Genius From The Dark: Finding Meaning In The Time Of Pandemic Panic & Quarantine Will Cady Follow Mar 9 · 11 min read

Stopping everything is scary.

The very idea of it is an affront on our values. The Cult Of Progress, which has brought us this far into modernity, is built on the idea of keeping busy.

Wherever the COVID-19 coronavirus came from and however it spreads, the effects surrounding its emergence strike at the very heart of the interconnected global economy — compromising the speed at which we manufacture goods, how we gather, and the ways we connect.

Supply chains have ground to a halt. The largest International events around which we plan our personal & professional calendars have been cancelled. An awkwardness has supplanted the intimacy of our face-to-face greetings. The audiences in front of whom we place our messages are being forced to disperse.

With all of this, it’s understandable to feel that what we’re being thrust into is very unnatural — that something is wrong.

I don’t believe so. I believe this is part of a transformation process that has been well underway for some time now. That the uncertainty is so uncomfortable is what makes it so rich with possibility.

So how do we get comfortable with it?

How To Not Be Afraid Of The Dark

We are entering a dark period. No doubt. It may last weeks or even months. We just don’t know when the COVID-19 coronavirus will subside nor do we know what aspects of our daily lives will never be the same.

This dark period we are entering is rich with invitation to create and be inspired. Artists stuck in their studios for weeks. Entrepreneurs with opened calendars. What to do with all this unexpected time and bottled up energy?

When chaos sets in and everything is changing, the biggest opportunities are right in front of us, but only if we allow ourselves to see them. This is hard work. How do we do it? How do we navigate the deep labyrinth of our own confusion?

When the world becomes foggy and the truth becomes subjective, I turn to the tools of the intuitive world. This is where something like the Tarot, as full of woo as it may seem, comes to me as a tool.

Why might the Tarot be relevant now? For starters, the cards and practice emerged out of 14th Century Europe the wake of Black Plague at a time when people we’re trying to make sense of the darkness. We can see evidence of this in the themes of the cards themselves.

Death Tarot / Deck Credit: Rider Waite Tarot

Spiritual practices like Tarot help us work with the stories we tell ourselves about what is happening within & around us. They are not for escaping from the grounded truths of reality such as, in this case, the need for washing your hands, consulting a doctor when you’re ill, tracking statistical updates and following local guidelines on quarantines or travel restrictions.

Bringing attention to the Spirit changes our relationship with Panic, bringing to the surface what is calling to be healed.

Meaning becomes the balm.

Tarot is encoded with meanings that can help us to get in alignment with the stories coming into and out of our lives. The reflections of ourselves that we see in their images and structures as they are laid before us become a mirror of our own subjective, subconscious selves — the domains of our being where our power to choose & embrace transformation hides.

I flip some Tarot cards nearly every day to get a glimpse in the mirror at my own subconscious. Stepping back and watching my mind assemble a pattern of story within a random array of stories laid out on a table in front of me is spiritual hygiene. Whatever jumps out tends to be the very element within me and within us that is calling for attention — for healing.

So what do I see amidst all of this panic? What meaning can I make of life in the time of coronavirus?

When I look at the cards, this is the story I see coming in:

It is time for us to rest. Out of rest, comes the dreams from which our most brilliant futures spring forth. Relax into the change to let it be channeled through.

Where does that “reading” come from? The basis of it comes from message buried in one card that has recurrently shown itself to me this week: The Four Of Swords.

I’ll explain.

The Underlying Structure of Tarot

To fully understand the message encoded in The Four Of Swords, we’ll first need to understand the underlying structure of the Tarot.

If you’ve been curious about this, well you’ve come to the right place. I’ll explain Tarot like a strategist; starting with the fundamentals.

The Tarot is made up of two decks merged into one:

The Major Arcana, which is a compilation of 22 Cards of the Book Of Life originating from the ancient Egyptian Book Of Thoth, depicting all of the primary archetypal energies we encounter through life’s journey. This includes the humbling absolution of The Blasted Tower or the empowering encouragement of The Chariot.

The second is The Minor Arcana, originating from Marseilles, France and eventually forming the underpinning of today’s playing cards, is formed out of four distinct suits with cards numbering from one to ten and a royal suite on top of each. Each suit also represents the distinct energies we may encounter through life’s journey, but specifically filtered through essence of that suit’s way of living.

