, to the growth and decimation of the lunar phases. Tonight the Moon will rise full in Saggitarius, the mythic sign of the centaur. At this moment, at this place in the tide, I don’t know what’s ahead. I wonder what mythic vision for a way forward could this Moon be signaling?

A Moon of mythic not knowing.

There is a boat that’s been circling Bergen’s contaminated waters all year. It pulls up rusted boats, trash, and barnacle-covered debris; treasures from the swamp. In the flickering Moonlight, I glimpse a floating crayfish drifting in the tide.

~~~~~~~~

Sources:

Helena Avelar and Luís Ribeiro On the Heavenly Spheres American Federation of Astrologers 2010

Anonymous Meditations on the Tarot TarcherPerigee. 1980

Jessica Dore Tarot for Change Hay House. 2021

Alejandro Jodorowski The Way of the Tarot: The spiritual teacher in the cards Destiny Books. 2009

~~~~~~~~

The artwork for this post was created in collaboration with Clea Filippa. Clea is a multi-media artist and performer currently based in Bergen, Norway.

Some years ago I was introduced to the practice of Yin Yoga. In a mostly silent room I was guided into postures that were held for long periods of time, with little movement. Being used to a more energetic, flowing approach to Yoga, these postures seemed simple and insignificant at first. However, several minutes into the class, they began to reveal their intensity. I found myself shaking, as a kind of agony emerged from my body. Our teacher, Inna, encouraged us to welcome, breathe and relax into the sensations that would arise from our bodies. Counter-intuitively trying to release the reflexive tension, I closed my eyes and entered into a world of tense, shimmering sensation.

I’ve found myself being pulled toward the passive, slow burning practice of Yin once more this Summer. Working early mornings in a bakery, I come home midday feeling a little over-heated, bleary eyed – tired but awake. In times like this, I’ve usually gone straight to coffee, running out of the house to keep my energy going until I crash. But something about this sleepy Norwegian summer has led me to pause. After a year of fast changes in a new country, I’m feeling a need for slowness, and re-orientation. I’ve been drawn back to the dark, brooding world of Yin Yoga, courtesy of my ever-reliable youtube yoga teacher Kassandra.

As opposed to yang-centered Vinyasa practices that stimulate qualities of heat, dryness, and movement in the physical body, Yin’s quality is dark, moist, and still. It is like a body of water slowly eroding a rock. Yin waits, and it moves with gravity: with the natural forces of pressure, weight, and time.

In the long-held postures of Yin Yoga we are aiming to reach the elusive, unseen places within the body – the connective tissue, fascia, and joints. A posture is entered, the hips open, head bows, the arms move forward finding a holding place. What feels comforting at first begins to creak: an opening is being created, the body is being excavated, disturbed. In applying steady contraction, and vulnerable opening to these unseen tissues we are beginning a therapeutic release of these points. 

Yin teachers speak of the Edge; The point where we feel sensation, but not too much. When we Edge we are searching, moving toward precipice, skirting on the perimeter of feeling.

Reaching the edge and knowing we don’t want to go further, the objective becomes Holding. Holding allows the openings we have created to be stimulated. As our reactive impulses attempt to resist and flee, we hold still, breathing, softening. Blood begins to flow, joints are unfolded, knots of tissue and cartilage are provoked, massaged, and soothed as new energy is allowed to flow through. 

~

I keep thinking about Temperance. The angel who walks with two cups in hand mixing and sloshing water from one cup to the other. Searching for the right mix, they seem caught in a moment, between states. This image always makes me think of trusting the path you are on, a state of becoming, a search for harmony.

~

Perhaps I have been drawn to Yin this summer as I’m a little uncertain of what’s ahead, and like the mountains in the distance, what’s behind feels far away. Like the angel in Temperance I find myself in a middle ground, an Edge space. Sometimes this angel can be seen as hesitant, a little unsure of where to go; so it just neurotically mixes the water back and forth, not knowing whether to take a step into the water or back onto the land. 

Energetic body

The practice of Yin has its roots in traditional postural Hatha Yoga as well as well as the Taoist philosophy of Chinese Medicine. According to this philosophy, the body can be understood as hundreds of energy points called Meridian lines. These energy lines are responsible for moving Chi throughout the body, Chi can be translated to something like, ‘Life Force’; the force that animates our life and body.

