Instead, the Queen of Wands, in her fierce assurance,
Beckons me around the ivy and wire rust,
To coiled rings of fence blistering into grass.
I walk in sandals,
My toes tickled gently at the edges by grass.
I press my feet over bent blades,
Feeling the surface like plastic, yet strong — like rope. Now, I bring forward the Queen of Swords,
My current self — clear-eyed, steady, sharpened by experience. I begin this walk with clear eyes.
I carry truth with me, sharp and detail-focused,
A blade that cuts away what no longer serves.
I’ve been through enough to know
What must be severed,
What boundary must be drawn firm and cold.
I walk with clarity —
The kind that is both strength and stillness.
I ask myself:
What truth am I standing in right now?
What have I had to become more clear about — or cold about — To protect myself?
In my hand, I find the blade.
Tarot Walk — Queen of Swords and the Quiet Trees
There is a doorway into the rock,
Not obscured by anything but darkness.
The moss is withered here,
Pebbles muttering quietly into stone paving.
I see no door — only the shadow silhouette
Of something too dark to be solid.
It’s where we begin the walk.
I do not decide to ignore it.
Not cold metal, but wood,
Already shaped like a sword,
Smooth in its carved simplicity.
I place it gently on the moss fur
Growing thick on the ancient wall,
An offering to the mountain’s patient strength.
I no longer have to tread warily through battlefields,
I no longer have to wage war within myself.
Here, I am invited to stand clear,
Protected and unafraid —
The truth held gently, but firmly.
The quiet trees beckon me,
Their branches reaching out like arms,
Inviting me into a hug I didn’t know I needed.
1. Queen of Swords – Situation
The Queen of Swords sits at the heart of this walk; a figure of clarity, solitude, and necessary detachment. This was me in the present: walking through a landscape I had once fled, holding my own boundaries tightly.
Her sword doesn’t just cut others away; it protects the space needed to feel.
She is the one who survives because she has learned to compartmentalise. This is not absence of emotion, but a strategy of protection when the world punishes you for needing too much.
In 2005, I couldn’t ask for help. In this walk, I still wasn’t sure I knew how.
The Queen of Swords reminds us that Disabled people are often made to become hyper-rational to be believed — to speak our pain in clinically acceptable terms, to cut away softness. She is a figure of survival, not ease.
My ritual:
A sword-shaped piece of wood, found fallen on the forest floor, became my Queen; placed upon a bed of moss, cradled.
This card held my present state: intellectual clarity born from survival, boundaries shaped by past harm.
The Queen of Swords is what the world sees: capable, articulate, defended. But laying her on the moss softened her edges. The forest accepted the sharpness — reminded me that discernment doesn’t have to mean isolation.
I wore a crown of leaves sewn by pine needles.
This was the version of me who knew how to survive, but not yet how to be soft again.
I pause here,
Not yet ready to take the next turn.
The path ahead leads to the 10 of Swords — The Weight I Carry
Where pain waits behind me,
Where something fell apart,
Where endings came with sharp edges.
I feel the ache still pulsing beneath my skin,
The sting of betrayals, the closing of chapters,
But before I face that,
I need time to whisper to the trees,
To share the secrets up my sleeves,
The wounds I haven’t spoken aloud.
The trees tell me I don’t need to be resilient anymore.
I don’t need to steel myself or carry the weight alone.
I can relax into their bark,
Lean into their steady presence,
Let go of the armor I wear so tightly.
I make a crown from leaves, I use pine needles to sew them together They tie together in an embrace, gentle.
The 10 of Swords: The Weight I Carry
When I finally turn toward the path that leads deeper into the forest, The ground beneath me softens with fallen leaves,
A quiet carpet absorbing footsteps and echoes.
Behind me, the weight of the 10 of Swords rests heavy — There is pain here, old and sharp,
Like the pine needles matted into the prickly carpet floor, A dense, uneven weave of what has fallen and stayed. The forest floor is thick with memory.
A patchwork of curled oak leaves and broken twigs,
Some dry and whisper-thin, others damp and soft with rot. Pine cones sit half-crushed, their edges jagged and crumbling, As if time and teeth have worked on them in equal measure. Pine needles press into the soles of my sandals —
Some sharp enough to sting, others softened by rain and weight.
There are cigarette butts tucked between roots and stone, Tiny remnants of someone else’s breath,
People who sat here before me,
Deep in thought, stressed, in pain —
Their exhales linger still in the damp, resin-sweet air.
Feathers lie in quiet offering —
Mottled grey and white, tipped with rain,
Or ruffled by the breeze,
Small signs of passing wings and the softness
That still lives in a place of heaviness.
I kneel and feel the forest’s skin with my hands, the backs of my hands. Cool, textured, sticky in some places from sap.
It smells of earth and silence,
Of wet bark and green things turning brown,
Of endings that are still feeding something unseen.
Even the light changes here —
Filtered through pine and branch,
It dapples the floor in slow, golden patches,
Falling on loss without needing to fix it.
This is where I stand with the pain I still carry.
This is where I begin to ask what can be laid down.
Here, held by quiet green,
Seeds in my palm, I use them to direct my way.
The urgent need to survive softens.
The sharp edges dull,
And I allow myself to breathe.
Maybe it was trust betrayed,
Or a chapter closed too abruptly,
A relationship severed with a cutting edge.
I feel the ache still pulsing beneath my skin,
But now, I let it breathe —
Not as a wound to be hidden,
But as a truth to be witnessed.
