2. Love Potion Number Nine

Dear Temperance, will I ever find romantic love?

Major Arcana XIV: Temperance. Aquarian Tarot, David Palladini, 1970. “Mature adaptation to whatever life offers; individualized existence.”

Greetings and hand-to-heart welcome to the second issue of Dear Temperance, a tarot advice column for paid subscribers to Home + the World!

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Dear Temperance,

thank you so much for your weekly dose of beauty!  If you don't mind asking the cards for me...it's the age old same old...am I ever going to experience romantic love?  maybe that's too open ended.  how about what is broken in me that makes this seemingly impossible?  maybe that's too specific!  is it my fault?  fault probably isn't the right word.  

learning so much from you-thank you!  ceasefire now! xo

Signed,

Looking for Love

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Dear Looking for Love,

Greetings from the New Moon in Cancer: the moon of care, nurturance, connection, and love, the moon of the salt summer sea, the moon of sweet watermelon slow-ripening on the vine.

This is the question, isn’t it? The most human question of all. Could I be loved. Who hasn’t looked to the stars and wondered am I actually lovable? Or am I irredeemably broken? I know I have, and every person reading this has. And so, already, you are not alone.

I love the poetry in your words, especially the ambivalence: is it possible? Do I dare to believe? The word ambivalence derives from the Latin ambi, meaning both; and valēre, indicating strength. So, to be ambivalent means to have strong feelings on two opposing sides of a question: to feel that you must go AND you must stay, simultaneously; to feel that you are uniquely unlovable, AND yet you have a powerful, enduring, unrelenting desire to be loved.

The deck I’m using today is the Aquarian Tarot, one that I have wanted for a long time. I purchased it on a recent trip to Scotland, on a day where I was walking solo around Glasgow, with no data (and therefore no google maps), just a vague sense of my location relative to the River Clyde to the south and a highway to the west.

Glasgow Cathedral and Necropolis

As I meandered down the High Street from the Glasgow Cathedral and Necropolis—a 900-year-old church and hilltop cemetery filled with towering monuments to every raping and enslaving Victorian Glaswegian titan of industry; every patriarchal colonizer priest and pastor—I happened upon a little witch shop, where the flowing-white-haired proprietress was just rolling up the security gate and opening the door and front windows. Of course, I went in, browsed, procured the deck I had been thinking about, and had a nice conversation with the shopkeeper about some places I might go for lunch.

Go down the hill to the clock tower—she instructed, and then as an aside—where the witches and wizards were tortured and executed—and take a right.

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