Our ‘Life force’ will from time to time, become blocked. Restlessness, fatigue, depression, anxiety, and all other de-stabilizing stagnations within the body will stop the healthy flow of energy. Like the water of Temperance, our water is held between two poles, held still, it will eventually thicken, cluster, and clog, needing to be shifted. This feels like a perfectly normal thing, our bodies and life are fluid, we are changeable, and not meant to be in one state forever.

~

As Temperance moves they keep the water moving from one cup to the next, two feet between two states. They are in a state of flux, they hold their water, their life force, and wait for the right moment.

Yin is a watery practice. Becoming like water we release, and connect to our body’s water-like intelligence. As water moves through cracks in rock, we move through the density of our flesh, bones, and cartilage in passive patience.

Like the tides, lakes, or oceans, our watery body is a place of residue, of collection. In the crevices and corners of the unseen, we store memory: as Bessel Van der Kolk has said, The body keeps the score.

Being at the Edge is about moving toward the still, murky waters of life. Where we move toward the scores, and rhythms of affect that have washed up, fragmented, and dispersed through the lakes and tides of the body.

~

My time of Yin this summer has allowed me to sink into uncertainty, to not look for a way forward, but to enter into the residue, the unclear density. Sometimes before we move forward we must first acknowledge the confusion of where we find ourselves. In becoming there is a loss at what has come before. And before we can move into a new realm with clear sight, sometimes we have to take stock of what has been gathered.

One definition of Temperance is moderation. As the water is mixed slowly and with care: the right formula is searched for, the correct temperature. When the right conditions arrive water changes, stagnation is released, and new rivers open into wide expanses of sea.

As we hold at the Edge of our bodies, we are at the edge of the Self, of becoming; shifting toward a self that is unseen, authentic, and beckoning.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Artwork and text created by Jack O’Flynn. 2022.

Sources:

Yin Yoga: Stretch the mindful way. K. Reinhardt.

The Body Keeps the Score Bessel Van der Kolk.

Yoga with Kassandra (Youtube Channel)

Inna Costantini, online Yin Yoga teacher https://www.innayoga.com

When we see you 

We spiral

A goblin wheel spins on a dark blue sea.

~

To be surprised, to be stuck, to repeat.

A yellow wheel turns on a blue sea. On its spokes are three mischievous goblin-like creatures and animals. They are falling, climbing, and sitting, each at different places.

The wheel is called ‘The Wheel of Fortune.’ Who are these creatures, and what is this strange wheel?

A wheel is a circle of spokes that turns and spins, often connected to an axel, which is then connected to a larger machine.

The movement of the wheel controls the movement of the larger machine; 

So a wheel is a point that decides direction.

Fortune speaks of the chance, luck, or money we might receive in life. Fortune may be good or bad, bringing us up or down.

To speak of someone’s fortune is to speak of that which we receive.

So the Wheel of Fortune could decide the direction of what we receive from life; 

The direction, and destination of our fortune, both good and bad.

~

The wheel of fortune has six spokes that reach outward from a revolving orange center. Its spokes create an order to its movement. Like a strange clock, this wheel has a machine like logic.

But there are no measuring instruments that we can recognize here – there are no numbers or letters. And the spokes appear in not perfectly even rows.

It spins on a blue sea, in water, in slippage; our conscious vision and calculations may not be reliable here.

The ocean is where our life began and where the oldest life forms exist;

in mysterious and dark depths this wheel spins.

Depth; the depth of the world, and the depth of psyche.

The wheel turns beneath what we can see.

~

~

There are three creatures on the wheel. They are at different stages, one is climbing, another is descending and a proud-looking sphynx like goblin sits atop the wheel with a sword in hand.

The creatures pull and claw at the wheel, are they hanging on for life or are they trying to clamber to the top? Maybe they are the ones who move the wheel.

But the wheel is connected to a lever, which leaves the picture. Something outside of their control is in charge of this wheel.

The way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans. The Wheel shares in God’s sadistic pleasure of seeing people disappointed, let down and tormented by life’s cruel twists and turns.

We have ideas, plans, and dreams for our movement forward in life.

The Wheel reminds us we are never fully in control of our movement, in fact, we may be controlled and at the mercy of a cruel and twisted machine, one run by goblins and steered by an invisible hand.

~

~

The blue goblin on the top of the wheel sits, seeming to look on at us with a smirk. They have a sword in hand, a crown, and a cape. They appear to have acquired something on this wheel.