What has ended?
I ask, listening deeply.
What parts of me still clutch the pain tightly,
Like precious shards too sharp to release?
The stone is lined with images, messages, not yet uncovered, heard.
I move my feet and sway to the rhythm of the trees.
What am I ready to lay down here, on the forest floor? I do not rush to answer.
The trees’ canopies hold my dreams gently as I sit with the ache. Down below, pinecones.
An oily feather.
I see the tree stump disappear into the ground
I see the tree stump disappearing into the ground — once the base of something tall and rooted, now softening,
slowly being reabsorbed by the forest floor.
It doesn’t vanish in violence but dissolves in quiet surrender.
And in this, I recognise the weight of the 10 of Swords — the pain that sits behind me, the sharp edge of something that ended, a betrayal or collapse I still carry in my body.
But the stump teaches me something delivered by the ten of swords; that pain, too, can be laid down. It doesn’t need to be clutched or defended. Like old wood returning to soil, it can be released — not forgotten, but allowed to become part of something larger, something living. The forest accepts what I no longer have the strength to hold.
I hear it in my head
“Release”
What I’m releasing is the belief that I have to hold it all together — that if I let even one part of myself fall apart, I’ll become unrecognisable or unlovable.
I’m releasing the habit of silence, the way I’ve tucked my pain into corners where no one could see it, even when it was tearing through me.
I’m releasing the expectation that I should have healed by now, that grief should move in a straight line, that I must always be strong, composed, in control. I place all of this — the heaviness, the old armour, the unspoken ache — into the soil. I let it sink into the forest floor, where the stump disappears, where endings become something else. Not a forgetting, but a transformation.
I find a rock and dig it into the ground and as an offering to these aches I surround it with love, with pinecones.
I rewrite it but everything I write I feel ashamed about,
like I’m an eleven year old without the vocabulary I want.
I try again:
What parts of me still clutch the pain tightly,
Like precious shards too sharp to release?
What am I ready to lay down here, on the forest floor?
I do not rush to answer.
The trees’ canopies hold my dreams gently
Filtering them through needles and leaves,
Letting only what is needed fall back down to me.
Down below, pinecones rest like closed hands,
Hardened and protective.
A single feather lies along a treasure trove of forest floor sand remnants.
Dark, damp, and slightly oily,
Its barbs slightly torn,
Bent from weather or struggle.
I pause beside it.
The feather could have belonged to a bird
That fought too hard against the wind,
Or brushed too close to a thorn.
It carries both flight and fall.
A remnant of freedom,
And a sign that not everything airborne
Stays aloft forever.
It speaks to me of fragility —
How even wings carry wear,
How softness doesn’t mean weakness,
And how every trace left behind
Tells of a journey that was survived.
I do not yet know what I will leave behind here.
The feather’s steady presence is a quiet invitation: It is okay to rest in the ache,
To honour what has fallen apart,
And begin to soften into letting go.
I breathe deeply,
Allowing the sorrow to settle,
Not to drown me,
But to teach me the shape of release.
But I know the forest is listening.
And I know I don’t have to hold it all alone. A tree stump below my feet was enveloped by the ground.
Seven of Pentacles - Crip Grief-Walk: Tarot, Rocks, and the Reckoning of Need
The Tarot Walk became more than just a durational performance — it became a method of crip time: slow, circular, repetitive, embodied. In this walk, I carried not only myself, but also my past self, and Hitchins’ past self, each tethered by memory, by the unspoken griefs we never got to share with each other.
As I walked, I laid down seven large white rocks in the grass, each one naming a sorrow I could not speak aloud in 2005. This became my enactment of the 7 of Pentacles — Failure — not as an end point, but as a container. Each stone marked what had once felt like ruin, now transformed into material evidence that I had survived.
In the language of the Tarot, the Celtic Cross gave shape to the emotional topography of the walk. Each position in the spread became a site of crip theorising: not abstract, but intimate and lived. The cards echoed my internal states and external movements, giving voice to what I was not yet able to say. These seven white rocks had been in a pile, and now, like chalk, I had salvaged them and created them into a line along the grass. The grass, green, the rocks, white. I thought of the white cliffs of Dover, and childhood memories of the ferry, when we crossed over from Calais, returning to Wales to see my grandparents.
7 of Pentacles – Conscious Thought
This is the card I gave flesh to: seven white rocks, laid carefully in a line in the grass, each one naming a grief I thought was mine alone.
These were the failures I feared had defined me: my inability to recover “quickly enough,” my lost relationships, the years I felt useless, how stupid I was that I couldn’t tell the closest people to me that I felt wrong, that I felt broken, that I felt unable to share how much in pain I was, how ashamed I was at being born this way. I have missed you so much.
But in the placing of each stone, I made those failures visible — and ritualised. The 7 of Pentacles isn’t just about futility; it’s about evaluation, the long pause before I can plant again.
It asks: What have I been cultivating? What has cost me so much, and what might I need to let go of to move forward?
10 of Swords – Influence
Below her lies the ruin: the 10 of Swords, the collapse, the breaking point. I had reached this in 2005 (emotionally, physically, socially). My body could no longer sustain the effort of passing, of hiding pain. My friendships ruptured. He saw me faltering but didn’t know how to hold it. I carried his confusion too; the tension of being seen, but not understood.
Crip theory insists that we do not collapse alone; our breakdowns occur inside systems that demand impossible endurance. This card marks the moment those systems failed me.