Each suit of the tarot corresponds to one of the four primary elements, not including the fifth element of aether — and with those correspondences, also the different levels of Mind that make us who we are.

The Four Aces // Deck Credit: Golden Universal Tarot

The suits with their correspondences are:

Coins = Diamonds = Earth = Mineral Body = Body Mind

= Diamonds = Earth = Mineral Body = Body Mind Wands = Clubs = Fire = Energy Body = Primal Mind

= Clubs = Fire = Energy Body = Primal Mind Cups = Hearts = Water = Emotional Body = Heart Mind

= Hearts = Water = Emotional Body = Heart Mind Swords = Spades = Air = Mental Body = Intellectual Mind

The journey of life through each suit is defined by the numerological energies at each stop from one through ten. The underlying principles that determine the specifics from card to card are fascinating and complex, meriting their own lengthy articles entirely.

Cool. So what the hell does The Four Of Swords have to do with the coronavirus?

The Journey Of Swords

The suit of Swords represents the way of life through the mental plane. It is about the ideas that become the basis of our skills, grant us our pedigree, and are used to meet others in the dance of playful sparring or mortal combat.

Words, and the ideas they represent, are the basis off of which we have built the modern world. We live in an age of Logic and Industry.

Words are Swords. Whether we use them for games or war is up to us. They are airy in their nature because of the swiftness with which they move and the power with which they can affect the movement of things.

Like swords, though, our ideas cut both ways. We can hurt ourselves with too much thinking. Anxiety. Neurosis. Stress. Conflict. Dissociation with our bodies, the Earth, with grounded nature.

The power of (s)words is what makes us more than human. The names we give are how we uncover what makes us each a distinctly unique personality — for better and for worse. They represent the intellect borne from our minds, the executive power of our brains, the stories we tell ourselves about who are.

The Four Of Swords suggests we…take a break from that for a little while. Try to remember where we came from.

There is transformative power in allowing the genius of our intellect to descend back down to the foundations we arise from.

The suits can help. The suits are a ladder.

Moving back down, we can see that Cups represent the interconnection of social bonding that makes us Human. Wands represent the fire-driven urges that animate our primal, animalistic instincts. Coins represent our physically manifested embodiment in the vegetative and microbial domains that gives our bodies form. Our organs, our guts, our blood, our bones.

The Ace Of Swords through the Four Of Swords // Deck Credit: Golden Universal Tarot

In the journey of Swords, we begin with The Ace Of Swords — the first manifestation of the energy of thought. The “hand of god” delivers us an idea.

The Ace Of Swords is the spark of new insight, the first opening of our eyes.

So what do we do with this new power? We practice.

Next, we are brought to The Two Of Swords — the moment in which we begin to practice with the skills required to work with the energies of our inspirations. It is the card of pursued mastery. The card of the practice room, the card of the meditative pose; the yogic asana. It’s homework. It’s the apprentice. It’s the prototyping phase. It’s the pre-seed round entrepreneur.

The Two Of Swords is finding our place in the excitement of the global economy as we enter the 2020s.

What comes after we find our power? Our limits.

Following that is The Three Of Swords — which I like to refer to as the “some new shit has come to life” card. It would be nice if what we practiced in our room is everything we needed when we walk out the door, wouldn’t it? Well, it’s not. “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” says Mike Tyson. That would be the energy of The Three Of Swords.

The Three Of Swords is the spoke in the wheels of the global economy at the core of the panic around not just coronavirus, but climate change, political unrest, and everything else that keeps us up at night worrying about the future of all the special things we had planned.

How do we overcome our greatest obstacles? Looking within.

This brings us now to The Four Of Swords — a brilliant lesson in how to tap our own wells of ingenuity and genius. When panic strikes, when things fall apart, when uncertainty abounds, or even when we just simply get stuck, inspiration comes from within.

The Four Of Swords is when we need to get out of our heads and into our bodies — where the way forward arises out of the infinite energy hiding in the stillness.

Sleep on it, says the Four Of Swords. You need to let go of what you think is right and embrace what your mind hasn’t yet seen.

