Hi. I’m Katie. This newsletter is a place for the woo curious to explore spirituality, culture, and humanity in an intersectional way. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week…
Last week, while visiting St. Croix, I packed up three cans of ravioli, one pack of turkey hot dogs, a change of clothes, my green hammock and my thirst for seclusion into a backpack and went on a camping trip with my partner, Hilly, and six other people.
This choice was not entirely out of character for me. I grew up camping…sort of. Die hard campers would contest this statement, as the Martin family’s version of roughing it was of the car camping variety, where we pitched our tents a mere 10 feet from our parked van.
Sure, we roasted marshmallows and slapped mosquitos just like any other family trying to bond around a blazing fire, but we were never far from a cell phone tower or a paved road. My childhood experiences with camping did not involve a lot of risk. The biggest chance we took was running out of Cheez Whiz, a packable staple that my dad endearingly referred to as “spray cheese.”
I’ve known Hilly for nearly two years, so I was not so naive as to think that his idea of camping would neatly align with the soft-edged sort I grew up with. But if I’ve learned one thing from him, it’s that the good stuff, the marrow of life, requires some work. Getting to our campsite would not be easy. But it would be worth it.
And it was. After a long, sweaty hike where we took a few wrong turns (the guidance of “turn right at the burnt-out car,” while colorful, wasn’t exactly precise), we were rescued by Garincha, one of Hilly’s friends who had spearheaded this excursion. We hopped in his Jeep, and he lead us to our home away from home for the next 48 hours.
The northwestern side of St. Croix is dotted with tide pools, or places where the landscape creates a little pocket of seawater that is cradled by the cupped hands of long-dead coral, fossilized and frozen in the limestone rocks that jut from the foamy waves. Barnacles cling to rocks through high and low tide, resilient in the face of the changing water level.
Our campsite was one of those places where you feel like you must walk softly because you are the first person to set foot on this little square of the Earth in a very long while. Here, I felt almost reverent in the face of nature’s brutality and beauty: the crashing ocean made me feel fragile. The smooth, large stones that we used to create a fire ring lent a sense of purpose. The stars, when they emerged at dusk, were like needleheads that pinned me into place—I craned my neck to examine the constellations I memorized as a child and saw them with new, unpolluted eyes.
I cannot say that our group “did” much in our short time at this tide pool. We played card games. We climbed to the top of the limestone formations and watched the sun set. We lounged in hammocks, smoked cigars and took frequent dips in the calmer water of the tide pool. We ate shakshuka for breakfast and drank rum and pineapple juice in the afternoon.
I hesitate to use the word perfect, but I feel like we brushed our fingertips against the idea of contentment. The marrow of life. For a moment, it was ours.
I often say that the universe has jokes. And when it came time for our camping trip to end, let’s just say that the universe had been working on an entire stand-up routine and was ready to deliver punchline after punchline. This, paired with the tail end of Mercury retrograde, made our exit from paradise a little, uh, tumultuous.
It all started with a pair of lost Jeep keys. After lugging all of our things up a steep hill, the eight of us stood there, covered in sweat, and contemplated this unwelcome plot twist. Our exit strategy hinged on the unbridled, rugged power of the Jeep—no mere car could handle the deep trenches and gaping potholes of the unpaved trail that led down to where we were. Though we had a second Jeep (with keys!), there was no way that all of us, plus our supplies, could make it out in one go.
After a search party that returned to the tide pools to search for the tiny, silver key came back empty-handed, it was decided that the best course of action would be to use the working Jeep to evacuate some folks, retrieve the spare key and then drive it back to those of us left behind. With that, Jeep #1, piloted by Garincha, headed out. Hilly and I stayed with a few others, busted out our camping chairs and passed the time by eating Cheez-its and chatting.
Though the distance from where we were to where the spare key was waiting was not long on paper, the rough roads caused the round trip to take quite some time. Complicating things further, the sun sets rather early in St. Croix. Time was not on our side.
By the time Garincha returned, bearing the key, the shadows were decidedly long. But we weren’t concerned—we had what we needed to make our way home. Hilly climbed behind the wheel of the now-live Jeep and led the way up the mountain, bouncing us to and fro as we navigated the washed-out ridges of the dirt path.
About halfway up the very steep incline, the universe unleashed its second zinger of the day: after a particularly jostly back-and-forth, the Jeep we were in started sounding…weird. And then, unceremoniously, it died. In the middle of the path. While blocking the second, still-running Jeep behind us. Womp womp.
This was the first moment I started feeling a little panicky and very stuck. We tried starting the Jeep. It sputtered hopefully…and did not turn on. When the gauges indicated that we might be out of gas, we tried siphoning some from the other Jeep (which, though unsuccessful, allowed us all to show off our critical thinking skills as we cobbled together a siphoning device by using a windshield wiper fluid tube and a glass rum bottle).