The Ten of Swords for me on this Tarot walk is the ruin beneath.
My Ritual:
Around a large stone, I placed a ring of pinecones — each one a seed of grief, a symbol of eternity. This was an act of love.
The rock might have been Hitchins, or my memory of him, a past self that no longer exists for him but is buried deep within my crip-grief-work, or perhaps it is just the ache of unprocessed grief.
Pinecones, with their spirals: mathematical, endless; whispered that collapse does not end us. It repeats. But it also transforms.
The ruin of the Ten of Swords was not just mine; it was also his, and it needed holding, not hiding.
This was the card of 2005:
the year I unravelled
while everyone around me insisted on a version of me that didn’t exist anymore.
The version that was still high-performing, compliant, cheerful — functional.
There was friction between my inner knowing and outer expectation.
Doctors who said “you’re not that bad, just try to lose more weight.”
Friends who didn’t believe me.
Family who insisted on dinner reservations while I couldn’t get out of bed.
It was not one rupture, but a chorus of dissonance.
Tiny wars of “shoulds” and “why are you like this?”
No space to fall apart safely, no mirror to hold my unravelling.
I pressed my feet into those old arguments,
retracing the terrain of my own collapse.
Then I found five sticks of bamboo on the forest floor.
Not by accident — they revealed themselves like a quiet offering.
I took them in hand, arranged them into the alchemical symbol for water,
and pointed them toward the lake.
This was not a weapon, not a shield —
but a gesture of surrender.
Bamboo bends.
It doesn’t break.
By aligning the symbol toward water,
I offered that early strife somewhere to flow,
somewhere to be witnessed, reshaped.
Crip grief-work moves through conflict, not around it.
Because sometimes the war is not over until it’s remembered.
6. Knight of Wands — Coming Fire (Future Influence)
The bamboo had grown tall and wild — thin green shoots clustering together, some still supple, others already hollowing into bones.
I returned to them, cradling the wand I had drawn from the lake — the Queen’s wand.
It was still damp, the water having darkened the grain of the wood, as though it had absorbed something in the letting go.
I moved through the thicket slowly, threading between the stalks. This wasn’t a search for spectacle.
It was a search for a place of rest.
Not abandonment — but transformation.
I found it — a cradle formed where the sun filtered through, warming the bamboo’s base.
There, I laid the wand down.
Not in haste. Not in grief. But with a reverence for what had already passed.
The Queen’s fire — bold, intuitive, unapologetic — did not vanish into the lake.
She had moved forward with me, through me.
And now, she shifted form.
The Knight was near.
This was the ritual:
to carry what had been grieved, and to place it somewhere it could change.
Not fixed. Not erased. But held in motion.
The bamboo, in its newness, in its reach, held the wand like a young arm growing into its strength.
The wind moved through the stalks, a thin, rustling chorus. It felt like a breath returning.
I walked away.
The Knight of Wands is not safe.
He does not wait for proof, or permission.
He moves on instinct — impulsive, raw, sometimes reckless.
I fear him.
I long for him.
Part of me aches for that spark again — not the frantic fire of crisis, but the slow embers of aliveness.
A readiness not built on healing, but on refusal: refusal to keep shrinking, waiting, apologising.
In crip time, forward motion is rarely dramatic.
It arrives in tremors — a stirring, a breath, a whisper of risk.
The Knight doesn’t promise triumph.
But he marks a turn: the moment when grief stops being only weight, and starts to become fuel.
This was that moment.
Crip hope is not naïve.
It is careful, practiced, slow.
But it still burns.
And the bamboo — resilient, hollow, alive — whispered back:
keep going.
In crip time, forward motion may still be slow — but it is no less real. The future is not a cure, but a shift.
The ritual spoke of continuity: the Queen’s passion not extinguished, but passed forward.
Crip hope is cautious, tender, and slow. But it still burns.
7. The Devil — You / Attitude
No walk here. Just kneeling.
The path curved, then stopped —
into a shallow bed of river stones, cool and smoothed by time.
I did not step through. I stopped. I knelt.
This was not movement, but pause.
A kind of altar. A kind of reckoning.
I opened the pouch I had carried close and let the crystals fall softly into my palm:
Rose quartz. Smoky quartz. Moonstone. Lapis. Aquamarine.
Each one had travelled with me, holding what had been unspeakable:
need. want. brokenness. Desire.
The rocks became grief-objects, but also markers of persistence. In crip time, growth is not linear, and failure is not failure — it is a different rhythm of becoming.
Seven of Pentacles — Conscious Grief
I came to a clearing with the seven white rocks already in my hands — heavy, cold, chalky. I could feel the weight of them in my arms, not just as objects but as symbols. Each one had been carried in silence before this walk, tucked beneath skin and bone for years.
I laid them down in a line on the grass, careful and slow. Each placement was a naming — not just of feeling, but of the failed attempts to be heard.
A friendship lost when I could no longer perform wellness.
Institutional abandonment — the time I was discharged too soon, or never listened to at all.
The shame of visible breakdown, the way it lingered on my skin like something contagious.
A family who didn’t believe me until I was in the brain and heart unit of UCLH in 2011.
A lover who recoiled when I named what hurt.
A language I could never quite use to explain the pain — not in words that made people stay.
And a final grief: the endless, exhausting labour of survival that no one ever acknowledged.
