With Rubble in Hand (Messages of Divine Love)
May 12, 2025/Tarot of the Cat People
The Messages of Divine Love offer intuitive insight for the week. Through using tarot or oracle cards, these readings channel guidance from Mother Earth, who supports us, the ancients who walk with us, the guides who urge us toward growth, Mother Mary, who loves unconditionally, and our future selves looking back on the signs we see around us today.
Because I exist as a bisexual, disabled Chicana and have a history of working in trauma-informed care & public policy, these readings are offered in the spirit of creating a world of collective care & creative connection.
INTRO NOTES TO THE DECK & READING
Long story short - I was sick for over a week, down with migraines and unable to concentrate for more than a couple of hours at a time. And given the wild happenings over the past week, I am leaving open the possibility that my body and brain just needed to shut down for a time. (Because WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? ) While I am technically feeling better, I've been so behind that any benefit of the rest has been spent on the panic of getting caught up. All my progress has been undone before I can enjoy it.
The energy this week has a similar "crumbling" sensation to it. Every time we have a grip on the future, it disintegrates in our hands. Every time we think we have a strategy, someone comes along and turns it to dust. It will take all the strength in our hearts to root in and resist the dying of our hope.
Star Wars reminds us, "Rebellions are built on hope.” And if rebellions require hope as scaffolding, then that tells me hope-bringer is a valid role in the current environment. The rubble of the safety we thought we had, of the order we thought we understood, is lying all around us; the hope bringer inspires us to pick up the shattered pieces of our lives and start to make each other whole again. It is hope that offers a hug in the darkest hour. It is hope that kneels in the dirt to pick you back up again. It is hope that glitters every so slightly to urge you to impossible action and boundless courage.
When the world is crumbling to pieces, who is the bringer of hope you look to the most? Who is the hoper-helper-true-believer-do-gooder you turn to when you need your faith restored? As we stand with rubble in hand, channel that special person and ensure your actions, words & beliefs would make them proud.
Where We Are This Week
Eight of Swords
Third Eye Chakra
There is a direct and concerted effort to siphon our energy into our own private neuroses, so we have less to give to the collective resistance. Do not give in. These forces will be trying to distract us with dark memories of our past, beliefs about our guilt, and preying upon our fears. By keeping us rooted in our anxiety and insecurity, we become too occupied with staying safe, so that we then won’t risk attending a protest or calling our representatives. If they can keep us busy with the false beliefs of ourselves, the gaslighting, and insults, then we won’t notice how this controlling behavior reveals their weaknesses.
From Our Guides
The Empress
Heart Chakra
If ever there was a time to tap into our higher selves, our deeper selves, our most resilient, connected selves, now is the time. This is bigger than any of us and requires us to reach deep within to root ourselves in the present moment. A softer side of leadership is required right now - not just to offset the cruelty, but to offer a more sustainable alternative to the status quo.
Messages from Lady Gaia/Mother Earth
Five of Swords (R)
Crown Chakra
We’re going to lose some rounds. That’s just the reality that we’re going to have to adjust to. That doesn’t mean everything will carry the stink of defeat - that only happens when we cling to the resentment of losing rather than let it inform how we regroup. Mother Earth is asking us to employ those higher selves to see beyond the immediate destruction to instead search out the pattern of attack, the messages left behind. Defeat doesn’t have to define us - it can inform us.
Messages from the Ancients
Seven of Swords
Throat Chakra
Last week, this card showed up under the “Future Selves” part of the reading. Collectively, a lot of people are starting to ask, “Are we the baddies?” and their ancestors are roaring back with a reply. The only way out of this will be through the mirror of complicity. Understanding our role in creating this world, reckoning with the roles our ancestors played in bringing us here, including the patterns of deception and carceral intervention, became embedded in the generations before us. We can choose to be the cycle breakers, but we have to see through the lies enough to recognize the way to do that.
Messages from Our Future Selves
Ten of Pentacles
Solar Plexus Chakra
Impossibly, improbably, there is a good future waiting for us, a future worth fighting for. But I want you to temper this prediction with the idea that you’ll likely have to build it from scratch. There won’t be an easy way to this future, but when you get there, it absolutely will be worth it. Not only do I see wishes fulfilled, but generational curses broken, trauma healed, and material prosperity flowing. It won’t come for at least a year, likely three, but if you let yourself believe, you’ll find your wu there sooner instead of later.
