Artwork Description
Swoon – Oracle Deck: Salty Batter-Failure
Dimensions: 17 x 11″
Year: 2024
Medium: archival digital print on Moab Entrada 300 gsm
Edition: ed. 1/20
Sometimes things don’t go as planned. Sometimes we make a mistake. Sometimes we fail.
For the Wee Witch Katarina, as for many of us, the Buddhist parable of the Two Arrows brings some needed wisdom. It was one of those rare days when Katarina had the energy to do something nice for her kids, but she messed it up.
She’d wanted to make them cookies like her grandmother used to do, and the pain of this small failure was the first arrow. But so much worse for her was the second arrow – that of the suffering created by the meaning we make from it. The story we tell ourselves about what our mistakes and failures mean.
For Katarina, any small mishap or short- coming instantly overwhelmed her with shame. Flooded her with the belief that she could never do anything right for her daughters, that she was a bad mother, and moreover, that she herself was fundamentally and terrifyingly flawed. The meaning she made of her own mistakes drove her further into paralysis, depression and ultimately back to the Toad Well.
This card invites you to be compassionate with yourself and your moments of perceived failure. It’s human to make mistakes. There’s no life where everything goes as planned. We may have to learn to endure the first arrow of hurt and disappointment over the loss of our hopes and expectations. But perhaps through a gentle disarming of the old toxic stories we picked up along the way, we can spare ourselves the pain of that second arrow.
–Swoon