When plans A through D failed, Hilly slowly, carefully backed the Dead Jeep down the mountain to a spot where the narrow path was a touch wider. Here, Living Jeep, which still could not hold all of us and make it up the mountain, was able to squeeze past and set off in search of gas or help or…something. We weren’t sure what our next steps were.
As night trickled in, the reality of our situation became clear. Our phone reception was spotty, and even if we managed to get a bar, our cell batteries were all slowly dying. Though the Living Jeep would eventually return, there was no guarantee that a perfect solution would arrive with it.
We hadn’t given up—spirits were still surprisingly high as we laughed nervously and tried to brainstorm the best course of action. But I wasn’t really sure how we were going to make it out of here…and I wasn’t getting the universe’s jokes. What the hell was I supposed to learn from this mess?
Two years ago, when I first decided to get divorced, I refused to do much of anything to actually indicate that I was leaving my husband and my home. Simple tasks like donating clothes or going through the files that housed all of our important documents seemed impossible.
I felt stuck, like a fly adhered to a lolling tongue of paper spiraling from a ceiling. I had tried to take wing and change my situation, but I had collided head first with a feeling of inertia that I could not shake. I couldn’t envision a life beyond the one I had spent the past five years building with my husband. What more was there than our sloping backyard, our granite countertops and our picture windows?
Only a few memories from this time of stuckness remain in my mind. In one, I remember sitting on the floor of our walk-in closet, holding two mismatched socks in my hand, and crying because I couldn’t find their counterparts. How the hell was I ever going to rebuild my life if I couldn’t even match socks? How was I ever going to free myself?
As tears cascaded down my cheeks, I hung my head between my legs and let the blood rush to my head. I hoped for a sign or some clarity that would explain it all and tell me what to do next, or at least where the missing socks were. But I received nothing but a headache.
Eventually, despite lacking a clear direction, I picked myself up off of the floor and kept moving. I don’t know what happened to the lonely socks. But somehow, I went from crying on a closet floor to standing on my own two feet in an entirely new life, one that I built myself.
I think a lot about why I was able to get unstuck. Why I was able to get out of my head and to do the thing: make the moves, pick up the socks, lift my chin and keep on living, even when life seemed anything but easy. It is difficult for me to put my finger on one magical “thing” that made forward motion possible.
It seems too simplistic to say that I am an optimistic person (my anxious thoughts would beg to differ). It’s also reductive to explain away this resilience with the sort of pat phrases I heard passed between the pews of my childhood church:
Everything happens for a reason.
After every storm comes a rainbow.
It’s all part of a bigger plan.
These treacly aphorisms rattle around like coins in a can, hoping to make enough noise to drown out the shittiness of life. As someone who heard her fair share of them, I can confidently say that these empty words are not an ingredient in the secret sauce to getting unstuck.
So what made the difference? Why am I not still lying on the floor of a walk-in closet in the suburbs? If I had to try to define what “it” is, I’d say that what helped me get unstuck was my belief that something would come out of this…even if I didn’t yet know what that something was.
It would have been easy to stay on the floor that day, ruminating on all the mistakes I had made to lead me to a point in life where I no longer had a matching sock, so to speak. But even though the universe didn’t whisper an explanation in my ear when I was in the middle of it all, begging for a reason, I believed that I would eventually find the meaning…even if, at the time, there were only faint flickers of it.
Making meaning out of horrible situations requires playing the long game. And hoping to discover that meaning only in the context of the specific, difficult situation is misleading. More often than not, the why is found in the ripples that wing their way out from the epicenter of what has imploded in our lives. And it is rarely, if ever, immediately understood.
Eventually, if we look long and hard enough, our eyes adjust and those little flashes of meaning begin to create patterns in the darkness. Everything is not illuminated. But a way forward is.
Back on the island, as darkness settled in and the last rumbles of the Live Jeep faded away, all there was left to do was to wait. I have never been good at that. So we decided to start walking up the mountain, hoping to intercept Garincha as he returned. Hilly distributed the headlamps and flashlights he had smartly packed. We picked a signal in case we got separated (it was “ca-caw, ca-caw!” if you were wondering), and we began trudging up the hill.
The same stars that had enchanted me last night appeared again, and they were equally beguiling in their crystalline brilliance. Though we were in a situation that had no clear, assured outcome, it felt comforting to trace the familiar outline of the Big Dipper with my finger.
At one point in our hike, Hilly looked over at me. The red, nighttime-friendly light of the headlamp illuminated his features as he smiled and said a simple sentence.
“What an adventure.”
Not “what a horrible situation.” Not “what a nightmare.”
An adventure. I glimpsed my first flash of meaning.
