April 7, 2017: The Empress by Mary Allen
My card this
month was the Empress, the third major arcana card in the deck. According to Angeles Arrien the Empress is
about love with wisdom.
The Empress
isn’t one of the cards I associate with myself or particularly relate to,
although I love how it (she) looks in the Thoth deck: A crowned female figure holding a lotus, her face
viewed from the side, two moons and a bower of green leaves surrounding her, a
swan and a shield with a double phoenix on it at her feet. Except she doesn’t really have feet—her lower
body is green—the whole card is predominantly green and pink, she’s wearing a
pink top covered with symbols—and the green striped lower body might be a
mermaid’s tail. At first glance I can’t
figure out what she, and love with wisdom, had to do with the month I just went
through.
I spent two
weeks in the desert last month, on a writing hiking vacation with my friend
JoAnn. We stayed in the same Air BnB
house in 29 Palms we stayed in last year, sat across from each other at a
formica table on the sun porch and wrote every morning and then went for a long
hike somewhere in Joshua Tree National Park every afternoon. I decided to write about the vacation during
the vacation, which made me notice everything, made me more mindful more often,
than I would have otherwise.
I love the
desert, love Joshua Tree, love hiking along the stony sandy trails that wind
among the huge ancient tan granite boulders in the park, I love that house and
the bedroom I’ve slept in there for two weeks, two years in a row now. I love the sound of the oleander scratching
on the window at night when I get into bed, I love sitting on the back patio in
the sunshine every morning looking out across the sandy yard dotted with
cactuses to the mountains in the distance, I love the air, the light, the
cactuses, the mourning doves that roost on the clothesline and the hummingbird
that sips and sips from the hummingbird feeder at the corner of the house. I loved every single thing about that
vacation, and I suppose you could say that by writing about it while I was there
I loved it with wisdom. Knowing I was
going to write about it made me feel, if not exactly wise, then awake, aware,
which I suppose is a kind of wisdom.
I don’t see the
desert in the Empress, the way I could see it in the Prince of Wands with his
golden corona and vehicle of fire, which I picked as my card of the month a
couple of years ago during another trip to the desert with JoAnn. The Empress is a watery card rather than a
fiery one, all those pinks and greens and lotuses and water birds. But the empress herself is resting in a bower
of her own making, an inner bower made of peace and loveliness and happiness,
and my desert vacation rests in my memory as a time of airiness and peace and
happiness, and the desert with its fierceness has a kind of loveliness of its
own.
A couple of days
before the end of our vacation, JoAnn and I hiked a steep trail up one side of
a mountain and down the other side to an oasis, a place where forty-nine
ancient enormous palm trees grow in a fold among the rocks, fed by a spring. We sat there for a while on a large flat
piece of granite, eating almonds and drinking bottled water, listening to the
wind rattle the flat dry leaves of the palm trees, breathing the cool, green,
moist, pure air. The green and pink
Empress sitting in her leafy bower makes me think of that cool green oasis
resting in the middle of the hard tan desert, and of our vacation opening like
a window of summer in the middle of our winters.
April 7, 2017: The Knight of Cups by
Tania Pryputniewicz
Oh the birds of
San Diego are happy, warbling over one another’s songs in elaborate riffs and
rounds! I’m sitting in the sun at a new wooden rectangular table on our back
patio. At first I was sad to move aside the old weathered round umbrella table
where I usually write, but the new one affords me room to scatter out my sketchpad,
colored pencils, and my Tarot book library.
Before we hung
up to write, I asked Mary where she’d be sitting. I can see her in my mind’s
eye at her kitchen table in Iowa. How cheerful to be so vividly bridged these
mornings, to be “taroting” (the verb Mary coined for our tarot play), together
again.
For two months
now the Knight of Cups has presided over my altar. A pair of heart-shaped
shadows catches my eye first. They form the bottoms of the horse’s hooves as he
kicks up his heels. This white horse with a blue bridle bears a rider with blue
wings that echo pale blue shell-shaped sweeping waves, foamed, and one ethereal
blue peacock at the card’s bottom.
I love most the
rider’s wings. I’ve often thought the wings belonged to the horse, but the
wings spring from the shoulders of the green-armored knight. The knight holds a
chalice to the sky, a red crab emerging at cup’s rim. He’s offering up his heart
and the heart’s questions. In the image of the crab I see a layer of
protection, the color red so vibrant, a salute to the passionate heart.
The images suit
the heart work I engaged in this month. On the heels of completing a cycle of
poems about the commune I lived on as a child, I started mining the material
again in prose. I’m still excavating divorce, loss, geographical and
psychological moves—not in order to blame, but to understand motivations. Like
every writer, I must balance heart concerns for those I write about with concerns
for younger versions of myself. I need all three tools: chalice of open heart,
sheltering shell of the crab, and wings for aerial perspective.
Alejandro
Jodorowsky puts these words in the mouth of the Knight of Cups: “My sole
desire, to realize this endless talent with which I’ve been invested, is to survive
so that I may remain within its service” (with Marianne Costa, The Way of
Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards). The part of this quote that interests
me most is the line: “to survive so that I may remain in its service.” In other
words, to write about difficult things, but to not get lost or feel eclipsed.
To survive, thrive, and be of greater service on the other side of whatever I
discover.
When my husband
and I walk the dog at 6 a.m., usually the sky and sea mirror back blues. But this
morning found us under a light pink sky, ocean’s surface beveling towards us in
gentle silt grey and light pink waves. Near the parking lot we passed a crab.
Upside down and yards from the tide line, it glittered wet and bright
red as the chalice in the Knight of Cups card. My vote: dropped by a fisherman.
My husband: dropped by a bird. I love that the crab showed up scant hours before today’s Card of the Month writing.
I also see in
this Knight of Cups my husband and I offering up our hearts like parallel
knights in pursuit of our loves. He spends hours swimming in the sea and running
on land and mentoring others to bring their bodies to peak performance. And I
spend hours writing and when I can, mentoring others to
find their words. As the Shadow of Oz deck so beautifully states in relation to
the Knight of Cups, you must find a way to appreciate, “The overwhelming beauty
haunting your situation.” For today, I carry on, blissfully haunted by colors from
the blue prairie snow skies of the past to the sunrise pinks of now.
Upcoming on-line class
taught by Tania:
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