Looking closely, they have a small platform to sit on, They are on the wheel, but they are not fully attached to the wheel like the others.

To recognize that we are not fully in control of how our life spins, and to accept the ups and downs of life with a smirk – may be a profound accomplishment in this spinning vortex.

~

Planets, stars, and galaxies are pulled apart and spun around each other by mysterious forces;

To be on this planet in one way or another is to be along for the drive. We do our best to move forward and make choices. But like a clock that moves with thousands of levers and parts; there are variables and mechanics in life that are out of control.

There are events that will happen to us, people who will change us, and roads closed off to us.

The Wheel cautions: you are not in control and beneath the veil of your actions there may be a spinning indifferent wheel of maniacal goblins.

But perhaps it also says – don’t take this too seriously. In the words of Bill Hicks:

‘It’s just a ride’.

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Artwork for this post was created by Jack O’Flynn and collaborator Lisa Rytterlund in Bergen, Norway.

Lisa Rytterlund is a Swedish artist currently based in Bergen, Norway. Primarily working with clay and ceramic processes, they currently create work that explores self-portraiture along with mythical and religious symbolism, through an often playful approach and humourous lense.

Find Lisa’s work here https://www.instagram.com/rytterlund/

~

Jack O’Flynn 2022

When we see you

We are protected

By a bird and an angel, a lion and a bull

~

To be whole, to be complete, to be realised

A woman hovers in a bounded blue garland. One foot raised and crossed behind the other, she holds a cup and wand in her hands, as a cloth floats across her body.

If the Fools journey begins with a step into the unknown, It finishes at The World. The final card of the Major Arcana of the Tarot .

When we speak of The World, we usually speak of the Earth, our planet, with its landscapes, ecology, countries, atmosphere, wildlife, and people.

The World is where we live; it contains and sustains our existence.

To speak of someone or something’s ‘World’ is to speak of that which holds all that there is to say about them.

Our World defines us.

It is something all-encompassing, a holder of diversity, and a finality.

Why does Fool end their journey here at The World? What does the floating woman encased in a blue garland have to tell us?

~

~

In her hands she holds a wand and cup. A wand is for creating and moving out into the world, a cup receives and holds, bonds, and pours.

Life is a continual process of outward to inward,

expansion to retraction, inhale to exhale.

To hold these energies seems to say:

You hold the forces of life in your hand,

you are a self-creating force.

a self-sustaining vessel.

~

She stands freely, proudly, and calmly. This calm stance has been earned, through the trials of becoming, loss, renewal, and emptying.

When we reach the World, we may stand, softly, yet firmly in our place. 

When you arrive at your place, your World; there is an ease, a softening into the body.

To stand freely, with softness and security,  you have to trust in the safety of your place in the World. To be safe, valued, and protected, we must feel of Worth.

Worth, could be considered one of the final destinations of our journey through these cards. How to find it, how to believe it, and how to sustain it.

Self-Worth.

Worthy of attention, Worthy of protection 

The World says we are Worthy, because we are it and we are here.

~

~

Standing freely in a container of garlanded leaves, they are enmeshed and flowing, pulsing with energy. They create an orb of serenity and clarity. This portal is bound tightly, it is safe and solid and forms an opening in the middle of the card. 

Worth when discovered, binds us, and keeps us safe, allowing us to venture into new realms, secure within our orb of Worth. 

An angel, a bull, a bird, and a lion secure in place the garland which protects the woman. They are elemental guardians, supporting and holding the World together, above and below.

This is a harmonious structure, each element has its place, protecting the floating egg.

She is naked, but for a cloth floating over her body. She does not fear being seen, but rather in the last analysis there is always something that can’t be fully revealed; creation and the self is, a mystery.

The cloth of protection hangs gently, suspended in a perfect moment. Her foot grasps the floor and she holds all that she needs to. 

The gentle draping of the cloth reminds us that life is fleeting; it will pass in a moment, this cloth of life needs to be felt, and cared for, for it is all that we have. 

The World, caught in a tender orb,

hangs in the balance. 

It is precious, and must be protected.

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Artwork for this post was created by Jack O’Flynn and collaborator Lisa Rytterlund in Bergen, Norway.

Lisa Rytterlund is a Swedish artist currently based in Bergen, Norway. Primarily working with clay and ceramic processes, they currently create work that explores self-portraiture along with mythical and religious symbolism, through an often playful approach and humourous lense.

