We Must Call A Meeting
The 8 of Birds Tarot Card from the Shining Tribe Tarot Deck by Rachel Pollack
As you may know, or perhaps you dont, each week on a Sunday, I do a weekly pull on a special Tarot deck, (whichever one I am guided to use), and then share a short interpretation on that card for the collective via social media. As I write this, our weekly Tarot card is the 8 of Birds from Rachel Pollack’s ‘Shining Woman’ deck, which was later renamed ‘Shining Tribe’.
In Rachel’s deck, the suit of Birds replaces the more standard suit of Swords, and as you can tell, both are representative of the element of Air - it’s a no brainer, right? For the sake of full disclosure, the four suits in this deck are;
Trees instead of Wands
Rivers instead of Cups
Stones instead of Pentacles
Birds instead of Swords
Now, here's a bit of a personal one for me. The copy of the deck I actually pull from isn't a shop-bought one. It's an artists original — Rachel drew and hand-coloured it herself, before it was ever mass produced. I bought my copy of this directly from her, in person, on a small special-interest trip through the Red Centre of Australia, where she taught at different points along the way. We did readings out at Kings Canyon. We sat with her over specific cards and talked them through, the way you only get to when there is a small group of you and a whole desert around you instead of a lecture hall. Every time I pull from this deck, I'm pulling from something Rachel actually touched — not a print run, her hand. That's not a small thing to hold.
As I have a couple of Rachel’s books here, I had a look at what she says about her 8 of Birds card, and what stood out to me from her writing, was a reference to the poem you see below which she says inspired the image she created for the 8 of Birds.
I trust that you enjoy reading it as much as I did.
We Must Call A Meeting
Poetry by Joy Harjo
I am fragile, a piece of pottery smoked from fire
made of dung,
the design drawn from nightmares. I am an arrow, painted
with lightning
to seek the way to the name of the enemy,
but the arrow has now created
its own language
It is a language of lizards and storms, and we have
begun to hold conversations
long into the night.
I forget to eat.
I don't work. My children are hungry and the animals who live
in the back yard are starving.
I begin to draw maps of stars.
The spirits of old and new ancestors perch on my shoulders.
I make prayers of clear stone
of feathers from birds
who live closest to the gods.
The voice of the stone is born
of a meeting of yellow birds
who circle the ashes of smoldering volcano.
The feathers sweep the prayers up
and away.
I, too, try to fly but get caught in the crossfire of signals
and my spirit drops back down to earth.
I am lost; I am looking for you
who can help me walk this thin line between the breathing
and the dead.
You are the curled serpent in the pottery of nightmares.
You are the dreaming animal who paces back and forth in my head.
We must call a meeting.
Give me back my language and build a house
inside it.
A house of madness.
A house for the dead who are not dead.
And the spiral of the sky above it.
And the sun
and the moon.
And the stars to guide us called promise.
I think about Rachel a lot when I pull this deck — not just because her hands made it, but because of how she talked about cards out there in the Red Centre: never as fixed meanings to recite, but as doorways you walk through with the person in front of you. That's the tradition I'm trying to hold onto when I share the Tarot with other people.
If the 8 of Birds has shown up for you this week too, I'd love to know what it's stirring. Come find me on socials and let's call our own meeting.