In that moment, I was no longer stranded. I became an explorer, cutting through uncharted territory in search of hidden treasure. A map-maker, carefully recording the unique silhouette of the land we were walking over. A believer, on a pilgrimage to understand myself and others more deeply.
I was no longer thinking about how stuck we were. I believed that, if I kept moving, this time in my life would eventually lead to something else. And something else after that. And after that.
We did eventually get off of that darkened mountain—after ANOTHER set of lost keys, a Jeep repair that involved zip ties, and a white-knuckled drive back to paved roads. And I’ll be the first to tell you that I didn’t give a damn about why all of this had happened—all I cared about was a long, hot shower and some food.
Maybe one day, I’ll look back on this moment and see all of the little flashes of meaning that came during and after knit themselves together into a beautiful constellation of truth—the type that cannot be simply discovered but must be unveiled, bit by bit.
Or maybe I won’t. Maybe the stressful ending to a wonderful camping trip will just be a funny story to tell to others. I guess the outcome doesn’t really matter.
I may not be an optimist, but I am a believer. I choose to chase the flashes of meaning, and I choose to believe that they are there, if I look for them.
Sometimes, this is all we need to pick ourselves up off of the floor: the belief that the way forward will be littered with the light we need to guide us to where we are meant to go next.
✨Cards for Humanity: The Hanged Man✨
Whether you’re into tarot or not, here’s a few things to consider about this weird thing called life.
As a child raised in the Christian church, I grew up listening to gruesome stories of crucifixions, or executions that involved nailing the hands and feet of some poor soul to a wooden cross and hanging them there until they died—Jesus Christ’s death in this manner is probably the most well-known example.
But he wasn’t the Biblical figure who met his demise in such a barbaric way. According to scripture, St. Peter, one of Jesus’s apostles and his closest friend, was also eventually executed by cross because of his beliefs. However, unlike Jesus, St. Peter was crucified upside down: his head was closer to the earth, and his feet pointed towards the heavens. It’s hard to imagine how to make something like crucifixion worse, but there you have it.
Michelangelo painted his version of St. Peter’s death, and interestingly, the expression he chose for Peter is not one of suffering and pain. Instead, Peter’s gaze locks with that of the viewer, and he wears a look of triumph, as if he is confident that he will overcome his suffering.
It’s not a stretch to compare St. Peter’s inverted death to the imagery on the Hanged Man, the 13th card in the major arcana in the tarot. Like Peter, the Hanged Man has his head pointed to the earth while his feet are strung up on a tree (the cross is often referred to as the tree in the Bible). Both men wear triumphant expressions—the Hanged Man is also illustrated with the same aura around the head that is often added to paintings of holy figures.
When appraising the Hanged Man, one might wonder how the hell he got himself in this situation. He appears to be hopelessly stuck…or is he? Either way, he has an assuredness about him that he is here in this uncomfortable posture for a reason…even if it isn’t exactly clear right now. The leaves that grow to the right and left of the Hanged Man function as flashes of meaning and hope that remind us that there is growth to embrace from the past, and more is coming in the future, even if we are in a bare-branched season of life.
I like to think that, if we were able to see the next few frames in the journey of the Hanged Man, he would eventually right himself and stand, once more, on his own two feet. But there’s no way to know for sure—all that is guaranteed is that, for now, he is here, with the blood rushing to his head and his legs contorted in the shape of the number four, symbolizing his belief that stability will eventually return.
When the Hanged Man appears in a reading, it’s tempting to ask what we should learn from this particular moment of stuckness in our lives. But instead, perhaps we aren’t meant to get it right now—maybe what we’re being asked to do instead is to trust that, when it’s time to understand why, we’ll be open to receiving it.
✨Prompts | The Hanged Man✨
Meditate. Journal. Pull some cards.
☀️ Where in life is my perspective on something being inverted or changed?
☀️ What beliefs do I hold about the outcome of this situation? How are those being challenged?
☀️ What flashes of meaning am I beginning to glimpse about this situation?
☀️ What am I learning right now about stillness and stuckness?
✨Weekly Mantra✨
Write it down. Say it out loud. Share it with a friend.
I believe that I will receive what’s meant for me when I need it.
Did you know that I do full-fledged tarot readings for folks?! I bet you did, but here’s a friendly reminder that I love pulling cards and would be thrilled to read for you, if you’re in a place where you feel like you want to explore with tarot. You can access my current offerings here…and you didn’t hear it from me, but some of them are still discounted because I forgot to turn it off when May ended.
Truly an adventure on many levels! I love your journey to find meaning in life. I too am on that journey.
wow - what a story! (and frankly, no one wants to hear travel stories where everything goes smoothly.) this whole post gives me 8 of cups vibes, down to the little cove where you camped. all of those expectations stacked up and discarded, and a journey out into the unknown at night.