February is associated with romance. A lot of the readings I’ve been doing this month are on the subject of love and relationships so I asked the Tarot for insight into romantic relationships and she gave me a nice general guide
Eight of Wands ~ There is a rush at the beginning of a relationship. It’s the energy of novelty and the excitement of connection. This feels amazing. It feels alive and it is very easy to get carried away in the flow. The energy is focused and you are moving together. That focus blinds you to each other’s faults and you tend to overlook the parts that aren’t working because you’re so caught up in what is. Eventually those wands are going to hit the ground and the energy will be spent. You will come down off that high. You will be two flawed humans who now have to deal with each other as you really are.
The Star ~ In relationships that progress past the initial rush, and survive the inevitable impact with reality, there is the moment where you see each other as you really are. You progress to a deeper, more meaningful connection and union when you get to this phase and lovingly accept the other. There is no hiding. Here there is real love. There is compassion for yourself and the other and there is understanding and hope for the future.
Two of Pentacles ~ Loving someone, and being loved, flaws and all, requires effort. Over time we may find we can’t do this with the person we are with and we separate from them. Or we discover that we can’t imagine life without this marvelously irritating person and we make it work. We balance our needs with theirs. We take the good with the bad and together you find the sweet spot because you have found someone worth going through the struggle with.
This past week NASA announced that the Mars Rover Opportunity has stopped transmitting and its batteries have died. People all over social media were quite touched by Opportunity’s final words and there were heartfelt comments of sympathy for Opportunity.
I thought it was kind of sweet. Other people found a way to
be put off or even offended by this. There were false analogy arguments
comparing the feelings people had for the rover and what they feel for a
variety of other sympathetic causes like abused children, refugees, animals. It
was exhausting to read and misses the greater point; as most false analogies
do.
It’s not about parceling out compassion. There is room for feelings for everyone and everything. At the moment we are mourning the loss of a thing that was dear to many. That doesn’t have any relation to the compassion people do or do not have for abused animals, endangered species, or missing children. Those are separate issues.
It’s completely human to feel deeper feelings for people and things that are closer to you. It is understandable to cry over your dog’s death. Is it okay to ask someone, whose dog has just died, where are their tears for all the other dead dogs in the world? No, of course not. It would be heartless and unfair to minimize someone’s pain in that way.
Yes, Opportunity and the other rovers are machines. Human beings are social creatures and we bond not only with other humans but with animals and objects too. Think about your childhood teddy bear, your first car, an instrument you play, art you created. All of these things are things but you have affection for them. My husband’s first car was destroyed by a drunk driver while parked in front of his house. He speaks of that car like a long lost friend. The Mars Opportunity Rover was an extension of Us and as such has a special place in our hearts.
Opportunity was intended to last 90 days but instead lasted nearly 15 years. We have all seen the amazing images sent back to us from Mars and learned the data collected that has shed light on the origins of our planet and our solar system. Opportunity was our eyes and ears on a different planet and over the years he and the other rovers were personified in the way NASA spoke about them and the stories we read. Discovery Rover sang Happy Birthday to himself on the first anniversary of his landing on Mars. Curiosity, Spirit, and Opportunity, nicknamed Oppy, have their own Twitter profiles. They are technological marvels that humans created, paid for with our taxes, and launched into space.
We all know that Opportunity was a machine. We also know
that it had a life of some sort. Most of us can’t really explain how we mean
that. I think that understanding of Opportunity, as more than just a machine,
is a throwback to our animist roots as humans. It’s in our bones to sense the
life in the world around us. This is why we bond with our cars as well as we do
to our cats.
Opportunity’s final words were very human and poked us in
our existential dread but that doesn’t make the sadness we feel for him less
real or shallow. It instead reminded us of the affinity we have with all things
and that brought out our compassion. This week that compassion was focused on a
little robot who shut down on Mars.
Personal intimacy and physical intimacy are not the same
thing. They can be. But they aren’t always.
You can have sex with someone you don’t know very well, care
for very much, or even don’t respect. There is no emotional risk when you
aren’t invested in the person you’re in bed with. You can claim an intimacy
with them because you were physically naked and your bodies intertwined. But
were you really engaged with that person? Was there a real connection? Or, were
they a prop in your experience? Were you a prop in theirs?