Stillness is the key. The answer will come.

Most Tarot Deck renditions of the Four Of Swords depict a figure that is in a state of either deep sleep or prayer. Typically there are three swords on the wall, representing all of the gathered thoughts & ideas at their disposal while one sword rests underneath them, representing the object of their focus. The thought that inspires their dreams.

We also tend to see in images on the Four Of Swords, a stained glass window or something else where the light gets in. This is where the light of hope and divine inspiration comes in. Too subtle for the arrogance of our busy waking minds to see. This represents the magick of our dreams that penetrate the darkness of our sleep.

Pay attention to your dreams. Pay attention to your feelings. Let your mind come in afterward to make sense of these things; but it first needs to get out of the way.

Embrace the inactivity. Embrace the cancelled meetings.

The way forward out of this mess doesn’t live in your inbox, it lives in your imagination.

The Potential Energy In Stillness

The power and relevance of the Four Of Swords in the context of our global panic around the COVID-19 coronavirus is that it tells us to go back down the ladder of o our being from our Intellectual Mind to our Heart Mind to our Animal Mind to our Vegetable Mind.

We only find the way forward by going down to the bottom of who we are.

This is, after all, exactly what the coronavirus has done to us individually and collectively. We are being forced to bring our attention down to the level of our microbial health and address a deep dis-ease. We are more present than ever with how we eat, how we breathe, how we share space with each other.

We are dropping our attention down to our most fundamental level of being and bringing the imaginative power of our Intellectual Minds with us.

This gives us a chance to reinvent everything — from the ground up.

I would suggest that this dis-ease has much to do with a misalignment in how we’ve constructed our global economy & culture. The solutions will come from the ground up in the inspiration we bring forth from our rest. We will get past this pandemic. Even if at a tremendous cost, that cost will be billed to the systems most ready for change — for healing.

All that is certain right now is the uncertainty, but the opportunity in these changes is massive.

The factories are closing. The conferences are cancelling. The festivals aren’t happening. Communities are quarantining. Travel is restricted. Audiences are moving. This also means a massive shift in where attention is focused — and in turn, how money moves.

Think of what these shifts and this pent up energy can do. Think of all the musicians holed up in recording studios, grounded from the road. Painters in their lofts. Builders at home with their families. Teachers and executives sheltered at home with their immediate communities.

All of the energy of our expertise suddenly turned inward to our homes.

It’s okay to take a breath. If anything, this virus shows us that we should treasure every breath. Embrace the sleep, explore your dreams, discover your art, and see that your genius will come bursting forth into the world…and change it.

We will be stunned by the brightness of the ideas that will emerge on the other side of this darkness.

That is precisely the message behind The Four Of Swords: get out of your head and into your body.

There’s no use in banging our heads against the wall when we don’t know what’s coming next. In fact, our bodies know more about what we need right now than our minds; so best to listen to them.

Perhaps this resting is the only thing that will get us to the core of what is truly underlying the dis-ease that manifested this virus in the first place…and heal it.

Prompts For Creative Professionals

Meeting for coffees, drinks, and dinners are off the table. How can you provide value and intimacy with your collaborators remotely? What gifts can you give? What inspirations can you provide from a distance?

SXSW is cancelled. So too may be Coachella, March Madness, Cannes Lions, and Comic-Con. What can you do to keep those audiences connected? What opens up if those audiences disperse? Can you provide something digitally?

How can we make art together from afar? Cooped up together at home?

Intimacy is being challenged. We’re questioning our handshakes and hugs. What can you create that may step into the tension in that space? How else can we imagine human connection?

People are becoming more aware of the wellness state of their bodies than ever. What can you create that helps them tune in?

Global interconnection is disrupted. Supply chains. Travel. How can you supplement what dries up from abroad with solutions sourced locally?

What have you been waiting to settle down and focus on? Write it. Record it. Paint it. Release it.

Sit on these. Meditate. Rest. Sleep. Let your mind work in the background and the moment of inspiration will come.

What’s most important of all is to let go of our anxious attachments to the rituals of the past so we can invite the new ones of the future to come in.

Trust that this is part of a process. Relax your nerves and rest into your genius. Bring it to us on the other side.