The Darkest Nights
Black moon and winter solstice thoughts on reciprocity and the future that gestates below the soil.
“The Little Match Girl” by Hans Christian Andersen opens like this: “It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. Evening came on, the last evening of the year. In the cold and gloom a poor little girl, bareheaded and barefoot, was walking through the streets.”
It’s New Year’s Eve and the girl wanders with an apron full of matches that no one wants to buy. She is taunted by the holiday lights and aromas seeping through other families’ windows. The girl can’t go home or her father will punish her for not selling her wares. Instead, she starts to strike the matches to warm her hands for a few seconds at a time. The light of each match projects a vision of care and belonging.
An iron stove with a toasty fire. A roast goose dancing towards her from its dish. A brilliantly lit Christmas tree.
The five of pentacles tarot card illustrated by Patricia Coleman Smith depicts two decrepit characters trudging through snow. They pass beneath the glow of a stained glass window, suggesting a cathedral, but neither seems to notice. The two characters don’t even see each other. The figure on the right is hunched and barefoot, wrapped in a tattered shawl, and staring blankly ahead. The figure on the left, bandaged and hobbling with a crutch, is looking away from the cathedral.
Pentacles are gold coins etched with five-pointed stars, leading many to thoughts of poverty, yet no amount of money can shield us from the shadows of the pentacles suit. More broadly, they also represent the earth, every gift it offers us, and even magic.
If the pentacles suit represents all these things, the five of pentacles could be the constricting feeling that the Earth doesn’t love us.
When I see this card, I think of the Little Match Girl. I think of the record-high 18% increase in homelessness in the United States in 2024 and the 28 vacant houses for every person who does not have one. I think of children in Gaza enduring relentless bombing, amputations without anesthesia, and famine. I think of the woman engulfed in flames on the NYC subway, aided by no one.
I cried when I pulled this card from my first tarot deck. It was a few weeks into a prestigious-sounding fellowship in Prague at the end of my graduate studies. I examined each card on the desk of my Airbnb. The five of pentacles prodded an open wound. It reminded me that I was a person with no future and no value who would slip through the cracks of this world. Maybe I wasn’t barefoot, wrapped in bandages, and traversing a seemingly endless winter, but it felt that way.
The tarot’s answer to the 5 of pentacles is the 6 of pentacles, a depiction of reciprocity. If we are lacking models of reciprocity in the human world, we can look to other species. I think of trees exchanging nutrients from their roots through the mycelial web beneath the forest floor and the transformation of decaying plant material that becomes the compost that nourishes new seeds.
In her new book The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes the pleasure and gratitude she feels at foraging serviceberries alongside the birds. She explains that in her Potowatami language, the root word that means “berry” also means “gift.” When she forages the berries, she is participating in the natural world’s circular economy of gifts and reciprocity.
Kimmerer writes:
With my fingers sticky with berry juice, I’m reminded that my life is contingent upon the lives of others, without whom, I simply would not exist. Water is life, food is life, soil is life - they become our lives through the paired miracles of photosynthesis and respiration. All that we need to live flows through the land. It is not an empty metaphor that we call her Mother Earth. Food in our mouths is the thread that connects us in a relationship simultaneously spiritual and physical, as our bodies get fed and our spirits nourished by a sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods.
We feel the most alienated is when we are the least able to locate ourselves in the web of connections. The Little Match Girl freezes while lost in the dreamworld of her last few matchsticks, but I wonder if there were sources of care available to her beyond the edge of the flames. Maybe selling matches for money was never the solution. While other people disappointed and neglected her, the fire stepped up to warm her hands and blanket her in fantasies. What other allies were available to her? Was there a warm cathedral with an open door? Was there a spray of winter berries waiting to greet her around the next corner?
In our atomized and hyper-individualistic culture, other humans often lack the skill, capacity, or interest to meet our needs. Perhaps we can expand our definition of community to encompass the masters. The berries, the tree roots, the fungi, and the flames.
In a commencement speech delivered to graduates of Mills College in 1983, Ursula LeGuin offers an alternative to patriarchal notions of success built on the immiseration of others. She writes:
I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing - instead of around, and down.
Calendula (Calendula officinalis)
Calendula’s name comes from the Latin calendae, which means “little calendar” or “little clock.” The name of this golden relative of the daisy reflects calendula’s talent for bringing sunshine and medicine any month of the year. Even in late December, the calendula plants on our terrace send up the occasional bud on a warm day even though the rest of the garden is dead.
Call upon calendula to aid with signs of infection, such as sore throats and swollen lymph nodes. This makes its petals a great addition to immunity supporting tea blends, fire ciders, and elderberry syrups. It can be applied topically to the skin to support fungal infections or to speed up wound healing. Calendula can help repair the tissues in the digestive tract in much the same way as the skin, making it a powerful ally for ulcers, gastritis, and ulcerative colitis. Herbalist Matthew Wood suggests this plant “for places where the sun doesn’t shine.”
(Sources: The Essential Guide to Western Botanical Medicine by Christa Sinadinos and The Book of Herbal Wisdom by Matthew Wood.)
Love Notes
Gaza Mutual Aid Support Network and Lebanon Solidarity Collective continue to need our support! Many people in Gaza are currently surviving genocide without food or functional tents, while Lebanon continues to suffer despite the supposed Ceasefire.
Food insecurity is also impacting Palestinians in the West Bank. Help Tala of Baba’s Olives raise $40,000 to support these families with food and medicine in this fundraiser. You can also buy a kuffiyeh from Baba’s Olives and the proceeds will be donated directly to Bethlehem families.
I got my copy of The Serviceberry at a new indigenous-owned bookstore in Glens Falls, NY called Black Walnut Books. Definitely check out this gem, located in the Shirt Factory, if you’re exploring the Adirondacks.
Lyrics of “Disaster Tourism” by mewithoutYou did not make the final draft of this newsletter, but you can still listen to it here.
In an unhinged act of procrastination, I binged a 6-week course by Sylvia V. Linsteadt called “When Women Were Shamans” about pre-patriarchal Europe. I can’t stop thinking about it. She sifts through archeological history and folklore for remnants of matrifocal cultures and myths that predate written language. You can find this course through Advaya, which coincidentally has a great newsletter called Entangled. (We are obviously operating on the same wavelength.) Definitely check out Sylvia Linsteadt’s Substack, too!