This is the third spread in a collection designed to help navigate the coronavirus crisis, and all the rapid changes and shakeups it has wrought. For introductory notes, visit the first post, Salty Tarot Spreads for Chaos & Plague, also featuring the Keep Calm (While Gravely Fucking Concerned) Tarot Spread. For more supportive calamity spreads, visit the free Eight Useful Tarot Spreads for Times of Resistance & Change ebook. And now, salty spread number next:
The Kick Ass Under Quarantine Tarot Spread
For managing wellness & balance within seclusion.
1. Kick Ass: How to weather social distancing like a champ.
2. Take Names: How to connect and foster relationships remotely.
3. Stay Safe: How to protect body and boundaries under danger.
4. Ground Well: How to keep mind and emotional body well enough and grounded under isolation and stress.
5. Have Fun: How to stay enriched and engaged through the quiet life.
6. Raise Hell: How to stay active within politics and resistance from home.
NOTES:
Once again, this spread is for brainstorming coping strategies. Please don’t take it as pressure to thrive. Precious few decent people are doing their best right now. Everyone’s different, and that’s where tarot’s variety and validation can help. Some need action and stimulation. Some weather solitude best through rest. Some need personal projects, some need steady distraction, and others need adaptive social outlets. Many folx need a variety of consolations and supports. You may find that activities and comforts you usually enjoy fall flat, while new ones bring welcome distraction.
We all come pre-acclimated to different levels of solitude, but this is not normal solitude. It’s a few layers more complicated even than individual medical constraints, and I say this having lead a fairly secluded life on account of health logistics for the past five years and counting. (This blog is one of my own coping projects.) For some pandemic life is a shocking change, while for others it’s a matter of minor adjustments, but unexpected things can hurt within it, even for those who are introverted, shy, chronically ill, or remotely rural as a baseline. In my own experience living with seclusion longterm, it does get easier. You can sync into a balance that works for you, even when these conditions stretch on. There are days when it hurts real bad, and days when it’s relatively easy. Like so many other pains, isolation pains rise and pass naturally in waves.
Under Card 1, Kick Ass, weathering social distance like a champ means staying alive and mustering your personal best, here and there, come as you are. This should reference strategies to pull you closer to thriving in the moment. Your best doesn't have to look like your neighbor’s. You don't have to feel like a champ within it. (Hooray for you if/when you can!) So long as no one gets hurt, it’s totally cool if it turns out that sundry pointless, goofball, or weirdo things connect you to your best self. Lean on the random mirth bits. Participation trophies all around.
Under Card 5, Have Fun, look for either activity suggestions, or energies to channel in order to feel more engaged and open to joy. Majors and courts will likely suggest mindsets and personas to channel, while minor pips will likely suggest project topics and activities.
Under Card 6, Raise Hell, physical distance does not exempt us from civic duty, and quiet and remote forms of activism and political engagement still count, thank you very much. There are many ways to contribute and raise your voice outside protests in physical spaces. If you are accustomed to counting or engaging in physical activism to the exclusion of other forms, it’s time to get creative. Trying circumstance necessitates counting as real and worthwhile qualities we’re trained to discount, including quiet action, distant connection, and all manner of adaptations.
Listening to disabled activists, and the disabled community in general, is illuminating at all times, but especially in the context of this spread’s sub-topics, and extra especially within politics and activism. Readers of this blog might enjoy the Brown sisters’ interview with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha, “Disability Justice for the Apocalypse” on the How To Survive The End of The World podcast, and the essay collection Becoming Dangerous (see Maranda Elizabeth’s contribution, Trash Magic), while beginning to explore the confluence of disabled rights, activism, and spirituality.
Remember that it is fully human to face down and rail against terrors, and craft and cling to beauties and comforts, all at once. Dissonance and complexity shade our capacities to feel good during strife. When we do recover moments of peace, joy, and functionality, we naturally feel little pangs of guilt. All sweetness in this world is bittersweetness.
Like many, I grew up thinking, per endless ’90s pop-psych babble, that compartmentalization was some kind of negative or dysfunctional impulse—a form of distortion and closure healthy people were supposed avoid or re-integrate. My friends Trauma & Tarot threw me some reeducation on that front. (Shoutout to The Slow Holler Tarot deck Architect of Knives and Six of Cups.) While we certainly may get hurt by it, compartmentalization can be a pretty fucking rad and useful tool in our kits. Granting permission to compartmentalize in tempered doses, portioning out doom time vs. distraction time, may not work for everyone, but it’s sure helped me cling to sanity. Speaking not as mental health expert (hard amn’t) but as a hot-mess art-queer dwelling in an increasingly fascist garbage culture, I’m a fan!
