S.O.S.
Save Our Selves, and the Wheel of Fortune tarot card
I’d intended for my first big post to be a coaching exercise, but felt the need to write this because I kept saying it to people.
Like many of us, I’ve been trying to get work done and take care of myself and raise my kids and garden amidst all the existential dread. It’s exhausting. It was exhausting before the last election, and has been unimaginably exhausting since.
I’ve been taking solace in the Wheel of Fortune tarot card recently because the world feels too wiggly right now, too full of negative possibility. The Wheel is one of the spirit tarot cards of every thing changes. The card signifies cycles and inevitable turns of fate, both positive and negative change. The card is also a reminder that however things are right now, they can change again. Life is in constant motion. every thing changes.
In the U.S. right now, I feel a bit like I’m sitting at a roulette table betting on black, and that the ball keeps landing on red. I’ll share one way this is playing out in my professional life. The Supreme Court recently reversed a court order that barred the administration from laying off employees en masse. This means that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts our weather and governs fishing in federal waters, and many other important federal agencies will lose more staff. Federal agencies and the people who depend on their services were already reeling from the loss of probationary staff and forced federal separations. Now the administration can proceed with gutting federal agencies even further. For my work in fisheries management, this means that critical federal work that supports fishing communities, protects marine species, and keeps mariners safe at sea will be even more impossible. There are more horrors things since I started writing this, including the Environmental Protection Agency announcing that it will eliminate its scientific research arm, and proposing to repeal the finding that allows the government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. We are entering a much deeper state of scarcity.
When I work with tarot and the Wheel comes up, one set of questions I ask is:
What do you want to do with your new circumstances?
Who do you want to be in the face of change?
What is a past situations where you took lemons and made lemonade, or had lemonade and somehow turned it into more lemonade? What resources helped?
Now to the thing I’ve been saying a lot lately. I know how I want to show up – who I want to be while it feels like I keep getting bad spins, that this administration keeps destroying good, important things.
You first need to know that I’m a big true crime, disaster, and horror junkie. The story of the 1972 Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash in the Andes has always fascinated me. In short – a chartered plane carrying 45 passengers from Uruguay to Chile crashed in the Andes. Sixteen people ultimately survived for 72 harrowing days in extreme conditions, including alpine exposure, starvation, and an avalanche. I saw the movie Alive when I was young, and have other reenactments, including the recent artistic and haunting depiction in Society of the Snow. Some of my favorite discussions of this tragedy were on two podcasts -- You’re Wrong About and Last Podcast on the Left. Both podcasts highlight that people often focus on the anthropophagy (inappropriately described as cannibalism) in the story, when the true marvel is the incredible care and humanity the survivors displayed to each other throughout their unimaginable ordeal.
At one point in this story, 16 days after the crash, the survivors hear over the radio that rescuers suspended their search for the crash site. One survivor, Carlitos Paez, recounts a pivotal conversation he had following the news:
Gustavo Nicolich - who later died in the avalanche - told me: 'Carlitos, I have good news to give you: I just heard on the Chilean radio that they are not looking for us anymore.' I said 'How good news, son of the great ...?!' and he replied: 'This is good news because now we depend on ourselves and not on outsiders.'
If I think about 47 years later, I realize that that was the moment when we realized where we were standing and that we had to call on our own resources to save ourselves. It was when we stopped waiting and started acting.
That story, that conversation is what I’ve been telling everyone about how I want to be.
As a long-time federal employee, I used to trust way too too much in the missions of our federal institutions. I know the federal government is clunky and has a *very* checkered track record, but I was part of it. I believed that our institutions, our collective decisions as a society, though imperfect, were always sllllooowwwwllly shifting towards a greater good. As I watch it all crumble, that faith isn’t just impossible anymore, it’s dangerous.
That’s why for me right now, Gustavo Nicholich’s energy is where it’s at. No institution is going to save me, the ocean, my family and those I love, anyone right now. There’s no more government to yell at to right imbalances or to intervene with the services we all need. There’s not an adult in the room.
And so, this is where my Wheel of Fortune questions come in. What do I want to do in these circumstances? Who do I want to be in the face of this change? What kind of lemonade should I make? [Insert pee joke.]
If the government is being wildly, irrationally awful, I can match that energy in the opposite direction. I can try to be wildly creative and solution-oriented in response. I’m older now, and more powerful in my career, and want to stand in my agency to weather this turn of the wheel instead of feeling hopeless. I’m mostly thinking about this in my fisheries management work, but it is equally true in other parts of my life. Fish Forward was one of the ways I started acting. There were hopeful fish and seafood stories to tell, people still fighting the great fight, and no space to gather them, so we made that space. I’m now learning how to use my professional weight in fisheries other ways. One is I’m teaming up with like-minded people to do the work I think needs to be done and that the government can (and maybe should) no longer do.
I chose to show the Wheel of Fortune card from the Modern Goddess Tarot deck in this post because the imagery matches how my grounding and active response is playing out. Lately, I’ve found inspiration in community – in spaces where people are ready to sit down with some caffeine and a notebook and get to work. The people who have given me life lately are those who are done waiting to be saved, who are done complaining that they are being wronged (because we’ve been wronged for SO LONG) or lamenting that it could be done better, and who are ready to start acting.
In moments when the world keeps bringing you down, what do you center yourself? Who are people that you emulate when shit hits the fan? What qualities do they have that inspire you? What power and skills do you already have to draw on? What resources do you need to shift yourself out of desperation and into action?
And if nothing else, I can hold it in my heart that the wheel will keep turning, and we’re just as likely to get a winning spin next time.
Resources:
Links to Alive and Society of the Snow above in the article.
An excellent journal article that analyzes the Flight 571 crash to draw conclusions about how resilience is cultivated, and how to maintain resilience in high-stakes situations. Kijan Vakilzadeh, Sebastian Raetze, Enacting project resilience: Insights from Uruguayan air force flight 571′s crash in the Andes, International Journal of Project Management, Volume 43, Issue 1, 2025, 102677, ISSN 0263-7863, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2025.102677.
All of the podcasts that I listened to on this story. One part on You’re Wrong About. A long (and less clean) 3-part series from The Last Podcast on the Left.
If you prefer story format and no cursing, check out this 4-part series from Against the Odds: