The Tarot Asks, Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?
Reading by Rahne Alexander
“It turns out, love is like oxygen; it is putting on your own mask first and then helping your fellow passengers with theirs.”
Valentine’s Day is funny to me. It’s never been my favorite holiday. It’s too high-risk, and why is it in such a cold month? Who amongst us hasn’t felt on thin ice on this emotionally tenuous holiday?
For me, V-Day has turned out to be a series of strange traditions. It started — as it did, I believe, for most of us — as a reminder of how unpopular I was in school. There were a few years I obviated those teenage feelings by mailing silly poems to distant friends, written on drug store valentines. For a few years after my sister’s divorce, she and I made a tradition of spending every February 14 together. And then for a few years, I’d catch a production of the Vagina Monologues. One year I saw Loretta Swit do the show at Baltimore’s dearly departed Mechanic Theater.
Let’s consider this month’s column a slight return of my mail art past. Imagine this a little missive scrawled on the back of a drugstore valentine, maybe one with Bugs Bunny kissing Elmer Fudd.
My usual reading of the Lovers highlights pretense and illusion, being untethered, ungrounded — great feelings, to be sure, but unsustainable. A strong reminder to be present in the moment, to stop and smell the flowers and ask yourself, who decided that this was the season to give people roses?
I selected the Lovers as the anchor card for this month’s reading because it would be foolish not to take the chance to engage this card of many splendors in this season when a lot of us are deliberating what the word “love” will mean this year.
Listen to Rahne’s handcrafted playlist for this month’s meditation. She put it together just for you. xo
If I’m being honest, I almost always take the Lovers with a grain of salt, especially when the deck seems really invested in depicting the Lovers in heteronormative ways. Being a queer lady of a certain age, I’ve become accustomed to reading through such pervasive culture depictions and choose what is relevant to me.
Interestingly, according to tarot scholar Rachel Pollack, an early version of this card was designated as “The Choice,” perhaps to highlight a choice between competing desires. Dark vs. light, mortal vs. divine, apples vs. oranges. But even here, choice options are rarely binary. In almost any Lovers card you pick, there are other significant figures other than the nominal paramours. What are we to make of the fact that the Lovers is almost always at least a threesome? Clearly we need more insight into what other forces are involved.
“Love is an acknowledgement of the ways that you’ve truly fucked up and so have committed to doing better.”
In response to the Lovers, I drew a card: the Five of Cups. While I was glad to keep dwelling in the land of emotion and connection via the Cups (or Hearts, as I tend to think of them), i was less glad to be contending with a card of heartbreak, sorrow, regret. It’s certainly the card that better represents what, historically, Valentine’s Day has meant for me. Some sadnesses serve to distract from deeper sorrows. As the song goes, are you ready to be heartbroken?
We’re looking at a lot of really terrible stuff coming directly at us. The one thing I think we can all agree on is that the world is getting worse, and it seems to me that the overwhelming response has been to quickly determine who is expendable. I think we’re in the right to feel a great deal of sorrow about where we are.
Is it, as they say, better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all? I think so, because the periods where I felt loveless were among the bleakest of times. But I can’t know what it’s like to have never loved.
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I think one of the things that makes love terrifying is its acknowledgement of temporality, the awareness that time is fleeting and so I am choosing to spend a portion of my time with this person or this place or this thing. Love is an acknowledgement of the ways that you’ve truly fucked up and so have committed to doing better. It turns out, love is like oxygen; it is putting on your own mask first and then helping your fellow passengers with theirs.
It’s an acknowledgement that ultimately, that there’s only so much you can do.
My recommendation is, of course, to really celebrate your love this month. Celebrate it now and always, and at the same time prepare yourself to deal for the heartbreaks to come. Think about how much stronger you are now than before you got your heart broken the first or even the fifth time. Embrace the sorrow as well.
I think that a huge part of understanding love is dealing directly with sorrow — not avoiding it. To this end, I’ve made up a little playlist of heartbreak songs to accompany this month’s meditations. May V-Day this year be a full spectrum of emotions.
Rahne Alexander is an intermedia artist and writer from Baltimore, Maryland. She holds an MFA in Intermedia + Digital Arts from UMBC. A tarot reader for more than 20 years, she can be reached for readings at rahne.com/tarot.