Find Lisa’s work here https://www.instagram.com/rytterlund/

Jack O’Flynn 2022

   ~

When we see you

We pass

To the black soil of purple hands

~

To disintegrate, to churn, to sprout

A flesh and blue coloured skeleton scrapes a blade across the black ground. Feet, hands, bones and severed heads are left in its wake. From the black soil tufts of purple and yellow grass sprout up. 

Death in most definitions is considered an end. For something to meet its Death, is to be destroyed, finished; annihilated. 

But I want to consider Death,  and the nameless or 13th Arcanum of the Tarot, as a process of change, a process that speaks to transformation: through cutting, decomposition, rot and re-generation.

There is a saying in Ireland that when someone dies they have ‘passed on’

To pass is to move from place;  Passing could signify the movement of time, the movement of water in a river or the eating and digesting of food. For someone to ‘Pass On’ is for someone to move somewhere, to change into something, to become something else.

What happens to a body that has ‘passed on?’

The process of Death begins when our physical bodies, no longer enlivened by oxygen, begin to discolour and stiffen. The ‘stench of Death’ of putrefaction begins with a release of microorganisms and bacteria that commence decomposition. The body bloats; organs, skin, tissue and muscles liquify;  

After around a month of intense changes to our physical body, our teeth, cartilage and hair are left to sink into the ground.

The breakdown of tissue leaves only skeleton remains, to become fossilized, or broken down too: becoming brittle, cracking, disintegrating and returning to dust.

Seeing the skeleton walk across the black ground in some way reminds us of this process, this horror that feels so alien to our live, warm, and fluid bodies. We crave our lives to be solidified and secure.

But our bodies are in a state of ongoing flux. Each day we are shedding skin and hair, processing food; excreting sweat, fluid, shit, and bacteria. These are all parts of ourselves, parts that are, Passing, from one place to another, each moment.

When we inhale we breathe in Oxygen, when we exhale we release chemicals no longer needed back to the world – emptying our lungs. In this process of gas exchange, our inhales and exhales keep our organs, blood vessels, and tissues churning. Air opens up and closes our bodies – allowing new life to come and go.

If inhalation is the breath of life, then exhalation may be the breath of Death.

With each exhale; each excretion of waste from the body, we become Death: becoming decay, revolution, movement.

~

Hospitals, sewers, dumps, wastelands, and all places where sickness, rot, and decay have been cast to, remind us of Death. We reject them, are revolted by them, and prefer to keep them away, cordoned off, underground, shipped away. To make contact with them is to make contact with Death.

Julia Kristova, spoke about the revolting power of Death, decay and waste as the abject; That which is truly not us, that which the ego does not recognize. 

“These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.” 

We keep Death at ‘the border’, to live as though it were not a part of us. To keep out of mind the fear and revolt it brings us. But there is power at the border of the abject. Our ego, our sense of self, finds itself strengthened in its rejection, knowing what it is not, what it refuses.

~

The skeleton walker of the Death card walks with a long blade in hand, powerfully, dynamically stepping forward. With each step they take, a new layer of skin is grown.

As the purple and yellow growths sprout from the black soil, the body, re- generates, our psyches too become re-born.

In his book Dream and the Underworld James Hillman speaks about dreams as a place of Death. In sleep each night our collected psychic material goes to be churned, cut-up and re-fed to us in dramatic, surreal situations.

Figures from our past come to us with messages, in sometimes profound or equally absurd vignettes. In the dissolve of dream location our self and body slips from places; through feelings, thoughts and memories. Our dayworld intentions are harder to locate.

 If Dreams are a Death space for the residue fibre of our lives, a place where our muscle memory is sent to be worked up and processed, then the matter they condense into is black soil.

Rich black soil of carbon and compost; a fertile humus that Death walks upon, feeds, turns and reaps with the scythe. Each lost body part, each shed identity, each forgotten dream has gone under the sharp blade of Death.

To sleep and dream is to sink into the black soil.

The black soil of soul making.

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Artwork for this post was created by Jack O’Flynn and collaborator Lisa Rytterlund in Bergen, Norway.

Lisa Rytterlund is a Swedish artist currently based in Bergen, Norway. Primarily working with clay and ceramic processes, they currently create work that explores self-portraiture along with mythical and religious symbolism, through an often playful approach and humourous lense.