I’ve often wondered why my pain went unnoticed; why my visible distress was met not with care, but with discomfort, sometimes even dismissal. Looking back now, I think disability was a trigger for my mum. Perhaps it brought up fears she hadn’t processed, or mirrored struggles she wasn’t ready to name. I don’t believe she meant to ignore me, but my needs seemed to overwhelm her. In 2005, I told her I wasn’t okay. That I couldn’t keep going.
I think, to her, my suffering wasn’t legible as crisis; not when compared to their more visible unravelling.
When I graduated, I told her I felt too exhausted to go to the celebratory dinner after a long day. She said we had to go; it had already been booked. It wasn’t that she didn’t love me, but that she needed things to appear normal. Contained. Manageable.
Each time I voiced a need to anyone I trusted or loved; please, can you move in with me? please, can you leave with me? please, I need to sleep, the answer was no. Not because I didn’t matter, but because I think my needs unsettled a deeper fear: that care, once fully opened, would be too much to bear.
This card was not about waiting for results. It was about naming the cost of being ignored, of being expected to endure.
The Seven of Pentacles is often seen as a card of investment, reflection, questioning worth: Has this effort been worth it? But for me, it was never about what would grow, it was about what had already been buried. It was about what never had the chance to grow in the first place because I didn’t have access to rest, support, language, or care.
This was crip labour
effort poured into holding a self together, into enduring without visible breakdown, into surviving systems that were never made for me.
The seven rocks became not coins, but costs. Not signs of success, but of persistence.
I placed them not to release them entirely, but to say:
I see you now. I will no longer pretend you didn’t happen.
In crip time, failure is not an end point. It doesn’t mean giving up. It’s a rhythm — a point of rest, of suspension, of reckoning. Failure, in crip terms, is what happens when survival isn’t recognised as labour, and when growth is slow, uneven, nonlinear
if it comes at all.
The rocks marked a new rhythm. A place to ask:
What do I need to let die so I can keep living?
Maybe what I let die was the performance
the part of me that still hoped someone else might one day validate this pain.
This card sat in the position of conscious thought
and consciously, I knew I wasn’t walking for recovery.
I was walking for recognition.
For witnessing.
The griefs weren’t new.
But I could finally name them.
The stones remained where I placed them.
They were a form of crip documentation
quiet, unarchived, but real.
A way of saying: this happened.
This mattered. This was not seen. But now I have seen it.
And though I walked away, I carried myself differently.
And my daughter
with the grace of unbroken belief
tiptoed around the rocks,
swirling in and out of them like they were part of a secret game only she could see.
Her feet traced patterns of lightness over the weight I had laid down.
She turned the line of grief into a dance.
It was not innocence exactly
but a kind of freedom.
She didn't avoid the rocks.
She danced with them.
And in that moment, my heart did not break
it sang.
A song I hadn’t known I was still allowed to carry.
A song where grief and joy were not opposites, but companions.
A song that said:
You made it. She sees you. This, too, is survival.
She made the silence move.
And the walk became worth it.
4. Queen of Wands – Unconscious Drive
Beneath the cool logic of the Queen of Swords lives another queen: the Queen of Wands, warm, magnetic, sensual. She is the self I used to be before pain closed in — creative, expressive, longing to connect. Her presence as my unconscious drive reminded me that I was walking not just in grief, but toward reintegration. That even as I processed shame and isolation, I carried within me the possibility of joy, radiance, and creative fire.
Crip theorising does not mean denying joy. It means making space for joy in the ruins — allowing fire to smolder beneath the collapse.
See video in the folder - I chose a bamboo wand and stood at the shore. I threw the wand into the water.
I had once shared a different relationship with Hitchins. Our connection had once been lit by curiosity, creation, and the joy of learning together before I had become very unwell, and had hid myself from his world, and myself. It was a bond of intellect and intimacy, deeply rooted in shared language.
He always bought me the most wonderful of books.
This card — sitting deep in the unconscious — reminded me that the Queen still burns inside me: bold, expressive, desirous of connection, unafraid to take up space. I saw her clearly, and then I let her go.
I dropped her wand into a lake — not out of rejection, but as a ritual of grief and release. A thank-you. A farewell. The water shimmered where she disappeared beneath the surface, but it received her gently. It was not a drowning. It was a laying to rest.
The Queen of Wands reminded me of who I was before shame took root, before institutions and fear tried to shrink me. She reminded me of the self who could speak, act, and create without being punished for it. And maybe — just maybe — of who I might still be, when I allow myself to create without fear. Not in the same way, not returning, but reclaiming.
5. 5 of Wands – Past Influence
I didn’t expect this walk to stir up such old, raw grief.
I’ve collaborated before — made, performed, remembered. But this time was different.
Why now?
Maybe because this reading belonged to him
but the walk became ours.
I wasn’t just walking beside his memory.
I was carrying both our past selves, side by side.
Two young people who didn’t yet know how to speak the truths lodged in their bodies.
Who didn’t yet have the words for what was happening to them.
I hesitated at the lake —
the water thrashed against the shore, stirred by wind, unsettled.
The Devil card speaks of bondage
but not one imposed from outside.
It is the mirror of internalised shame.
It reflects how I had carried the belief that my needs were too much
that needing rest, care, presence, touch
meant I had failed.
It asks:
Who told you that desire was dangerous?
Who convinced you that to want to be held, loved, witnessed
meant you were a burden?
I carried the Devil inside me for years.
This card lives in the wounds of ableism,
of family silence, of institutional gaslighting.