If you are okay not connecting any deeper than that, mazel
tov. You have what you want. If, however, you say you want a more profound bond
with someone, it needs to go beyond physical intimacy. This is where it gets
scary for people and I suspect this is the reason many of us make our personal
relationships sexual so early on. It’s an unconscious effort to bypass this
discomfort and have the appearance of intimacy. But deep down we know it’s not
the same thing.
Real intimacy is being your authentic self with someone else while they are their authentic self with you; warts and all. That’s really being naked. It’s a wonderful experience being seen for who you really are and being loved and accepted as such. The risk comes from not knowing how the other will react to the real you. This risk and the fear of that kind of rejection is the biggest obstacle to that deep connection we all say we want.
The risk is real. The cost can seem high. You invest in a
relationship and slowly, over time, reveal who you are and then, perhaps at
some point a year or two in, either you or the other person realizes you two
are not a good fit. Sometimes you can let this go on much, much longer and find
yourself married, with children, to a person you don’t really know and who
doesn’t know you. Ouch! That sort of pain corrodes your soul and your self-worth.
You thought you were protecting yourself from pain but instead you inflicted a
slow torture on yourself.
Now what?
You have a choice. Be who you really are. Be your authentic
self and let the chips fall where they may, or not. Actually, you have always
had this choice. If you didn’t actively choose then you might want to start by
looking at why not.
I
think it is better, and ultimately less painful, to be rejected for who you actually
are than pretend to be something you’re not.
In 1999, Mr. Wonderful and I sold our tiny townhouse in New
York City and bought a single family home in the Hudson Valley. When I say our
townhouse was tiny I’m not kidding. The entire property plot was 23 feet by 36
feet. That included the footprint of the house. We were so excited to be able
to buy ourselves a home; a place of our own, where we could raise our kids and
be a family. Before we closed on the house we had already outgrown it. It was a
two bedroom house and we were expecting baby #3.
We made it work for years. You can get away with a lot when
your kids are little. Our oldest was going on eleven and we knew we needed to
upsize. We also knew that was going to be a challenge. Mr. Wonderful would have
to drive to the city, every day, so the final say was his. The last thing I
wanted was a miserable husband who resented us because of his situation. If we
weren’t all going to be happy there, it wasn’t the right house for us.
We did find a nice house, good schools, nice neighbors, and
commutable to the city. It was in pretty good shape but no one updated the
interior since the house was built in the 1970s. We made that work too. Little
by little I removed ugly wallpaper and wood paneling. If you don’t have the
money for renovations, paint is a good way to go.
The one thing that I absolutely despised was the double oven range. I cook every day. I make all our food from scratch and when the kids were little I was baking muffins and things several times a week. That range was a nightmare to use. It took up too much room in an already tiny kitchen. The top oven burned everything and overhung the range top in such a way that I could only use small pots on the back burners. It was so unnecessarily complicated that to get the bottom oven to work required three different knobs. So aggravating! Our first Thanksgiving dinner was two hours late because I didn’t actually turn the oven on when I thought I did.
It was pretty much like this but brown
We didn’t have the money to replace it so I adjusted to that awful range and made it work for the next bunch of years.
If Mr. Wonderful and I are anything it’s practical. We made a list of all the things the house needed. We prioritized and slowly worked our way through it. Five kids, one salary, new house, money was tight. When I say slowly I mean slowly. One day, while out with Mr. Wonderful, he took me to an appliance store. I thought we were just going to see what sorts of things were available and what they cost. You know, window shopping. No, he had brought me there to buy a new stove. I nearly cried. He had been planning this for ages. He squirreled away a portion of his cash every week for nearly a year so we could buy it outright. It was so sweet. I picked out a nice, simple, single oven range and by the end of that week the worst thing in my house was gone.
I don’t think any other gift has ever made me happier.
It’s not just that the oven was something I really wanted.
It was that my husband went out of his way to make it happen for me without me
ever asking him to. It was on our list and would have eventually been dealt
with but he didn’t want me to have to wait. That thoughtfulness and care made a
mundane thing like an oven incredibly romantic.
If you follow me on Instagram or are friends with me on
Facebook then you know that first thing Saturday morning I accidentally knocked
a mug off a shelf and couldn’t catch it in time. Instead of smashing itself on
the floor, the mug crashed into the oven door glass and shattered it into a
thousand pieces. I was a bit more upset about it than I expected I would be. I
actually have a sentimental attachment to this oven. The repairman will call me
sometime today with the cost to repair it and I really hope it’s not too much.