1. Kick Ass: How to weather social distancing like a champ.
2. Take Names: How to connect and foster relationships remotely.
3. Stay Safe: How to protect body and boundaries under danger.
4. Ground Well: How to keep mind and emotional body well enough and grounded under isolation and stress.
5. Have Fun: How to stay enriched and engaged through the quiet life.
6. Raise Hell: How to stay active within politics and resistance from home.
NOTES:
Once again, this spread is for brainstorming coping strategies. Please don’t take it as pressure to thrive. Precious few decent people are doing their best right now. Everyone’s different, and that’s where tarot’s variety and validation can help. Some need action and stimulation. Some weather solitude best through rest. Some need personal projects, some need steady distraction, and others need adaptive social outlets. Many folx need a variety of consolations and supports. You may find that activities and comforts you usually enjoy fall flat, while new ones bring welcome distraction.
We all come pre-acclimated to different levels of solitude, but this is not normal solitude. It’s a few layers more complicated even than individual medical constraints, and I say this having lead a fairly secluded life on account of health logistics for the past five years and counting. (This blog is one of my own coping projects.) For some pandemic life is a shocking change, while for others it’s a matter of minor adjustments, but unexpected things can hurt within it, even for those who are introverted, shy, chronically ill, or remotely rural as a baseline. In my own experience living with seclusion longterm, it does get easier. You can sync into a balance that works for you, even when these conditions stretch on. There are days when it hurts real bad, and days when it’s relatively easy. Like so many other pains, isolation pains rise and pass naturally in waves.
Under Card 1, Kick Ass, weathering social distance like a champ means staying alive and mustering your personal best, here and there, come as you are. This should reference strategies to pull you closer to thriving in the moment. Your best doesn't have to look like your neighbor’s. You don't have to feel like a champ within it. (Hooray for you if/when you can!) So long as no one gets hurt, it’s totally cool if it turns out that sundry pointless, goofball, or weirdo things connect you to your best self. Lean on the random mirth bits. Participation trophies all around.
Under Card 5, Have Fun, look for either activity suggestions, or energies to channel in order to feel more engaged and open to joy. Majors and courts will likely suggest mindsets and personas to channel, while minor pips will likely suggest project topics and activities.
Under Card 6, Raise Hell, physical distance does not exempt us from civic duty, and quiet and remote forms of activism and political engagement still count, thank you very much. There are many ways to contribute and raise your voice outside protests in physical spaces. If you are accustomed to counting or engaging in physical activism to the exclusion of other forms, it’s time to get creative. Trying circumstance necessitates counting as real and worthwhile qualities we’re trained to discount, including quiet action, distant connection, and all manner of adaptations.
Listening to disabled activists, and the disabled community in general, is illuminating at all times, but especially in the context of this spread’s sub-topics, and extra especially within politics and activism. Readers of this blog might enjoy the Brown sisters’ interview with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha, “Disability Justice for the Apocalypse” on the How To Survive The End of The World podcast, and the essay collection Becoming Dangerous (see Maranda Elizabeth’s contribution, Trash Magic), while beginning to explore the confluence of disabled rights, activism, and spirituality.
Remember that it is fully human to face down and rail against terrors, and craft and cling to beauties and comforts, all at once. Dissonance and complexity shade our capacities to feel good during strife. When we do recover moments of peace, joy, and functionality, we naturally feel little pangs of guilt. All sweetness in this world is bittersweetness.
Like many, I grew up thinking, per endless ’90s pop-psych babble, that compartmentalization was some kind of negative or dysfunctional impulse—a form of distortion and closure healthy people were supposed avoid or re-integrate. My friends Trauma & Tarot threw me some reeducation on that front. (Shoutout to The Slow Holler Tarot deck Architect of Knives and Six of Cups.) While we certainly may get hurt by it, compartmentalization can be a pretty fucking rad and useful tool in our kits. Granting permission to compartmentalize in tempered doses, portioning out doom time vs. distraction time, may not work for everyone, but it’s sure helped me cling to sanity. Speaking not as mental health expert (hard amn’t) but as a hot-mess art-queer dwelling in an increasingly fascist garbage culture, I’m a fan!
PATRON ARCANA: The Hermit & The Lovers
This reading takes a broad, holistic view of Love, encompassing romantic and platonic, solitary and interpersonal, human and non-human/ecosystemic relationships. Quarantine conditions find a great many folx going romantically stir-crazy at the moment, so you may interpret the following romantically or sexually if that’s what you need. It applies just as well to platonic friendships, self-care, relationship with place, or any number of passions outside one’s human community.
There are as many pathways and shapes for the twin phenomena of Love and Interconnection as there are connective threads running between beings, landscapes, persons, items, and pursuits worth loving. So are there infinite methods of keeping the heart alive and exploring else-than-self within seclusion. The Hermit embraces solitude as a science and art giving boundary with sensory input. They explore mind, spirit, and world with a subtlety and depth of focus that cannot blossom within high noise.
Be charmed by this paradox: so long as we dwell within body and place, total separation remains impossible; so long as we dwell within body and mind, total connection, total dissolution into another, however beloved, remains impossible. We find ourselves locked in a game whose object is to connect and enmesh without merging—to explore else and other, but always through membranes, within (surface) tensions, and across distance. What’s a little extra distance on the scale of a life?