It lives in the moments I stopped asking for help because the answer was always no.
It lives in the body that kept breaking,
and the voice that kept saying:
I’m sorry, I’ll be better, I’ll be less.
But here, among the pebbles and crystals,
kneeling with my younger self —
the bind began to loosen.
No key.
No fight.
Just permission.
Just presence.
You broke up with him because you couldn’t do the ironing? The cleaning? The housework? (They laugh loudly as if that’s not a reason to break up with someone) but I couldn’t do any of those things, or drive, or work, or be employed, or be around people without intrusive thoughts,
“Well you’re not schizophrenic” said the mental health nurse, and I was only there because of the intrusive thoughts in my head “Rumination,” said my GP in 2017. It took until then to know what it was, OCD, only diagnosed in 2021.
Crip grief-work is not about purifying the self.
It is not about cutting away shame like rot.
It is not a healing arc in three acts.
It is this:
walking through the fire with your younger self in your arms.
Not to rescue her. Not to erase her.
But to say: I see you. I stayed.
She is not monstrous.
She is made of longing, of ache, of survival.
And she is still here.
The Devil did not leave me.
But I stopped letting it name me.
This was not liberation in a single moment.
It was a reckoning. A soft refusal.
A circle in the stones.
A breath.
A beginning.
8. Wheel of Fortune — Environment
Wheel of Fortune — Outer Environment
To the crystal bank, I added lavender.
A scent of memory and of change.
It didn’t cover the grief. It grew around it.
Soft, persistent. A bloom in tension.
The Wheel had turned not quickly, not dramatically,
but slowly, quietly, like seasons shifting inside the body.
Like a tide that doesn’t announce itself, but reshapes the shore.
In 2005, I had no words.
I only had symptoms. Silences. Stigma.
Now, I have language.
I have you as a collaborator,
I have disabled artists as my community,
I have support workers,
I have a carer.
I have a community.
I have disability benefits.
I use a wheelchair when I travel.
I have a way to mark time that doesn’t rely on recovery,
but on relation.
Lavender was my marker.
A plant that repels some things and draws others in.
I laid it not as decoration, but as a threshold:
a moment that said, something is different now.
The Wheel of Fortune doesn’t promise justice or healing.
But it reminds us that nothing stays static.
And that sometimes, the shift isn’t inside us,
it’s around us.
As I walked, the world continued.
People passed. The wind changed.
The garden did not collapse when I placed my grief down in the stones.
No one recoiled when I said aloud: I needed help, and no one came.
I began to feel it
the environment itself had changed.
Maybe not completely. Maybe not enough.
But enough to mark a difference.
In 2005, I was alone in this.
There was no one Disabled facing my same access barriers, who I could confide in, and if I told friends, they would only mock me or make fun of me, tell me that “I wasn’t as bad as other people, out there, much worse than me” if they found out I was taking taxis up the hill, or couldn’t stand on a train, and needed a seat, they would make fun of me.
No one stood up for me.
No one believed me, when I spoke of my pain.
I wasn’t even allowed to use the word Disabled until I discovered Disability Arts in 2015.
The shame, of being born divergent, crippled, the shame;
It only lived inside of me and grew as shame.
I believed the pain came from my weight, as I was told by doctors, I was overweight and it was putting pressure on my leg, so in 2005 I went on a juicing retreat, and tried to starve myself, because the pain was so bad. I thought it was my fault, that I was bad.
Now, there are others speaking.
Others building frameworks for care that do not erase or discipline.
Others laying down lavender beside their own grief.
Crip grief-work is not private.
It’s relational. It’s ecological.
It’s a collective rewriting of what counts as endurance,
what counts as value,
what counts as a life.
The Wheel turns — not cleanly, not in perfect arcs —
but it turns.
In Castel Azzara, I gathered the dry leaves with my daughter, created a sign of protection within the wheel of fortune,
And I turn with it.
In grief, in resistance, in scent.
Lavender and stone.
Memory and motion.
The Wheel does not ask us to be healed.
Only to notice that the environment is no longer the same —
and neither are we.
9. Lust / Strength — Hopes and Fears
I stood in a field of sunflowers.
Their stalks were burnt, curling, some collapsing — but still, they turned toward the light.
Their devotion was not perfect, but persistent.
It undid me.
The memories came in like a sudden heatwave:
Asking Hitchins to move in with me and him saying no.
Earlier, before I’d met Hitchins in my second year,
The boy, Jim, who harassed me.
The one who nearly raped me, knocked at my door for hours, to be let in.
No one believed me when I told them how frightened I was of him.
“But he’s our friend” said the couple I shared a house with, “and we pay rent so we can choose who is let in.”
(not by the hairs of my chinny chin chin - then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll - )
he started entering the shared house during the summer of 2005. It’s why I stayed in Edinburgh for so long despite being bullied in the flat over there.
“So come home” yelled my father down the phone at me when I was asking them for help to get me out of the house, to safety, someplace else.
“I’m going to go home” Hitchins said to me.
I didn’t want to live in his single bedroom. I wanted a home we could call our own.
When I had what could only be described as a c-PTSD episode, and me begging Tiina if we could move out together.
Tiina refused to move out with me. “I can’t afford it, and I’m happy here.”
I remember being shocked when she said she was moving back to Finland before Christmas 2005, I thought she was staying put in the house. She said later to me, “I only stayed in Aber, for you.”
But I’d begged her to leave the house. I was scared of Jim.
And she’d not heard me.