Messages from Mother Mary
Knight of Swords
Root Chakra
You’ll notice that sometimes I offer this card vertically and sometimes horizontally. The card crosses the “Where we are this week” card and serves as a bridge between our past “Ancients” and our Future, usually pointing the way. Dealing with the monsters & demons of our past (very often personified in our darkest selves) carries a brutal mental battle between good & evil, deception & truth. Given the future self card of the 10 of Pentacles, I see nothing but success on the horizon. But you’re going to have to be brave, engage in deep rituals of mental cleansing to stay observant and objective, but ultimately, you’re going to end up as a fearless warrior at the end of all this.
Extra Card
Seven of Cups (R)
Sacral Chakra
Guess what happens when you hem & haw about a decision? Eventually, the universe will make it for you. This intervention is inevitable this week. Anything you’ve been putting off will find a way to forge forward with the one you likely were gonna choose anyway. A few weeks ago, I referenced that we needed to get clear about our desires, holding out honesty for the true wishes we have. Some of us (myself included) didn’t do that…so the universe is going to pick up a cup and pour it over your head anyway. Anything to get us moving toward that goal. It just won’t be as elegant, pretty, or aligned as if we had affirmatively chosen it ourselves.
Undercurrents
King of Swords
Throat Chakra
The energy in the undercurrent reminds us to show up prepared for every argument, to exercise discernment and shrewd decision-making in our dealings. The advice is not to wade into a fight if you’re ill-prepared for the outcome and don’t have evidence to defend your point of view. Know your “why” for everything that falls out of your mouth, and be prepared to take the sword to your own point of view if it fails the test of objectivity and truth. Expect to be held to a higher intellectual standard before you compromise yourself.
Final Advice
The World (R)
Heart Chakra
Oh my dear hearts - it didn’t have to be this way, did it? This is the crash-landing ending that we were warned about - the plane doing cartwheels down the runway while entities like Trump call it a “success” or “the best thing ever”. We all know better that the gaslighting, the lying, the subterfuge of propaganda are not what we signed up for - and yet, if we get stuck in that reality, we’re only lending our energy to its creation. Resist the reality that is being offered to you and let your heart be the hope-bringer that others need right now. It didn’t have to be this way, but now that it is…what will you do with the rubble in your hands?
PARTING WORDS FROM A GEEK EMPRESS
In the interest of brevity, I think it’s obvious that I would choose Andor and the many quotable, relatable things happening in that show right now. I’m utterly obsessed with the storytelling, but also with how utterly replenishing it is for my hope right now. To know so many others are watching it, seeing the parallels, understanding the point…it’s keeping a geeky part of my heart alive with possibility and awareness that I really need right now.
I’m not sure if any of you have noticed, but the impact of the trickle down economics of tariffs, travel advisories, and governmental inhibiting of free speech will turn into a flood that will harm many in our geek communities. When I think about geek cons for example, I see how these policy implications can ripple through a community like ours: Whether it’s a chilling of DEI priorities or increased costs for small business owners that sell their wares at our cons, Canadian actors facing problems at the border, or people losing their jobs and thus their disposable income for events like a con…I think we’re going to see the crumbling all summer as tourism hits record lows. And for many - these conventions are not just a touchstone of fandom, it’s a deeply knit community that has its own economies that support art, commerce and collective care.
Last December, the research group Tourism Economics projected an 8.8 percent growth in international visitation in 2025, to go along with a 16 percent increase in visitor spending. By early April, Tourism Economics had reversed course, predicting a 9.4 percent decline in international visitor arrivals, with an even more pronounced 20.2 percent decrease for Canadian travelers. It could mean a $9 billion loss in visitor spending, the group said.
“‘We definitely are collateral damage': Tourism industry roiled by Trump’s new world order by Gregory Svirnovskiy (May 5, 2025)
It didn’t have to be like this. We didn’t have to go down this spiral of decay and corruption, control and abuse. But too many hid from their complicity, too confident in the world the way it was, too deep in denial about the hardship their comfort cost others. It isn’t a left/right, but a top/down … about those who have power and the cruelty it brings out in them. How often are we seeing that reflected in everything around us?
The one thing I’ll remind you of this week is that there are more of us than there are of them. There are more of us paying attention, throwing sand in the gears of control - that’s what our authenticity does. It makes us feral, ungovernable, unpredictable. And more than ever right now, we need the Empire to be obsessed with what the right hand is doing so it doesn’t see us stealing components with our left, rebuilding from the rubble, supplanting them from below…
Remember, we have friends everywhere. So let’s start acting like it, right?