The Tarot Asks: Are You Spring Cleaning?
Reading by Rahne Alexander
“Holding on to objects is not an inherently toxic trait, but it can be hard to perceive when we’ve crossed the line into unhealthy hoarding.”
One of the more daring resolutions I made this year was to throw away pens when they don’t work.
If you’re like me and grew up with austerity, it may be a familiar feeling to hold on to things that only sort of work properly. “Maybe I can fix it,” I think as the black fine point Sharpie makes a splotchy grey line. I cap it, set it on the desk, and grab another pen. Before long there are pens all over my desk, and some of them even work. A while later, I need to clear space on my desk, they all go back into the broken coffee mug pen holder, and the cycle starts again.
This is where spring cleaning comes in. Cleansing practices ahead of spring holidays — Nowruz, Passover, Songkran, Lunar New Year — are ancient practices in numerous cultures, but it doesn’t take an ancestral lineage to feel the pull to Marie Kondo your life, especially as the sky becomes lighter and gardens begin blooming.
I spent about a decade putting on a big festival each spring, which meant that from March through May every year I was putting in long hours at work, leaving no time to take advantage of the spirit of the season. By the time my event was over, it was summer, I wanted to be outside, and the detritus of my life remained. When that job no longer sparked joy and I set it aside, I was thrilled to renew the process of shedding other things that no longer serve me.
Some things were easy to dispense with: damaged and ill-fitting garments, weird kitchen gadgets I’d never used, dumb things I wrote on Facebook, relationships that only made me feel bad. Other things have been harder to part with: toxic inner monologues, stalled art projects, and an assortment of useless Sharpies.
I went into this month’s reading with a new approach: I flipped through the whole deck and set aside cards that seemed to have something to say to me about spring cleaning, then going through that stack a few times to narrow down to the two cards that seemed to be speaking the loudest: the Emperor and the Four of Pentacles.
The Four of Pentacles
We hoard for any number of reasons — trust, fear, an emotional need for connection to the past. The Four asks, what are you holding on to, and why?
The Four of Pentacles
In my traditional reading of the Four of Pentacles, I am given to thinking of desperate hoarding. Picture the Little Mermaid, with her legs where her tail used to be, perched on a pile of treasure, literally clutching a string of pearls. In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, we have a more taciturn miser, who seems to be shielding his vulnerability behind his meager wealth and his semi-royal costuming. The Four asks, what are you holding on to, and why? We hoard for any number of reasons — trust, fear, an emotional need for connection to the past. Holding on to objects is not an inherently toxic trait, but it can be hard to perceive when we’ve crossed the line into unhealthy hoarding.
The Emperor
The Emperor is a marker of law and social order, a figure defending against chaos. He’s a complicated figure for someone who resists patriarchy, for sure, and so he’s one of the figures that usually drives me to using more modern interpretations of tarot in my daily tarot practice. I don’t have any use for patriarchy, but I also don’t really care for chaos. The Emperor here is presenting the question, what is the role of law and order — especially after the cleansing is over? What are the epistemologies of the laws that I like? How can I change law and order to better serve not just my own needs, but the goals I have for freeing me and my family and, frankly, all of society?
I don’t think I know anyone who doesn’t want to feel more free, and this spring I’ll be thinking a lot about that as I dispose of the weird junk that I don’t need and make myself more and more vulnerable before the pile of treasures that I continue to keep, asking myself if these are the things I want to speak for me when I’m gone.
Your Tarot Tunes Playlist
This month’s Tarot Tunes playlist is designed to carry through the difficult emotional decisions that confront me when it’s time to attack the precariously stacked bankers boxes in the basement. May we all feel lighter and more connected when we reconvene next month.
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. Follow her on Instagram @the_tarot_asks