I could no longer stay in a house where I was no longer safe.
Feeling abandoned. Feeling invisible.
And then later, when Hitchins asked to come to China with me —
I told him no.
Not because I didn’t want him,
but because I did.
But because I didn’t know what to do about letting him in
And I was in too much pain.
Too scared.
My body was un
And I turn with it.
In grief, in resistance, in scent.
Lavender and stone.
Memory and motion.
The Wheel does not ask us to be healed.
Only to notice that the environment is no longer the same —
and neither are we.
9. Lust / Strength — Hopes and Fears
I stood in a field of sunflowers.
Their stalks were burnt, curling, some collapsing but still, they turned toward the light.
Their devotion was not perfect, but persistent.
It undid me.
The memories came in like a sudden heatwave:
Asking him to move in with me and him saying no.
Earlier, before I’d met him in my second year,
The boy, J, who harassed me.
The one who nearly assaulted me, knocked at my door for hours, to be let in.
No one believed me when I told them how frightened I was of him.
“But he’s our friend” said the couple I shared a house with, “and we pay rent so we can choose who is let in.”
(not by the hairs of my chinny chin chin - then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll - )
he started entering the shared house during the summer of 2005. It’s why I stayed in Edinburgh for so long despite being bullied in the flat over there.
“So come home” yelled my father down the phone at me when I was asking them for help to get me out of the house, to safety, someplace else.
“I’m going to go home” he said to me.
I didn’t want to live in his single bedroom. I wanted a home we could call our own.
When I had what could only be described as a c-PTSD episode, and me begging she if we could move out together.
She refused to move out with me. “I can’t afford it, and I’m happy here.”
I remember being shocked when she said she was moving back to Finland before Christmas 2005, I thought she was staying put in the house. She said later to me, “I only stayed in Aber, for you.”
But I’d begged her to leave the house. I was scared of J.
And she’d not heard me
I could no longer stay in a house where I was no longer safe.
Feeling abandoned. Feeling invisible.
And then later, when he asked to come to China with me —
I told him no.
Not because I didn’t want him,
but because I did.
But because I didn’t know what to do about letting him in
And I was in too much pain.
Too scared.
My body was unrecognisable to me.
My thoughts more frightening still.
recognisable to me.
My thoughts more frightening still.
.
Crip care is this:
not a promise of cure,
but an alchemy of relation,
a slow turning toward the sun —
a patient, tender fire
that moves on its own terms,
in its own time.
Here, between shadow and light,
I offer my fractured self,
and dare to imagine —
what shape this life may take,
when I hold the world
once again.
Walking as Crip Method, Ritual as Political Care
I offer Hitchins a quiet offering. In treading his Tarot walk to his spread, he gave me the opportunity to hold our past selves — fragile, fractured, grieving — through quiet meadows and on different surfaces. I treaded those steps with intention and care, carrying not only my own memories but the shared histories between us.
This Tarot walk is more than a journey through a landscape — it is a deliberate embodiment of grief, memory, and survival, enacted through ritual and archetype. Each card becomes a living symbol, each site a place of holding and witnessing. Here, Tarot is transformed from a divinatory tool into praxis: a cripped cosmology where collapse, pain, endurance, and hope intertwine with the earth beneath my feet.
Importantly, this ritual enacts a decolonial approach to grief. The dominant Western understanding of grief often imagines it as a linear process, a series of stages to be ‘worked through’ in the mind, culminating in letting go — especially in the context of loss or the end of relationships. But grief is far more complex, far more embodied. We do not simply ‘release’ old selves or past loves. Instead, these parts of us often fester, remain lodged in the body, in memory, in place. The end of love or relationship is not a clean break but an ongoing negotiation, a presence and absence coexisting.
Tarot and alchemy, along with surrealist imagery, offer vital tools to explore this embodied, non-linear grief. They open portals into the shadowed, often unspoken parts of ourselves that Western grief models tend to silence or ignore. Alchemy’s transformative metaphors—turning base metals to gold, death to rebirth—mirror the slow, unpredictable processes of grief and healing that unfold in the body and spirit. Tarot’s archetypes give form and language to experiences otherwise too intangible or overwhelming to hold.
This ritual walk draws on these traditions to decolonise grief — to shift from Western psychological models toward a more embodied, relational understanding that acknowledges grief’s multiplicity across time and experience. Grief is not only about death but about loss in its many forms: loss of identity, loss of capacity, loss of love, loss of imagined futures. It is lived in the body’s tension, the pulse of memory, the landscape of place.
The forest cradles my Queen, a figure of power and passion; the lake absorbs the wet wand of transformation; the white stones mark grief in physical form; the bamboo bends with the Knight’s restless fire; crystals shimmer among pebbles and lavender, reflecting the alchemy of soft healing. These natural elements are not mere backdrops — they are active participants in the ritual, responding to and holding the energy I bring. The land remembers. The elements echo my steps, my grief, my yearning.
China wasn’t a dream. It was an escape.
A place I could disappear without explanation.
He thought I was rejecting him.
But I was only trying to protect the parts of me I couldn’t let anyone see.
Now, nearing the end of my PhD,
I’m still not sure what kind of academic I want to be.
The university world is being gutted.
The art world is too fast, too narrow.
And I don’t always know who I am
as a maker, as a thinker, as a person.
But this ritual
this walk
gave me space to not know.
And to still show up.
I knelt in the sunflower field.
The light was soft and slanting.
