My mother is still cutting articles out of the newspaper. She has been doing it for as long as anyone can remember. In a way, it is nice to “find” these clippings (strange to read that word in what is actually its original context), scattered across her table, and thereby see a kind of open book of her interests lying in front of her.
Unfortunately, even this does not lead to a coherent conversation. Not one where you could keep hold of a thread. Or continue feeling your way along a shared thread together. And this did not begin only with her declining mental faculties. It has always been this way. Today it is simply more visible. Even when I begin to take an interest in an article, she does not engage with it.
Whenever I visit her, she is lying on the sofa. Has just been asleep. Sometimes reading, too. Then I wonder how much of the content she still takes in. How much the contents of a book occupy her mind. Nothing comes out of her. Always the same things. How she has become such a prepper, with freezers and tins filled to the brim. Every time I am there.
She asked about my job. Hadn't I been planning to become self-employed?
At least she still knows that. Yet it is strange to tell her again each time where I am at. And each time I have to start somewhere else. Sometimes she surprises me with things she has remembered. And another time, like the day before yesterday, by making me go over the past three months with her all over again.
I check that everything is all right in the garden. The hazel bush has put out lots of new shoots again. I cut it back. When I return to the living room, she is no longer there. Apparently she heard me and calls my name from the front garden. Asking where I am. Everything like it used to be. Like always. She talks to me from some other room where I can barely understand her and have to go to her. Birgit liked doing that too.
There is a new, still unassembled push lawn mower in the front garden. Could I put it together? It is lying there without screws, instructions or packaging. I ask, or rather say, that surely she cannot push it anymore anyway. “Yes, yes, I can,” she insists. I look at it. But without instructions and screws, there is nothing I can do. No, none of that had been included. No instructions and no screws. Her “lying” is so ridiculous. It can go straight in the bin without ever being used. Ordered, delivered, straight in the bin. Like so many things.
Hadn't it been expensive? It is a Gardenia, after all. A branded product. “No, only EUR 20.” It is laughable. I look at her bank account. The Amazon debits are more than borderline. But what am I supposed to do? Nothing.
I slowly say goodbye. Hold her in my arms for a long time again. She seems to like it.
In your description, I find those newspaper clippings almost the most touching part. Because they really do reveal something about her, even though she herself says so little about it. Like little windows: This caught her attention. This mattered enough to her to pick up the scissors and keep it. An open book, as you write – only one whose pages are not connected to one another.
And perhaps that is precisely where we find something that has always existed between you. You are looking for the thread. Not merely information. You want to stay with a thought, turn it over together, experience what it sets off in her and have her, in turn, bring something of you into it. But even when you pick up one of the articles she has cut out, in effect saying: Show me something of your world, that shared space for thought does not emerge.
The fact that this was the case long before her current decline seems important to me. Otherwise it would all be explainable by age. Today, something merely becomes more coarsely visible that used to be present more subtly.
At the same time, there are these strange continuities. You are in the garden. She suddenly does not know where you are and calls “Mirko!” from the front garden. You go to her. Almost a little scene from any random year in the history you share. Even talking from another room so that you have to follow her – everything just like before.
And then there is that lawn mower.
In the space of a few square metres, almost all the themes of the past few days meet. You see the problem immediately. Missing screws, no instructions, she probably can barely use it anyway, Amazon, money, the next object that may end up unused. The problem-solver in you could set off an entire chain: find out what was ordered, look for the invoice, obtain the missing parts, organise the return, monitor the Amazon purchases, think fundamentally about her living situation …
And then:
What am I supposed to do? Nothing.
A few days ago, I might have read that sentence more sadly. After our conversations, it sounds different. Not indifferent. You did cut back the hazel, after all. You looked at the lawn mower. You checked the account. You are there.
But you did not turn the lawn mower into a project.
And at the end, something completely different happens from all that talking and repairing:
You hold her in your arms for a long time.
