Follow the Goose

Or in this case, the Corpse Flower

I think, if not all of us, many of us have probably seen the comic below before. It came out several years ago and made the rounds amongst my single and/or childless friends.

It immediately pissed me off, so much so that I did a counter cartoon and wrote a whole essay about it that you can read via the link below.

READ THIS FIRST

Above is my version.

Now that I have a child I feel even more strongly about this than before. And it’s not that culture totally ignores this impulse. Arguably, the entire Bluey cartoon series is about following the goose (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch 1 episode, I recommend “Flat Pack” and thank me later). But the overwhelming message about children and having children is that you can kiss your fun life goodbye. There are so many things wrong and upsetting in the world today, but I am adding this one to the list, and it, in my mind, is the root of several of these and our flawed systems and structures reinforce the problem over and over again all the way up the chain. If anything, having a child should increase the fun in your life, not decrease it. We’re focusing on the wrong things ( as usual) and children and adults are suffering for it (as usual, again). Sigh.

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So I was working on my Parrot Tarot deck and drawing the 6 of Eggs (Cups) card.

This card’s correspondences are The Sun and Death cards from the Major Arcana and you can see my cards above the drawing. Since this is a Thoth-based tarot card, the name Aleistar Crowley associated with this card is Pleasure. You can see his and Lady Frida Harris’ card to the left there. In the Rider-Waite-Smoth deck, this is the card with two little kids, with one giving the younger a flower. It’s a very sweet card. While Crowley emphasizes Pleasure as in the adult kind, RWS emphasizes the meaning in more of a sweet even nostalgic moment.

In my Parrot Tarot, I have assigned a plant association with each of the Majors that then appears in the Minor cards to visually symbolize the correspondences. You can see that I’ve started drawing the chrysanthemum from the Sun card at the bottom and I have two kinds of Amorphophallus corpse flowers on either side.

The day I started drawing this, I hadn’t decided which kind of corpse flower to use yet. As I was sitting at the table sketching this out, a ring came at the door and a delivery was made. I had ordered an Amorphophallus konjac, a Voodoo Lily variety a few weeks ago and it was delivered to me at that very moment. The korm is pictured below if you’ve never seen one. As a gift, the seller sent a small korm of a Sauromatum venosum, which produces a beautiful slender stalk. Since it was an unexpected gift, I figured that it was a good one to include on my Pleasure card.

That very afternoon, as I was sitting in our rocking chair with a sleeping Baby Hawk in my arms, I saw that there was a Titum arum, the giant corpse flower, blooming at the California Academy of Sciences. In my dreams, I have a small greenhouse where I grow one of these things myself. I adore them. If you don’t know what this is, let me enlighten you. The corpse flowers get their name from a rather obvious source - they smell like rotting death. As opposed to smelling like the sweet fragrances many plants have chosen to evolve with to attract pollinators, the corpse flowers went another route. They evolved to stink like the putrid stench of a ripe rotting corpse to attract flies to pollinate them. Everyone has an evolutionary niche and these guys have certainly carved out theirs. The stalk, which isn’t the flower, is even fleshy and its texture looks like rotting meat. The flowers are tiny and are at the very bottom of the main central protrusion so that once lured in, the fly gets utterly covered in pollen and unwittingly goes off to do the corpse flower’s bidding once they’ve had their fill. You can see why I used this family of plants for my Death card. There have been several blooms over the years that I have not been able to witness for a variety of reasons: work trips, wrong timing, etc. The first time I saw one was in 2008 in Cleveland when they had one bloom at The Rainforest at the Metroparks Zoo. I stood in line for like 2 hours and witnessed this thing in its full death aura mode. It was life-changing and I’ve wanted to see another since.

I made plans to go a day later.

Synchronicity, the simultaneous occurrence of events, is a funny thing. Though it is a universally experienced phenomenon, it is a highly personal one as well as one that holds greater or lesser amounts of significance depending on your general worldview. Personally, I’ve cultivated synchronicity since before I knew the term for it and whenever things happen in this way, I pay attention. This many corpse flower occurences meant to me that it was time I follow the goose, take the day off, and go see the Titan arum flowering with the Little Guy.

Though the stench had already faded, which made me a bit sad, witnessing the raw power of nature in this utterly wacky growth from the plant kingdom definitely made my day. Hawk was into it too, although the aquarium at the Cal Academy of Sciences was more his speed at the moment. He’s utterly obsessed with fish.

While this is another example of how making a Tarot deck is just a magnifying glass of synchronicity onto one’s life, it was important for me to be able to follow the rabbit down the hole and see where it led. Following the goose is a radical reprioritization of what is important in life. This is not to say that all life is about is following the goose. Definitely not. We all still gotta get shit done, dinner made, laundry did, and mortgage payments to make. Saturn still has to Saturn. But allowing the space into life to follow the white rabbit where he may be going is the zest of what makes life worth living. And we can all, collectively, use a bit more adventure and magic in our lives and if we have children, it is imperative that they come along for the ride.

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