I reached into my bag and pulled out a slip of paper.
On it, I had written a single word the night before:
"Becoming."
I folded it, slowly, and slid it between the burnt stalks —
into the crook of two stems that had bent but not broken.
I added a single dried petal from my pocket.
Something golden. Something that I remembered.
This was my offering:
Not resolution.
Not clarity.
But commitment.
To keep turning toward the light, even when it scorches.
To desire life, even when I fear it.
To believe in love, even when I’ve walked away from it.
To claim my body, even when it feels too much.
Lust or Strength asks us to hold power without controlling it.
To be touched without disappearing.
To be seen in our need and not be punished for it.
The sunflowers did not offer answers.
They simply stood
scorched, bent, and still turning.
So did I.
This is my offering:
I want to live fully.
That is the hope — and the terror. Lust (or Strength) is about inhabiting desire, claiming power, moving with instinct rather than shame. I fear being seen in my need, but I also yearn to be touched, loved, needed in return. This card sits between fire and surrender: Can I be powerful without collapsing into control? Can I be held without disappearing?
This walk became the moment I began to say yes. Not all at once. But in steps. In stones. In breath.
10. Two of Wands — Outcome
I stood on a dust path in an animal sanctuary, surrounded by soft sounds and other-than-human presence. It was quiet, except for the rustle of feathers, a low grunt from a sheltering pig, the distant crunch of gravel under hooves. And in the midst of it, scattered in the dirt, were broken ceramic shards jagged, vivid, unexpected.
The first was green, like my favorite trees. Green that hums in the throat chakra, that invites voice to return. I crouched down and collected them: blue, ochre, porcelain white. Bits of once-beautiful things, now cracked but no less capable of holding light.
They reminded me: something doesn’t need to be whole to be held. And something doesn’t need to be finished to be chosen.
This was the Two of Wands a card of quiet visioning. It’s not about arrival. It’s not about triumph. It’s about the moment before: when you look out over your life and whisper, maybe… maybe this could be something again.
This card comes after the fire, after the breakdown, after the Devil’s terrain. It comes after shame, after silence. It says:
You are allowed to choose again.
You are allowed to dream again.
You are allowed to create a future, even if it doesn’t look like the one you were promised.
Tarot here does not promise healing or resolution. Instead, it offers a way to mark time differently — a queer, crip temporality that honours endurance rather than progress; that names what was left unspeakable. Through this ritual, I find a way to forgive myself and to reach across the chasm of time and pain to ask for forgiveness from Hitchins — not for failing to be well, but for the walls I put up between us, the isolation that grief demanded.
In 2005, the world held no structures strong enough to support me. The language of care, the politics of disability, the acknowledgment of crip grief were absent. Now, through ritual, through the reweaving of symbolic connection, I build my own structures of support.
The walk becomes an act of political care; a refusal to be erased, a claim on space and time for all the unseen, unheld selves. This is care that acknowledges collective survival
a care for those who have no scripts, no language for their pain, no place to land when they fall apart.
What makes this ritual especially radical and necessary is its form as walking
a practice that resists the ableist assumptions of continuous, linear movement.
For disabled, crip and queer bodies, walking is often fragmented: broken up over days, across shifting terrains and surfaces
forest floors, sands, shorelines, uneven paths. This dispersed movement acknowledges the reality of fatigue, pain, and the need for pacing, pauses, and reorientation. It refuses the ableist demand for seamless productivity and instead embraces a rhythm attuned to survival and endurance.
Walking
Becomes
a political act of care — care for my body’s limits, care for the fractured temporality of my life, and care for the relationality between body, land, and memory. Each step is a deliberate engagement with the material world, a reclaiming of space often inaccessible or inhospitable to disabled and queer people.
By moving through different terrains and returning slowly to the ritual’s sites, the walk challenges dominant narratives of progress and productivity, creating instead a sacred geography where grief, memory, and hope coexist.
Walking this Tarot path is an embodied refusal to be erased or rushed, and an affirmation that healing and transformation are nonlinear, relational, and deeply rooted in the land and community. Each step is slow not by choice, but by necessity
shaped by pain, shaped by access, shaped by the complex pacing of a disabled life. This ritual resists the capitalist imperative to “move on,” to “recover” in a straight line, to leave the past in the past. Instead, it turns toward the past with care.
To walk with grief does not mean to resolve it. It means carrying it
giving it form, shape, and ritual presence. Laying it down physically in the world transforms intangible suffering into something seen, touched, shared. The rocks don’t vanish; they remain, just as grief remains. But in that remaining, there is an invitation: to hold, to witness, to remember. To make space for what lingers
not as pathology, but as presence.
In this walk, grief is not just about death, but about time.
About selves that didn’t get to emerge, about love that was never fully spoken, about care that couldn’t be asked for.
In 2005, I didn’t yet have the language of disability justice or the frameworks of interdependence that might have helped me survive more gently. But now, in 2025, after nearly a decade of being on disability benefits, part of a wider movement, and witnessing how much more visible (though still marginalised) disability has become, I return to those early pains differently. Not to fix them, but to honour them. To bring the past into the present without needing to be healed in order to be held.
The ritual also carries the ghosts of relationships the version of him and myself, from that painful time, the tender, scared, silenced parts of me. I ask forgiveness not for breaking down, but for the loneliness of that breakdown.
For not knowing how to say “I am not okay.”