Find Lisa’s work here https://www.instagram.com/rytterlund/

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Sources

The Dream and the Underworld, Hillman. J 1979

Powers of Horror, Kristeva. J 1980

~

Jack O’Flynn 2022

When we see you

We are shaken

Trembling on a ground of waves

~

to upset, to reveal, to liberate

A cascading Tower looms tall. A lightning bolt cracks a hole through the sky. The crowned roof comes falling off. A man dances on his hands.

The Tower is perhaps the most feared card in the tarot. Ideas of ruin, devastation and crisis have long been attributed to the sight of the trembling tower walls, striking fear into those who see it.

And true, the Tower may bring these fears, but that’s not all that it offers.

To understand this card we have to first understand what a Tower is.

A Tower is a construction; It protects and fortifies from the outside world, keeping those inside safe. It may hold a reservoir of accumulated goods and knowledge, as well as serving as a vantage point to threats;

A Tower is a construction from which we can see. 

Our lives are made of many constructions. Within the walls of our experience is a story about who we are, where we are from and what has happened to us. This accumulated store of energy becomes a tower; a way of being, a structure that keeps us safe, contained and fortified.

We need structures, like we need walls to a house. Walls and structures help us to define who we are and make sense of the world.

~

But what happens when the structure that we are familiar and safe in, is suddenly changed?  

The sudden crash of lightning and the falling roof of the Tower can be seen as a dramatic, unforeseen event that shakes the foundation of the way things normally are. This strike could look like a revelation of truth, or a sudden upheaval that upends our perspective.

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After this strike, we cannot go back to the way things have been.

And perhaps this is why the Tower is so feared as a card

because of change.

Humans fear change, especially to the structured ways we have learned to live. Change is the unknown, it’s the potential for failure, and the loss of what was.

But change is inevitable, and constant.

Shunryu Suzuki, the beloved Buddhist teacher, was once asked what the most important teaching of Buddhism was, he replied ‘everything changes’

The change that the tower brings may come about through crisis and moments of stark exposure, but some times we need these sudden shocks to wake us up to the reality of our lives.

And crisis, sudden change and loss may also bring some unexpected gifts.

~

There is a central figure who seems to be falling through the sky, plummeting from the Tower walls. I had always seen their dangling legs and outstretched arms as crying for help, as they fall to their death.

But on closer inspection, I could not say that they were really falling; their hands seem to touch the floor, and they have a peaceful look on their face.

What if instead of falling, they have escaped from the Tower’s door and are now jumping onto their hands, kicking their feet into the air with joy?

The Sufi poet Rumi wrote that the door to love was devastation, and that allowing ourselves to fall would one day give us the wings to fly.

Perhaps he was signalling the potential for devastation to open up the emotional landscape. As devastation takes hold, and claims our past we may feel a new connection to the world around us, one no longer governed and confined by old walls and structures.

There may be sorrow and mourning at the loss of what was, but allowing ourselves to release when crisis appears, as the jumping man seems to do, may eventually lead to a new liberation.

~

From the moment of crisis to the liberation of destruction we eventually find one of my favourite keywords for the Tower: reconstruction.

Carl Jung put it simply, ‘Nothing can be created without something first being destroyed’ 

The spark of the Towers’ flames may become a light that illuminates, showing us what we need to change and where.

But the walls will eventually be re-built. However this will not be a simple reconstruction, it points to a more deeper restructuring. One that goes down to the foundations, to the roots.

Seeing the Tower can be to see a problem in your life in all of its totality leading you to completely rethink and revise your perspective on it.

~

~

The Tower clears the way for new foundations to be laid, and with new foundations,

we can build new constructions, with new vantage points;

new Towers to see from.

until the shaking of the Tower walls begins again

and a lightning strike brings our Tower

crashing down

like a trembling wave.

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The way of love is not
a subtle argument.

The door there
is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings.

Rumi, The way of Love

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Artwork for this month’s When We See You comes from a collaboration between artist’s Jack O’Flynn and Tamara Macarthur. Tamara created the cards from paper mache, paint, gold and glitter, leaving space in the middle for Jack to re-create the tarot image with colouring pencils and pen. The image in the middle was re-imagined from the Tarot de Marseille ‘La Maison Devx’ (The Tower) card.

Tamara Macarthur is a Glasgow based performance artist whose work explores tears, longing and intimacy within the space of theatrical, glittering sets of cathedrals, trees, waves and stars. See more of Tamara’s work on her website below.

https://cargocollective.com/tamaramacarthur