September 16, 2016: The Hermit by Mary
Allen
I had a vision
involving my card of the month this month.
Sometimes I have a hard time figuring out what to say about the card of
the month because I’m not sure exactly where the card and the month intersect—I
don’t really know what the card said about the month—but this month I don’t
have that problem. This month the
problem I have is describing the vision.
Let’s start with
the easy part: The card was the Hermit,
the ninth major Arcana card. In the
Thoth deck the Hermit is an abstract figure:
All you see that’s person-like is a hand and a head. The rest of the card is full of symbols: a large paper-hat-shaped crystal, a
peacock-feather background, something that looks like an egg with a snake
wrapped around it and something that looks like a sperm heading directly ward
the center of the card; Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding hell, down in
the corner, one dog head looking back at the past or at whatever’s coming from
behind, the other two looking forward.
The face of the
Hermit is featureless, turning to the side, and the hand is holding a diamond-shaped
crystal lamp that contains a small glowing sun.
It’s that sun inside that little lamp, held by the hand in the rough
center of the card, that seems to be the focal point of the card, and it was
that lamp that I saw during the vision I had this month.
I had just been
traveling around in the deep dark waters of my earliest childhood via EMDR (it
stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing; it’s a kind of therapy
that helps with symptoms of PTSD and other inner disturbances; I do it once a
month with my friend who’s a therapist and once a month with my regular, paid
therapist; on this day I was doing it with my friend). There was deep trauma in my early childhood
which is stored now in my unconscious, in the very bottom of the basement of my
mental house, under some trap door that in regular life you could never get
open.
It’s only
through the agency and the miracle of EMDR that I can go there at all, how I
got there on this day, how EMDR works, is too much to write about now. What I want to say is that at the end of my time
down there, when my session was almost over and it was time to start coming up
from below, my friend suggested I might picture a container inside myself where
I could store those painful feelings until I needed to take them out
again. Maybe a container with a lock on
it, she said, using an image she’d learned in her therapy training, a good
image that works to help many people.
But in that
moment it came to me that I didn’t want an interior container with a lock on
it, I didn’t want or need to keep those feelings locked away, that was the
problem I’d been having all along. And a
vision of something started forming in my mind—if mind is a word you can use to
describe the vast airy mysterious world of consciousness that lives inside of
us or that we live inside and that isn’t inside or outside of anything. In that moment in that place I started
seeing something, some image started forming vaguely inside me.
It was familiar
but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Some
small vessel full of light. Light that
would illuminate the feelings I had just dredged up from the deepest darkest
place inside me, the subbasement of the unconscious underneath a trap door. A vessel that would hold the energy of those
feelings, not keep them locked away somewhere but transform them, turn them
into a glowing warmth inside me, starting somewhere around my solar plexus and
spreading out, filling me with their light and healing.
It wasn’t until
I was on my home that I realized that what I was seeing in that vision was the
light in the lamp at the heart of the Hermit card. And then I was stunned by the synchronicity
of it—by the way that life collaborates with dreams and the unconscious and the
tarot cards, maybe even the ordinary details of the everyday world itself, to talk
to us about out deepest selves and about our healing, as if life has a mind and
a consciousness of its own that’s just waiting for us to ask it a question.
September 16, 2016: The Seven of Swords and The Wheel of Fortune by Tania Pryputniewicz
Sometimes Mary
and I pull Tarot cards we respond to negatively—so we select again. Why not? Even
though I’m a Tarot seeker committed to equanimity, I get a wrinkle in the
spiritual cape like anyone else when I get certain cards on certain days.
Which is what
happened this month when I drew “Futility,” also known as the Seven of Swords in the Thoth deck. We see a central sword starting to fracture under impending tips
of six other swords. But notice: the six sword tips are not actually touching
or fully breaking the main sword. It is an apt metaphor for how imagined trouble
creates fractures in mindset such as feelings of failure or hopelessness.
Not wanting to
spend the entire month in a “Futility” narrowed state, I pulled The Wheel of
Fortune as my back-up. I felt immediately cheered reading Angeles Arrien’s
promise for this card that “expansion and abundance come with the willingness
to change and keep things moving by taking risks and being open to new
opportunities” (The Tarot Handbook: Practical Applications of Ancient Visual Symbols, Arcus Publishing Company).
