Finding Stability in Uncertain Times

Standing on the Ledge — New Day, New Chapter

January 26, 2026

Standing on the ledge. New day, another chapter—whatever you want to call it. Another post.

And yeah… I’m watching the news out of the U.S. and it feels like the temperature just keeps climbing. The rhetoric is getting sharper, institutions are getting tested, and the whole thing has that “history trying to rhyme” vibe—1933 as metaphor, not a calendar prediction.¹

On a more grounded note, today was relatively quiet on my end. I did a lot of work on the blog: reorganizing pages, tightening navigation, and getting my footing again after the theme switch. I’ve lost some of my old branding—some of the background imagery and the look-and-feel I had built over time—but I’ll get it back. For now it’s a few more tweaks: an archives section so older months are easy to browse, a tagline up top so new readers understand what this is in two seconds, and keeping the categories visible so people can move through the work without getting lost.

For most of my WordPress life I lived in Independent Publisher 2. I got good with it. But it was time—IP2 was starting to feel limited, and Twenty Twenty-Four gives me room to build this thing properly.

Work-wise: I fired off another email regarding the ongoing dispute. We’ll see how they respond. What they’re trying to frame as “damages” looks an awful lot like regular, everyday work—ongoing process work. And if that’s true, it raises an uncomfortable question: does that mean the work I did was valued at exactly what they’ve been trying to withhold this whole time? Interesting thought. We shall see.

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Today’s Tarot (Rider–Waite)

Quick shuffle, quick cut—classic Rider–Waite deck. I’ve had this deck since I was about 20. So… 36 years give or take. It’s been a while. A lot of my old tarot books are long gone now—lost to time, bad breaks, and people walking off with what wasn’t theirs. Still, the cards remain.

• Past: Three of Pentacles
• Present: Knight of Cups (reversed)
• Future: Nine of Pentacles (reversed)
• Me (Querent): Page of Cups (reversed)

Past — Three of Pentacles

This one reads like craft. Building something real with skill, structure, and feedback. Collaboration, learning-by-doing, the steady “show up and work the problem” energy. In the context of this project, it fits: the site changes, the reorganizing, the rebuilding—less dramatic than it looks from the outside, but genuinely constructive.²

Present — Knight of Cups (Reversed)

Here’s the emotional weather report: a pull toward moodiness, discouragement, or chasing a feeling instead of a plan. Reversed Cups energy can be beautiful and dangerous at the same time—it’s intuition without a tether, sensitivity without boundaries, the temptation to retreat into the storm instead of steering through it.²

Psychologically, this is where self-criticism and rumination can hook in: the mind tries to “solve” uncertainty by replaying it. It feels productive, but it’s often just mental looping—motion without traction.³

Future — Nine of Pentacles (Reversed)

Reversed, this card often points to independence feeling threatened—money stress, stability stress, or the sense that your autonomy is being negotiated by forces outside your control. It can also flag a sneaky trap: tying self-worth to outcomes and appearances (“If I don’t look successful, I must be failing”). That’s not a moral flaw—it’s a pressure response. But it’s also a place to intervene.²

Me — Page of Cups (Reversed)

This one hits the same theme as the reversed Knight: emotional sensitivity with a blocked outlet. Creativity turning inward. Feelings that don’t want to be managed—they want to be heard. Reversed, the Page can show the inner critic taking the microphone, or the instinct to hide in the shell instead of staying present.²

This is where self-compassion is not “soft”—it’s functional. It’s how you stop punishing yourself for being human, and start treating yourself like someone worth helping.⁴

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Fir Tree Note (Celtic/Druidic Thread)

I’m a Fir in that old tree-horoscope frame: evergreen, resilient, honest, long-memory, perceptive—and yes, sometimes prone to isolation. Evergreen doesn’t mean unbothered. It means I keep my needles through the winter. I endure. I stay standing even when the season is ugly.

So the Fir lesson for this spread is simple: return to steady structure. If the Cups are reversed (emotion turbulent), I don’t “think” my way out of it—I ground. One practical action. One honest conversation. One boundary. One small repair that I can point to and say, “That’s real.” That’s how the Fir holds the line.

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Cancer Horoscope (Today)

You are often your own worst critic, dear Moonchild. You think you are being objective, and you certainly have that ability, but you hold yourself to impossibly high standards and punish yourself when you believe you have fallen short. And then, when you do begin to think this way, you crawl into your shell and hide for a while, which means you dwell on what you perceive as a failure. You need to be kinder to yourself. You may be making a judgment now that is unfair if you don’t hide away. You will soon see why you are wrong to judge yourself harshly.

Yeah. That tracks. Cups reversed, Cancer shell, inner critic at the wheel. The move today is not self-punishment. The move is clarity: name what’s real, name what’s not, and don’t confuse “not finished” with “failure.”⁴

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Field Notes (Sociology / Psychology Lens)

From a sociological angle, part of what makes this era so exhausting is the ambient sense of instability—rules shifting, trust thinning, people performing certainty because uncertainty feels like weakness. When institutions wobble, individuals absorb the stress and start managing it alone. That’s how burnout becomes a private problem instead of a public condition.¹

From a psychological angle, the pattern is familiar: high standards + stress + uncertainty can produce a loop of self-criticism and withdrawal. The antidote isn’t grand motivation. It’s a smaller discipline: reduce the loop, increase the evidence, take one step that moves the needle, then repeat.³

That’s it for today. Godspeed.

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References

1. Durkheim, É. (1897). Suicide: A study in sociology. (Concepts: anomie; social strain under instability.)
2. Waite, A. E. (1910). The pictorial key to the Tarot. (Rider–Waite symbolic tradition.)
3. Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (1991). Responses to depression and their effects on the duration of depressive episodes. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 100(4), 569–582. (Rumination as a maintaining loop.)
4. Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85–101.