Artwork Description
Swoon – Oracle Deck: Tears-Grief
Dimensions: 17 x 11″
Year: 2024
Medium: archival digital print on Moab Entrada 300 gsm
Edition: ed. 1/20
Don’t it seem like grief is the thing hiding at the bottom every pile o’ hurt? Every fit of rage, every shut down, clam up, wall it off and forget it.
But grief ain’t meant to sit still and hide. Our tears are water ‘cause grief is meant to move. Meant to flow through us, taking with it a little bit of what’s too big to hold.
Over and over again, it washes us clean if we let it. But some grief hits so hard, or comes when we’re too itty bitty to have to have a way to feel it much less understand it, and then it ain’t really a matter of willpower to let it flow through.
That’s the kinda grief that sat on top of the Grey House. It radiated up from that Toad Well like the smell of sewage suffocating you on a fowl hot night and it hung over everything like a grey haze.
The Kool-Aid scoop of tears from a lost stranger was an ingredient Katarina liked to use for them Toad Brews, but when the
Sibylant Sisters brewed up a spell that defeated the Toad Well’s grievous stagnation, it too took the form of water that flows. Grief carries a force so hard it can shut you down and make you bitter to the world. Or, a force so powerful it can crack you open, wide enough to hold more love than you ever knew you could. May your grief be the latter. May it break you open and flow through you like water.
–Swoon