Still, I kept my
Seven of Swords out of some kind of Tarot allegiance. And both cards spoke to
me this month. It started when I got my latest Social Security statement detailing
my life earnings. Or not detailing them—years of zeros stared up at me starting
sixteen years back (when the first of my three children came along) with a few $500
to $1000 per year earnings sprinkled in there.
I know better
than to reduce my worth as a person to my earnings, but I couldn’t help but do
the math. The lifetime sum of money, which I started earning at the age of 16,
averages out to earnings of just under $400 a month. I hamster-wheeled through
my past, reviewing what seemed at first a futility of repeated tasks that have
only slowly started to yield financial gain: years of journaling, editing, making
art, blogging about writing and motherhood, teaching poetry, blogging, and
Tarot writing online, in person, and at writing retreats, editing and publishing
poetry, and making poetry movies--all in disparate sequences that prioritized
my children, my marriage, and my mental health.
I’ve often felt
frustrated trying to figure out how to earn more while keeping the family
mobile as peacefully as possibly balanced. But something shifted me out of
Seven of Swords angst and into The Wheel of Fortune this month, just as
the cards suggested. In part due to the obvious—that I live a privileged life
and have a partner lucky enough to persist in a career he loves and secure
enough about his own views of parenting that he encouraged me to stay home with
our children, and also due to conversations with other mothers. And a
conversation with my brother. He listened to me vent on the one hand and then he
listened to me talk passionately about the latest group of classes I’ve
designed and he said, “You are a fabulous mother. And you are so much more than only
a mother.”
All the at-home prioritization
is a soul investment you can’t see mirrored in a Social Security statement—a
document not set up to account for the cost of childcare for three children,
the acting-as-a-taxi time, the doctor time, the food preparation and shopping,
the emotional and psychological cost of supporting the wage earner…all those blessed
and chosen hidden costs which are truly the cost of presence.
My poet friend
said, “You take a pen to that Social Security statement: Next to all those
so-called zeros, you write in what you were doing all those years! All those
hours of time with your children! Make up your own Social Security statement. You’ve
been investing in creating socially creative and responsible adults.”
My shift from
Seven of Swords thinking to Wheel of Fortune blessings might also be prompted in part
by the Paragrams in my purse, those 1x2 inch cards you can get in a tiny
envelope for free at the Self Realization Fellowship Garden just down the block
from the Encinitas Meditation Garden with excerpts taken from the teachings of
Paramahansa Yogananda… which I keep right next to my little red Pocket Pema
Chodron….
…which means
when I’m sitting in my battered, dusty, blue van waiting for my son to race out
of the house in time to catch the school bus--and out he comes with tennis
shoes in one hand, back pack unzipped and listing last night’s math homework,
bowl of oatmeal in the other hand, milk sloshing out across the van carpet as he slides
in--I use those twenty second not to lay on the horn or yell, but to select a
Paragram and read it. Or to open to Pema, to read how we are perpetual
children ourselves, that all of us eternally long to fall back into our mother’s
protective aura, perpetually not feeling “ready” to risk. Pema says we get
stuck in wanting to wait to feel fully ready to risk (Awakening Loving-Kindness, Shambhala Pocket Classics).
But we’ll never
be ready…so we just need to keep jumping into the fray.
There must be plenty
of other mothers and stay-at-home fathers sharing this stymied mix of
heart-centered joy/satisfaction of doing right by the kids and low self-esteem
that gradually creeps in when we are not earning (or at least not earning as much as the
primary wage-earner).
I can do my tiny
part to change the culture of how we view stay-at-home moms and dads by
changing how I treat myself: I can stop being cruel (goodbye Seven of Swords) about
my long list of zeroes…stop seeing them as evidence of a Fool choosing not to
earn…and see them instead as reminders of the repeated choice to stay within
arm’s reach of my children during the years they needed me.
And I can
welcome the Wheel of Fortune: the children blossoming in their independence. From
under my son’s door, I hear the lovely strains of his guitar music. On my
kitchen table, I see the intricate fern spiral designs taking form inside of my
daughter’s Medusa drawing. And under my palm for a second before he’s off to
shower, heat radiates up from the sweaty forehead of my youngest just back from
skateboard practice.