For the distance that shame and fear built between us. That distance is itself a grief, and it too needs acknowledgement. It isn’t about blame
it’s about making visible what was never witnessed. It’s about re-membering the broken pieces, not to make them whole, but to make them matter.
These pieces don’t fit neatly together like a puzzle; they exist as fractals
endlessly complex patterns repeating within themselves, revealing new depths with every turn.
They can exist as kaleidoscopes
shifting, shimmering, reflecting fractured light that forms unexpected, beautiful shapes. They can exist as surrealist poetics, where logic bends and breaks to create new meaning out of dissonance.
They can occupy space without needing to be fixed or smoothed over. This is alchemy not of purification, but of transformation: lead into gold, shame into care, silence into spell. It is the art of becoming
of embracing multiplicity, contradiction, and complexity as sacred forms of existence.
In this light, brokenness is not failure; it is a site of magic, a field of possibility. The fractured self becomes a constellation
held together not by seamlessness, but by the radiance of its very fractures.
The natural world
its canopies, its flowing waters, its spiraling pinecones
holds me with a quiet power. These elements invite me into a poetics of embodiment and transformation that resists binaries, embraces fluidity, and honours the surreal complexity of self.
This is a world shaped by trans-feminist thought, crip theory, and the politics of biodivergence
where divergence is not only acknowledged but encountered, collaborated with.
The seven white rocks remain somewhere in the grass. They do not mourn alone. They are part of an ongoing ritual of remembrance and care
a testimony to survival, to endurance, and to the slow, persistent movement toward life.
The Tarot Walk also connected to the wider practices that unfolded throughout the project (walking, dancing, singing, filming, and recording in the forest) where the land’s fascia met the fascia of the body in real time.
When I walked with Gemma Oakley through the forest, moving and dancing between trees, the ground responded with its own subtle tensions: roots underfoot shifting the body’s balance; humidity thickening breath; birdsong refracting sensation.
Filming those movements made the forest not simply a setting but an interlocutor—each gesture a reply to branches, light, undergrowth. Singing in the forest, I felt the sound leave my body and return altered, shaped by leaves, bark, and damp air: the land becoming both acoustic chamber and collaborator.
These practices echoed the principles of the Autistic Sensorium and Awe:tistic Methodologies (Robinson, 2025), where sensory perception is allowed to expand outward—into a dialogue with place, rather than being forced into narrow cultural scripts.
Movement became a form of listening; singing became a form of touching; the forest responded with its own somatic choreography. Recording in the studio later did not sever this connection but amplified it: breaths, textures, and tones carried the imprint of the forest within them, the residue of ecological encounter embedded in the voice.
The collaboration with Valeria Radchenko continued this unfolding. In the studio, movement became echo: gestures traced in the forest found new shapes in Valeria’s body, softened or sharpened by her breath, her memories, her sensorial interpretations.
Our dances intertwined—mine marked by the raw immediacy of autistic perception, hers by rain-soaked recollection and attuned listening. Song dissolved into movement, movement into pulse, pulse into shared rhythm. We were not mirroring each other but co-creating a resonant field in which new images and sensations could emerge.
These accumulations:
walking with tarot cards,
recalling adolescent myth-memory,
dancing and singing with forest fascia,
echoing movements in the studio,
produced Madder and its constellation of artefacts.
The work did not arise from a single moment but from the layering of these embodied acts, each one shaped by human and more-than-human collaborators.
The archive that emerged is living, somatic, and relational. It carries the pulsing imprint of forest ground, adolescent rain, voices in duet, and the fascia—both bodily and ecological—that binds all these layers into a continuous, evolving practice.
The Tarot Walk opened a seam in time.
Moving through landscape and weather, guided by images rather than destinations, Dr Sarah Edmunds and I found ourselves drifting towards an old, half-forgotten memory from when we were teenagers in Luxembourg.
We remembered running together in the rain—heavy, summer rain that slicked the pavements and blurred the city into a wash of colour. In that moment of shared recollection, something mythic surfaced: the adolescent sense of a body changing, blood as both omen and initiation, the first awareness of becoming something other than a child.
The rainwater mingled with the memory of blood, real or imagined, creating an image of red staining and running; something between embarrassment, awe, and a strange, feral pride.
As we spoke, the memory shifted from anecdote into symbol: madder dripping down legs, a plant-dye turned into metaphor, the colour of root and flesh, of a body declaring itself. What began as a fleeting recollection became a mythic memory; part personal, part folkloric. It belonged to both of us and to neither; it was held in the space between the remembering bodies.
The Tarot Walk, with its slow pacing and embodied attention, made this possible. Moving through the environment with cards as prompts allowed memories to surface not as fixed stories but as sensations; humidity on skin, breathlessness, the slap of feet against wet ground.
The memory lived again through the body first, words second. As Sarah put it, memories “live and dance in the body,” appearing not as linear narratives but as pulses, images, fleeting somatic intensities.
This exchange became generative. From that conversation emerged a series of images, sensations, and colours that formed the foundation for Madder and other artefacts.
The memory did not simply return; it produced.
It thickened into textures, hues, and gestures, becoming part of a living archive that is not stored but continually re-enacted. Madder; the colour of bruises, roots, menstruation, spilled dye, became a symbolic thread connecting adolescence, embodiment, and the ecological.
What the Tarot Walk revealed was that memory is not static but somatic: it continues to move, to stain, to reconfigure. Through collaborative recall, we allowed these embodied recollections to become creative matter—rooting themselves in the work as pigment, metaphor, and pulse.