When asked how infinity multiplied or squared could be larger than infinity, a high school math teacher (Mr. Johnson, if memory serves) said something like, “all infinities are infinite, but some get there faster than others.” It follows then, that a divided and sedated infinity is ultimately just as infinite as a flashy, glamorous, racing one. The Hermit knows how to chase a slow infinity. They know how to get lost as lost-in-space within the modest and little, perhaps even the infinitesimal. (And they know what that lostness is worth.)
The Hermit’s trickster secret is that they’ve never abandoned connection; they understand better than most how they couldn’t possibly. What looks like disconnection from the market throng reveals itself under the lone lantern’s beeswax glow as mastery within delving. Conditions are ripe for the delving right now, my loves. This collective hermitage is a choice made under duress, and for many, an unwelcome one. It can still be illuminating, profoundly so when embraced. And we still get a choice—even within constraint—where and how we delve next.
ELEMENTS: Water & Fire
Bleeding hearts. Tempered, sustained, and adaptive connections. Mellow but deep passions. Action and rest. Many feelings, held within limited or semi-chaotic channels.
VARIATIONS:
By default, this spread points to coping with isolation. Under friendlier conditions, you could point it to any number of activities, challenges, and situations that warrant kicking ass, taking names, staying safe, keeping grounded, having fun, and raising Hell. Sans quarantine, it becomes simply, the Kick Ass tarot spread.
Try this as a group or partners spread, to maintain harmony with the folx you’re cooped up with. Like so:
1. Kick Ass: How to keep our quarantined household running like champs.
2. Take Names: How to preserve and strengthen our bonds even when we get sick of each others’ faces.
3. Stay Safe: How to better protect our bodies and home together.
4. Ground Well: How to keep our minds and emotional bodies well enough and grounded under stress.
5. Have Fun: How to stay enriched and engaged together through the quiet life.
6. Raise Hell: How to stay active within politics and resistance from home. OR an outlet for pleasant and consensual mischief.
Try this as a group or partners spread, to maintain distance connection with the folx you love but can’t see right now. Draw separate readings and compare notes, or share one reading together. Like so:
1. Kick Ass: How to keep feeling like ourselves even though we miss each others’ faces.
2. Take Names: How to strengthen our bonds even when apart.
3. Stay Safe: How to protect our relationship and boundaries through distance. What do we each need to feel secure together without physical presence?
4. Ground Well: How to keep our minds and emotional bodies well enough and grounded under stress. How to trust and center what is real and stable about our connection.
5. Have Fun: How to stay enriched and engaged together through the quiet life.
6. Raise Hell: How to stay active within politics and resistance from home. OR an outlet for pleasant and consensual mischief.
Commercial Use of Tarot Spreads:
I aim first and foremost to helping people learn and use tarot for themselves. Everything I post is free to use at home or share with friends for personal, educational, non-commercial ends. That said, I recognize that some people will use my tarot spreads with paying clients, and I couldn't stop them even if I wanted to. (It's NBD though.)
If you use my original spreads for paid client work, please make a donation--whatever is fair and proportionate to your use--to support the site and help me keep releasing free tarot spreads for all my readers. If you share my work on your website, blog, or social media pages, give credit and link back (or tag @interrobangtarot on Instagram) so others can find these resources. Thanks so much! Sharing is wonderful, and I do appreciate your support. Many thanks to all who donate--you help keep this site running!
My work is not for re-sale or promotional give-away. Do not use my spread diagrams or illustrations as promotional materials in your own business or website. If you have any questions about use drop me a line.
I do not take any responsibility for the quality or content of others' readings. I do not endorse or recommend tarot readers or psychics. Some folks use my spreads in paid client work. None of them are affiliated with me, or recommended or endorsed by me.
I aim first and foremost to helping people learn and use tarot for themselves. Everything I post is free to use at home or share with friends for personal, educational, non-commercial ends. That said, I recognize that some people will use my tarot spreads with paying clients, and I couldn't stop them even if I wanted to. (It's NBD though.)
If you use my original spreads for paid client work, please make a donation--whatever is fair and proportionate to your use--to support the site and help me keep releasing free tarot spreads for all my readers. If you share my work on your website, blog, or social media pages, give credit and link back (or tag @interrobangtarot on Instagram) so others can find these resources. Thanks so much! Sharing is wonderful, and I do appreciate your support. Many thanks to all who donate--you help keep this site running!
My work is not for re-sale or promotional give-away. Do not use my spread diagrams or illustrations as promotional materials in your own business or website. If you have any questions about use drop me a line.
I do not take any responsibility for the quality or content of others' readings. I do not endorse or recommend tarot readers or psychics. Some folks use my spreads in paid client work. None of them are affiliated with me, or recommended or endorsed by me.
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