Dispatches from the Underground: Don’t Miss the Final Sprint of 2019
It’s here — only two weeks to go — the last chance to get in any final planting for the year
By some hilarious mischievous miracle, I haven’t said it yet. At least not recently. I spent all that time last week looking back at May and ahead at June and not once did I give that reminder I’ve been giving every year for as long as I can remember at this point. Not one to break with tradition, here I go:
This is the final sprint. Two full weeks remain before we mark the solstice. This is it, guys. If there’s anything you haven’t started yet but still want to accomplish this year, you need to make a move on it immediately. I can’t overemphasize this. Call it superstition or whatever you want, but there’s nothing I’ve learned about the cycles of the year that’s been more consistently true than this. I’ve been aware of this in my own life since years before I was conscious of what exactly was happening.
It’s not complicated, it’s just the (tired, metaphorical) planting cycle. This is your last opportunity to plant. From here on out, it’s tilling and harvesting.
To be sure, if you’re reading this and thinking of all the things you definitely can’t start in the next two weeks, well, as we often say in New England, there’s always next year. None of us ever gets in 100% of what we set to plant at the beginning of the year, and sometimes that’s for good reason. Sometimes — actually, I’d say almost all of the time — we don’t start off the year with a full and complete vision of what the year is to be, despite our best efforts and intentions. Adjustments must be made. But if there are things you still believe in and you think you can make even small movement on, don’t delay! Take that opportunity and reap the benefits later. If you pay attention to this, I promise you’ll find that I’m right. Test it.
I’m being a little dramatic, but this doesn’t have to be stressful. What gets done gets done. For my own stuff, I took a very simple inventory: recalling my stated goals from the beginning of the year (along with all those I’ve accumulated or modified since), I made a list of everything I need to do in the next two weeks. It wasn’t long — just half a page.
I broke it into three categories (although you should feel free to do this however the hell you want): tasks I haven’t started, tasks I’ve started but require completion or substantial progress prior to the solstice, and “other”, which encompassed things like solstice-related rituals and spiritual practices. When I broke it down, I found it to be sensible, tangible, and doable, for the most part. Will I hit every single one of these things prior to Friday the 21st? Almost certainly not, but I will hit the majority of them and that will be sufficient.
I did that over the weekend and then on Monday I set about kicking things off with a little bit of spiritual renewal. Throughout the day, pretty much on a whim, I focused myself spiritually by listening to the audiobook version of Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita. When I got home, I cleansed the house with a fat stick of palo santo, and then I went out to church to help put on a spectacular spiritual reset Vespers service. All this in such close proximity to the New Moon (which I believe was technically Sunday) has served to really light a fire under my ass. It’s not too late for you to go about something similar for the same effect.
Let’s do this. Don’t stress it. Just do it, like the goddess of victory once so famously said.
One more thing about the supposed and supposedly inevitable difficulties to come in the next eight weeks or so: sometimes, we can best survive (dare I say thrive?) during such difficult times in the simplest possible ways.
While I can’t expect or even recommend that you go out and buy 50 yarrow stalks and start casting I Ching readings, my weekly divination practice has been greater help than any other single thing over the years when it comes to dealing with difficulty. Each week I put together a compound reading that typically takes up all of two sides of a sheet of paper from a legal pad — a pretty hefty hunk of insight, right?
Except you can’t possibly pay attention and remember every single word, line, and nuance of that reading every minute of the week, right? Nobody can. It’s just like when I do my Outlooks — I try to remember key themes and big takeaways and hope that by hanging onto those I manage to follow my own advice. I do a miniature version of this exercise each week. For example, two weeks ago, my reading was fairly dire, and it came with a very clear recommendation — “keep cool this week.” That was all I remembered from that reading. Keep cool this week.
And I did it. I forgot pretty much the whole reading for the whole week, but I kept in mind the need to be cool (which isn’t naturally my nature, as some of you well know). So I stayed cool and I avoided disaster the whole week. The next week , I got another unfortunate reading, with another very clear recommendation — “stay cheerful this week no matter what comes.” So I did the same thing. It WAS a difficult and stressful week, pretty much start to finish. But I vowed — even aloud — to remain cheerful the entire time, and somehow I managed to pull it off. I ended the week satisfied and unscathed, if exhausted.
The point is, sometimes things like that are all it takes. You don’t have to spend twelve years practicing divination to figure that out — there’s many ways to look at the day or week or month ahead and suss out whether it’s gonna be a cakewalk or a gauntlet. If you then make tiny mental resolutions in response to that, it’s like arming yourself against whatever’s to come. It really works.
Speaking of divination, wanted to make note of the fact that I’ve been posting daily three-card tarot readings to my Instagram three or four times a week. If that sort of thing interests you, look me up and follow — @wizardofmonadnock.
Believe it or not, this isn’t really a self-promotional thing; in fact, the only reason I’m doing this at all is as an exercise to teach myself these cards. As I noted some time back, I’m new to the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (the traditional one you normally see when people talk tarot), so I’m trying to give myself a crash course by experimenting with daily readings and familiarizing myself with these fresh cards and what they mean and do and how they interact with one another.
It’s fun, and I think a lot of the statements I include with the pictures on IG turn out to be really interesting messages of contemplation, often urging us to pay attention in ways we probably ought to be paying attention to anyway. I could certainly use your help and feedback, so if you do decide to follow along with this, please don’t hesitate to leave comments or send DMs with any thoughts that might arise from all of this.
Just a final little addendum here — sometimes it’s not so clear or cut and dried at all. Just yesterday both the cards and everybody’s astrology lit up with warnings of tearful strife and disaster. None of that happened for me, at all. I kept thinking something nasty was about to leap from behind a corner to bite me, or that the next car approaching from the other side of the road was going to cross the yellow line. But no, it was actually kind of a good day. Maybe not a great day, but I would rate it slightly above average.
What’s that all about? I have no idea.