The Magician and Me #Tarot #Writing by @GiselleRenarde

Universal Waite deck © U.S. Games Systems, Inc.

I'm coming home to things I loved as a teenager. Tarot is one of those things.

When I can't sleep, I listen to tarot podcasts. One night, I listened to a podcast about calculating your birth card. I knew about significators--cards you use to signify yourself or other people--but I'd always used the card associated with my astrological sign as mine.

My birth card (Major Arcana card you get to by adding down your birth date, month and year until you have a number that's less than ten) turned out to be... The Magician.

I wasn't feeling particularly magical when I made this discovery. This past year has been full of grief, depression, anxiety, and plenty of other deep feelings. I've been in midlife crisis mode, big-time. I've made sweeping changes and questionable choices.

Where work is concerned, I wondered: "What is the point?" My books are still selling, but only the old ones. When I write something new, I can't seem to convince more than 3 people to buy a copy.  It's disheartening, it really is.

Life felt like something that was happening to me, not something I was actively engaged in. When I was numb, I didn't care whether I lived or died. When my feelings came back, I had too many all at once. Too many emotions, too strong. What's preferable? Feeling too much or feeling dead inside?

When I realized The Magician was my birth card, it opened up something inside me. Couldn't have come at a better time, because I was really starting to feel like I had no control over my life. Huge choices and life events all seemed to be in other people's hands, and I felt like I was just waiting for others to make a move so my life could finally begin.

The Magician doesn't wait around. The Magician makes things happen. He is me. I can manifest my will here on earth! I can do it!

One of the tarot podcasters I listen to and love is constantly saying that nothing's fixed in stone--if you don't like the direction your life is going, you can change it. For some reason, that had never occurred to me. I felt like I just had to wait around until something happened, and hope it was something good.

The Magician card convinced me that I have a part to play in my own life. I don't have to feel like everyone else is running the show (though, realistically, I still do, most of the time). I have the option of making choices and acting on those choices. I can choose which direction I want my life to go.

Even that much is progress. A few months ago, I felt like I had no life left in me.

The Best Laid Plans

by Giselle Renarde

May 1st is the anniversary of my first date with my girlfriend. A few days from now, we'll have been together for 9 years.

To celebrate, we planned a nice little getaway this week. I can't resist fancy inns, so I booked a couple nights at one we hadn't been to.

For weeks we've been talking about how great it was going to be.

We had our little road trip and that was fun. We checked into our room and it was so antique-y. Just what I love about fine inns. We ate offsite and dinner was great. Took a lovely walk. Back to the room. My girlfriend couldn't bear to miss Dancing with the Stars and she knows I'm not a huge fan, so she brought me a bottle of wine as somewhat of a peace offering, I guess. Made the show more fun for me.

Here's the thing: I drink alcohol very rarely, and when I do it's maybe half a glass of wine. I guess the saltiness of my kettle chips kept me sipping that wine, because by the end of Dancing with the Stars half the bottle was gone. My girlfriend doesn't drink, so that was all me. All 88lb me.

I didn't actually feel too affected that night, but the next morning, as my girlfriend was getting ready for the fancy-ass breakfast I'd already paid for, I started feeling... not good.

Really, really... not good.

Until this super-special getaway, I had vomited a grand total of TWICE in my entire adult life. But I guess my body wanted to remind me why I don't usually drink, because I tossed my cookies like you wouldn't believe.

And all the while, my girlfriend stood beside me, tilting a water glass against my lips every so often... until I started throwing up the water. Then she just stood there and watched, which was weirdly comforting. Throwing up isn't something I do too often. It was nice that she could be there to share the experience.

The experience itself was not pleasant. I became so weak and nauseous I ended up spending the entire day in our fancy hotel bed. I insisted my girlfriend go downstairs and enjoy breakfast. I knew how much she was looking forward to it. She came back with a bouquet of flowers and a get well card.

The rest of the day was just her taking care of me, which is something I've never really experienced. I've never asked anyone to take care of me. I've never let anyone take care of me.

I'll be honest with you: it was hard to ask her for even the smallest favours. I'm used to doing everything myself. At one point I was in bed and I needed a cool cloth to put over my eyes. I asked if she could run some cold water over a facecloth for me, and... she did. What's more, she seemed happy to do it.

I think that's when it dawned on me that the time we spend together is so valuable it doesn't matter what we're doing. My girlfriend didn't mind caring for me. She consistently put my needs above her own. I can only hope I would be so selfless if our situations were reversed. Pretty sure I wouldn't be. I'm not always the most mature person.

I'm still not feeling great, which explains why this post is entirely off-topic. Hopefully I've learned a lesson most people learn when they're 15 or so (don't drink half a bottle of wine) but I know this getaway will remain one of our most memorable--right up there with the day trip we took to Niagara-on-the-Lake when the power was out and only two shops were open.

Everybody wants a trip to be perfect, but perfection doesn't challenge anyone. Finding out how your partner treats you when you're sick (and, in my case, realizing there's finally someone in my life I don't mind asking for help) is much more useful than perfection.


Giselle Renarde is an award-winning queer Canadian writer. Nominated Toronto’s Best Author in NOW Magazine’s 2015 Readers’ Choice Awards, her fiction has appeared in well over 100 short story anthologies, including prestigious collections like Best Lesbian Romance, Best Women’s Erotica, and the Lambda Award-winning collection Take Me There, edited by Tristan Taormino. Giselle's juicy novels include Anonymous, Cherry, Seven Kisses, and The Other Side of Ruth.

A Makeshift Garden

by Giselle Renarde

I have a makeshift garden.

I rent an apartment in the city, and over the past ten years I've accumulated nine containers on my balcony.  That's my makeshift garden. It's not ideal, but it's better than nothing.

When I a kid, my father always kept a vegetable garden.  In fact, one of my first memories is getting a nasty splinter in my foot from one of the rotting wooden beams that marked the boundary.  Every year, my parents would "do down" countless tomatoes, which seemed like a frightening ordeal--all that peeling red skin and tomato guts, mason jars and bubbling water in giant cauldrons.

I can't remember what else we grew.  The tomatoes stand out in my mind.

Digging in the dirt has always been one of my favourite activities.  When I was little, I dug my hands deep down in the soil, searching for worms.  I wasn't happy unless I was dirty.  Now that I don't have a patch of earth to call my own, it's the thing I most covet.  I want to dig and disturb.  I want to play in the earth.  It's hard to do that in a container garden.

But, again, it's better than nothing.  There are moments when I'm weeding or dead-heading, or planting seeds, or noticing for the first time that something's started to germinate and it's poking its little green head out into the great big world... moments of utter perfection.  I've never experienced heaven like that doing anything else.  It's a feeling I've only ever had while gardening.

And it's fleeting.  It lasts only a moment.  A spark of perfect pleasure that grows out of the earth, fills me with bliss, then dissipates into thin air and is gone.

Take a Deep Breath

Photo found on Our Beautiful World and Universe

The arc of the southern Milky Way shone brightly on this starry night. Captured on May 4, in the foreground of this gorgeous skyview is the rainforest near the spectacular Iguaçu Falls and national park at the border of Brazil and Argentina. Looking skyward along the Milky Way's arc from the left are Alpha and Beta Centauri, the Coalsack, the Southern Cross, and the Carina Nebula. Sirius, brightest star in planet Earth's night sky is at the far right. Brilliant Canopus, second brightest star in the night, and our neighboring galaxies the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, are also included in the scene Much closer to home, lights near the center along the horizon are from Argentina's Iguazú Falls International Airport.

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The moon and Venus, taken with my iPhone on February 25, 2012.

“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” ― Galileo Galilei

I have been in awe of the night sky since I was a little girl. I never had a urge to be an astronaut-- I like my feet firmly planted on the ground-- but to look at the sky through the lens of a telescope and imagine the vastness beyond our planet... that takes my breath away. I do not have a mind for math and science, but if I did I imagine I would have chosen a career studying the stars.

I am over committed this month and on a tighter deadline than I would like following a month of illness (mine, the babies, the babysitter). I am somewhat overwhelmed at the moment, but I will find my way through the darkness. When it all gets to be too much and the responsibilities and deadlines and demands-- and life in general-- feel like too much, I ind myself seeking out the night sky. Late at night when the world is asleep, I will go outside just as I have done since I was a little girl and stare up into that dark void filled with pinpricks of light. Looking for shooting stars, making wishes, watching the moonrise... it soothes me. I take a deep breath and let it out slowly... and send my worries out into the universe.

I have forgotten much of the astronomy I learned when I was younger, but I can still pick out Venus and the Big Dipper and a few other constellations and that comforts me. The stars never change, even as my life seems to be rushing by at a crazy pace. The stars are always there. Constants. Beacons in the night.