Two days ago, the orthopaedic surgeon confirmed that my left hip needs replacing as soon as possible. He also told me my right hip will almost certainly need replacing in time.
Recently, I began lifting weights to strengthen my upper body ahead of surgery. Unfortunately, I soon realised that my right shoulder is arthritic too. Some days it’s manageable. Other days, the pain shoots down my arm and reminds me that it has limits of its own.
This morning, I lit a pink candle for sisterhood and prayed.
Not for healing.
Not for certainty.
Just for a way forward.
The Monastery I Still Miss
A few years ago, I wrote about a past life memory that has accompanied me since I was a teenager.
Whether it was an actual past life, a symbolic vision, or something else entirely, honestly, it doesn’t matter to me. The imprint is real, and it has shaped my life in ways I have never been able to ignore.
The memory is of being a Carmelite prioress during the French Revolution. Over the years, fragments of that life have surfaced in dreams, meditation and an inexplicable sense of homesickness whenever I hear the Salve Regina sung in Latin.
When I wrote about it in 2023, I believed I was primarily healing the fear of persecution.
Looking back now, I wonder if I was only scratching the surface.
Perhaps what I’ve really been grieving all these years is the loss of a way of life.
Not because monastic life was perfect, but because it offered something I have struggled to find ever since: shared purpose, daily rhythm, prayer, meaningful work and a community devoted to something greater than themselves.
Four Cards
After praying, I drew four Tarot cards.
Not with any particular spread.
Just a conversation with God.
Knight of Coins
I asked what I had learned in that lifetime.
I’ve always associated this knight with the Fixed Earth sign Taurus. What I saw wasn’t simply diligence or perseverance. I saw vocation.
Knowing who you are.
Knowing what your day is for.
Belonging.
Ten of Wands
This card broke me.
In the Tarot de Marseille, the crossed wands create something that resembles a barred gate.
I couldn’t stop looking at it.
The message felt simple.
You can’t go back.
The gates are barred.
Things have moved on.
The form your vocation once took is no longer available.
That realisation carried a grief I hadn’t expected.
Two of Coins
Then the conversation changed.
The Two of Coins isn’t enclosed.
It moves.
Exchanges.
Circulates.
Perhaps the invitation isn’t to recreate the cloister but to carry its spirit into ordinary life.
To step beyond the walls.
To engage with the world instead of retreating from it.
That feels far more daunting than disappearing behind monastery walls ever did.
Six of Coins
The final card answered the prayer I had begun with.
Sisterhood.
Not followers.
Sisterhood.
Women carrying one another’s burdens and praying together.
My Body is Asking a Question
I don’t know exactly what the connection is between emotional pain and osteoarthritis. Bodies are complicated, and I have no desire to oversimplify either medicine or spirituality.
But I couldn’t help noticing the symbolism.
My hips, the joints that carry us forward, have reached the point where one needs replacing, and the other will likely follow. Then, just as I began building upper body strength in preparation for surgery, my right shoulder reminded me that it too has limits.
Whether that’s coincidence or something more, I honestly don’t know.
What I do know is that my body is forcing me to ask questions I’ve spent years avoiding.
Questions about how I move through life and what I’m carrying.
Questions about why I’ve always believed I had to carry it alone.
My Mother
As I sat with these thoughts, I found myself thinking about my mother.
She left my abusive father when I was very young.
She carried wounds from her own childhood that were never given the chance to heal properly.
I remember her saying more than once that she wished she could join a convent.
A couple of years before dementia took hold, she told me she was eternally twelve.
Not long afterwards, her life began unravelling in ways none of us could stop. She eventually became homeless before the police found her and reunited her with my sister in Sweden. By the time I visited her in the care home two weeks before she died, she no longer knew who I was.
Looking back, I don’t think she ever found a place where she truly belonged.
Perhaps that’s why her longing for the convent has stayed with me all these years.
And maybe I’ve been looking for the same thing.
God-Substitutes
Looking back over my own life, I can also see another pattern.
I’ve been wondering whether some of the relationships I invested so much hope in were really attempts to recreate a sense of sanctuary. I don’t mean that the feelings weren’t genuine. They were. But looking back, I can see that I was sometimes asking another human being to become a God-substitute: to provide the sense of safety, certainty, belonging and homecoming that I couldn’t find within myself.
That’s far too heavy a burden for anyone to carry. No relationship can bear the weight of becoming someone else’s monastery.
That’s why those relationships could never carry what I was asking of them. Not because the people themselves were lacking, but because I was asking them to fill a space that only God could fill.
A Different Way Forward
One of the hardest things I’ve had to admit this morning is that I can’t keep doing everything on my own.
Perhaps that’s the deepest lesson hidden in these four cards.
The story doesn’t end with the barred gate.
It moves from the burden of the Ten of Wands to the exchange of the Two of Coins and finally to the generosity of the Six of Coins.
From carrying everything alone…
to a fair exchange.
When I lit that pink candle this morning, I asked God to show me a way forward.
I expected another solitary path.
Instead, I was shown people.
Whether I’m ready for that is another question.
I’ve spent so much of my life believing I had to carry everything alone that accepting help feels strangely unfamiliar.
Perhaps that’s where the real work begins.
I wish I could tell you that drawing those four cards resolved everything.
It didn’t.
Old fears don’t disappear in a single morning. Neither do old patterns.
But something shifted.
Instead of trying to force the gates open, I found myself wondering what might happen if I simply turned around.
