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An aged and wisened figure plants a wooden staff against the stone, poised with power and staring forward in fierce determination. Their skin and cloth are adorned in drawings, symbols bearing the Wood’s magic. A flowing white beard stretches below their face, a bear skin cloak above. Before them lie representations of each of the four physical elements. Spirit cannot be seen, but it can be felt in their presence.
This is the first guide you’ve encountered on your journey. Now that you have been welcomed into the Wildwood of disability, you will be shown how to question what you know. For new visitors and seasoned explorers alike, now is the time to reexamine perspectives and realign worldviews.
In today’s world, your worth is determined first by your wealth, second by your output. The only valuable output is that which serves to grow wealth — all the better if the wealth is not your own. Only those to whom money is meaningless can afford to eschew the relentless march of productivity.
The Wood operates on a far more ancient and magical system of value. Here, each soul comes into being already valued; they have gifted us with the joy of their existence. This value affirms their right to life and sustenance (but it is a complex and intangible system, for sometimes the greatest value comes from offering yourself up to sustain another).
This is no place for martyrs, though. Your time to sustain the Wood, to return your nutrients and energies, will come. There is no need to rush it. Until then, you must heed the call of the Shaman and act with the responsibilities of a denizen of the forest.
The Shaman is inherently at odds with capitalism, because capitalism does not adhere to balance. It tips the scales further and further in favor of the few in power, sacrificing millions upon millions of bodyminds to increase the accumulation of wealth.
As a disabled person, being seen as valuable—as productive—has saved my life on more than one occasion. But to maintain the level of productivity asked of me, a level that is not sustainable even for many of my nondisabled peers, is suicidal.
For years, I sacrificed piece after piece of myself to buy security and social acceptance. I dissasociated from feelings of pain, pushed fractured parts of my psyche deeper and deeper down. I thought that survival demanded it.
When I finally crossed the bridge into the Wood, I arrived in fragments. My Shaman could not be heard, buried in the pieces of me that had been chipped off and not grown back. The Wood felt alien to me, even as a deeper part of myself felt the pull that only home carries.
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I wandered these paths, with their roots and vines and leaves, without direction for a long time. After ages of regrowth, of nurturing buds that had long ago been cauterized, I began to hear my Shaman again. While my Shaman could tell me when balance was out of alignment—and mine was severely skewed—they still jostled with the perceived pressures of my surroundings and my own survival.
Think of the time you felt the most balanced in your life. When processes worked as intended and you neither gave nor took too much. What decisions led you to that time? What effort did you put in to maintaining it? Who else contributed, both human and nonhuman?
Some part of you guided you to make those decisions, kept you calm in the face of threats to your balance. That is your Shaman.
The Shaman does not hold all the answers to your role in the Wood. They know your needs and your wants, as well as those of the beings around you. They remind you that change is necessary even when excruciating, and that gratitude for life and its gifts is not just a declaration, but an ethic.
When you feel your inner scales tip, when one field of your life takes up too much space and you begin to lose yourself, that is your Shaman calling out for a return to balance. Only long moments of reflection and painfully transparent conversations with yourself will get you there.
Do not ignore your Shaman, especially in moments of tension between yourself and capitalism. You will drift from the Wood and from yourself.
I don’t think that push and pull is a battle meant to be won. I don’t think it is a battle at all. While the pressures of capitalism are relatively new, the disconnect between survival and personal balance is not. I think this natural conversation is where we find our path forward; by listening to both voices, we find our own somewhere in the middle.
The Wildwood Tarot was created by Mark Ryan and John Matthews, with illustrations by Will Worthington. This writing is an exploration of my own reflections on and relationship to the cards, not a guide on how to use the deck. For that, see the creators’ wonderfully thorough guide book that accompanies the deck.
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Ashton Rose 