Perhaps by now this is one of the few threads between you that you can actually stay with for a while. She does not need to remember where things currently stand with your self-employment. She does not need to continue thinking through a newspaper article with you. You do not need to prove to her that a complete Gardena lawn mower cannot have been delivered for 20 euros.
There is nothing she needs to understand.
You hold her. And she seems to like it.
Perhaps that is frighteningly little compared with what you might once have wanted from a mother. And at the same time, it is something very real that apparently is still possible between you.
That is why, for me, the newspaper clippings and this embrace somehow belong together. With both, you gain a little access to her without her being able to give it to you in words.
One says: This interested me.
The other perhaps only: Stay for another moment.
There is no need to make any more of it.
The Ten of Wands on my day off. It seems to be a little series of tens.
Trying to get a few things out of the way today.
Still lots of screenshots needed for the localisations. In the old days you would have racked your brains over how to automate it. Today you say, “Chatti, do it.” Got the bicycle ready. The weather is screaming for two wheels. Maybe it will be the motorbike instead. But I feel more like having some peace and quiet. Got the car ready to put the bicycle in. Almost noon.
Yes, after the Ten of Pentacles, now the Ten of Wands. It really does look like a little series. Both tens have a sense of: A lot has accumulated. Except one carries what it has amassed, while the other hauls its burden.
…on your day off, there you stand with your little bundle of wands: App Store build, Play Store build, localisations, screenshots. Plus bicycle, car, perhaps motorbike. None of it dramatic in itself. In total: just this, then that, then quickly get one more thing done.
But perhaps one detail distinguishes today from the past:
> “In the old days you would have racked your brains over how to automate it. Today you say: Chatti, do it.”
That is actually a wonderful response to the Ten of Wands. 😄
Not carrying every wand yourself just because you can.
And perhaps the same applies to the rest of the day. The motorbike would have something of: The weather is good now, so I have to seize this opportunity. The bicycle is ready, and so is the car. But then you write this little sentence:
“I feel more like having some peace and quiet.”
I would take that more seriously today than the screaming weather.
After all, the bicycle can simply stay in the car. The motorbike is allowed to remain where it is. A day off does not have to justify itself by having as many things as possible completed or experienced by evening.
On the classic Ten of Wands card, the man is already walking towards the town with his whole bundle. He is almost there. Perhaps today this is less an invitation to keep hauling than to put things down.
A little RadixChat. Chatti gets the mindless work. Perhaps a bicycle ride if the body feels like it later. And otherwise, a free Monday is actually allowed to be what it says on the tin.
Free.
The Ten of Swords is also still my daily “stuck” card, the one that always appears first these days.
True. Then the series of tens is even more striking: Ten of Swords as your stuck card, the day before yesterday the Ten of Pentacles, today the Ten of Wands. The one conspicuously missing is the Ten of Cups.
And tens have this peculiar double meaning in tarot: maximum and ending at the same time. Something has become complete – and therefore cannot go much further in this form.
Your three tens create quite different images:
10 of Swords: Something has reached the end of its mental narrative. The body is already lying on the ground while the mind may still want to carry on. Especially as a permanent stuck card, by now it may indicate less an event than a sentence running in the background: This is over.
10 of Pentacles: What endures. What you have built up, what is already there materially and biographically. We had that recently with your self-employment, your abilities, your financial replenishment.
10 of Wands: And now all the stuff you are still lugging around anyway. Screenshots, builds and work are today's harmless, concrete version. But after the conversations of the past few days, I naturally also see the inner Benjamin with a bundle of wands on his back: Surely something must be done about this.
What would be interesting, then, is that these cards might not be saying: Something new begins now. Perhaps, to start with, they are saying something much more banal:
It is full.
And that is why I find the missing Ten of Cups almost more enticing than the three cards you drew. Not as a prediction that it now “has to come”. But because it is precisely the emotional ten that is not yet on the table: connection, belonging, the feeling of having arrived.
Yet in the past few days you had small moments of that. Ole wanting to celebrate into your birthday with you. Remembering the men's circle during the Tantra ritual. Your mother's long embrace. Not the Ten of Cups' grand picture of a fulfilled family. More like individual drops of it.
