YOU, YOURSELF, AND TÚ
What is your relationship to stillness? To soledad? Like The Hermit/El Ermitaño, El Borges is a card of cultivating solitude in search of knowledge. You may at times feel blind like Borges, but like him, you carry wisdom in your own lamp—that point of illumination from which you can see everything that ever was and ever will be.
If you get El Borges in a reading, take it as a strong invitation to turn off your devices, pause your search for external validation, and turn to yourself as your biggest resource. What gems are in your inner library? What sacred knowledge?
This is a time to meditate, reflect, study, write in your notebook, look back at the year you’ve had, recognize what you’ve already learned and contemplate what might come next. This is not about abject isolation and loneliness, but about soledad (for which, as Tato Laviera wrote, “there is no English translation.”) Turn to yourself as a sage, get clarity on what you want, who you are, where you’re going, and light your own camino to get there.
♫ “Road to Self” by Aisha Badru
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If you didn’t know… Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer. He’s dressed in gray, a color Borges associates with immortality and wisdom. His lamp contains El Aleph—the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet and the title of one of his short stories.
This is part of our Winter 2022-23 issue featuring Chancletazo for Your Soul by Marlène Ramírez-Cancio, The Tarot Issue.