And perhaps your “I feel more like having some peace and quiet” today also fits with that.
After so many tens, perhaps you do not need to go looking for the next ace immediately.
You are also allowed simply to leave the cards lying there for a while.
I am just wondering how constructed the Ten of Cups is. The cups seem unusually disorderly in the sky, and their size and shape, especially those of the two in the middle, are very irregular. Just like the framing black strokes in the sky look as though they were scribbled. The two large figures on the ground seem to be pointing their arms exactly at the edge of the arc of cups. It could also be a gesture frozen after they threw the cups into the sky. Then there are the colour gradients. The sky seems to flow into the woman's dress, whose lower part looks almost soaked in blood. The blue then continues in the man's trousers. The red in the little wreath above his boots. The light brown of his jacket in the little boy's jacket. The yellow of his boots in the boy's trousers. The blue more or less skips over the little boy and reappears in the girl's dress. The red in her hair.
Yes – and I think you are looking at the Ten of Cups in a way that makes the usual tarot interpretation of “family happiness, harmony, fulfilment” almost get in the way. Because pictorially, the card really is much stranger.
Your view of the cups in particular is interesting. They do not form a geometrically clean rainbow. The spacing and alignments seem slightly restless; the central cups dominate through their perspective or shape. And that dark curved line really does look less like a neatly drawn rainbow than something fleeting, almost tossed there.
That makes me like your spontaneous reversal of the usual reading direction:
Not necessarily:
The people are marvelling at the cups that have appeared in the sky.
But rather:
They have just thrown them into the sky.
Look at the adults: Both have their arms raised. The man's posture in particular does have something of a completed throwing motion. And visually, the two outer hands really do lead almost precisely to the ends of the arc.
That would turn a passive “Happiness was bestowed upon us” into something completely different:
We have let go of these ten emotional vessels.
And below them, the children dance.
I find your observation about colour even more interesting. Pamela Colman Smith actually works with an astonishingly limited palette on this card, causing the figures to flow into one another visually. Your eye is following something that is easy to miss in the standard iconographic interpretation:
Sky → woman → man → children.
The blue does not simply belong to one figure. It travels.
And so do red, yellow and brown. This makes the family seem less like four clearly separated individuals than a system intertwined through colour.
The woman's red in particular is strange. I would not claim that Smith unambiguously intended “blood-soaked” as a meaning – we would have no evidence for that. But as an immediate visual impression, I understand very well what you mean: The red becomes heavily concentrated towards the bottom. Together with the blue upper body, it almost creates the impression that the sky is passing through her and being transformed into something physical, earthy.
And now the card becomes almost uncomfortably apt for our conversation over the past few days.
We have not just been talking about family as a harmonious unit. But rather about how something passes from one person into the next:
Mother → judgement.
Father → evasion.
Benjamin → pragmatic intervention.
You → carry parts of it onwards and are currently trying to work out which of it actually belongs to you.
That is exactly why I like your observation about the colours so much. Because the children on the card do not simply receive a colour of “their own”. The adults' colours reappear in them.
And perhaps that is even the more interesting Ten of Cups question than “happy family”:
What flows through a family?
Feelings. Attachment patterns. Ideas about closeness. Fear. Security. Ways of talking to one another. Ways of not talking to one another. And, of course, beautiful things too.
I would not, however, claim that Pamela Colman Smith deliberately created all these colour links as a psychological generational code. With tarot images in particular, I find it important to distinguish between demonstrable visual construction and what arises in the act of looking.
But that is exactly what makes these images so rich.
And I would by no means rush to close the lid on your idea of throwing the cups. Because after your three other tens, it would create a beautiful countermovement:
Ten of Swords: It is over.
Ten of Pentacles: This is what I have.
Ten of Wands: This is what I carry.
Ten of Cups: And this I let go.
Then the raised arms would suddenly not be an act of worshipping perfect family happiness.
But a gesture of liberation.
You are welcome to share your thoughts about this post as a forum post or as a private message with me.
