The Four of Wands

April 8, 2019: Four of Wands by Mary Allen

My card this time was the four of wands:  In the Thoth deck, a circle of gold with wands in the center and the word completion at the bottom; in the Rider-Waite deck, a picture of two people celebrating under a garland in front of a castle.  Angeles Arrien says this card means something being completed at the same time that something else is being initiated.  Biddy Tarot says this card means celebration, joy, harmony, relaxation, homecoming.  A nice card to have as my card of the month, but what is it saying to me?

Both of these meanings speak to me about my last month, albeit not in a very loud voice.  I went on a desert vacation, driving and hiking with my friend of many years, Jeannette Miyamoto, first visiting Sedona—hiking a few of the trails by the vortexes, those “swirling centers of energy conducive to healing meditation, and self-exploration, said to emanate from the red rocks in Sedona,” according to the internet—then hiking for three days in Joshua Tree park, talking, talking, talking in the car and trudging silently and separately along the trails.  The desert was blooming, small yellow and purple flowers scattered everywhere across the sand—those flowers sort of looked like the flowers decorating the garland in the Rider Waite four of wands, now that I think of it. We meditated at the vortexes, ate in a diner in Joshua Tree the town on our way back to Jeannette’s house in Idyllwild and on my way back, a day later, via the Palm Springs airport and two airplanes, to my house for my homecoming, another kind of completion.  It’s tempting to stick with all that as my four of wands experience last month.

Harder to write about are the ways in which I think I may be achieving some larger kind of completion while at the same time starting something new.  I’ve been thinking for a while that I’m probably at the end of a cycle, maybe a twenty-year cycle of writing but not publishing, working on fixing the broken things inside myself using EMDR, staying put while I healed.  Nothing has really changed that much yet, but I can kind of feel it coming in my bones.  And there have been little signs:  a nice email from my former editor letting me know I’m not quite as washed up as an author as I thought I was, a new writing project that I think could take me into the world, a kind of completion of the deep work inside me.  (There’s always more to be done, but I’m down to the really bottom of the barrel of the traumas inside me, scraping up the last most painful bits.)  

Even the trip to the desert with Jeannette was a kind of simultaneous completing and opening, completing a cycle—I’ve been going on trips to the desert in March with my friend Jo Ann for four years (it would have been five except I broke my shoulder last February and couldn’t go), but now Jo Ann’s spring break time is changing and we won’t being doing it anymore.  I thought I wasn’t going to go to the desert at all this year, but I got a last-minute chance to do it with my friend Jeannette.  And when I was down there with her, seeing her house and her life and all the rich lush ways that she’s been gifted by life, I felt a kind of opening of my inner eyes, a kind of inner revisiting of what I can have and be and do in my own life.   

*Tania will be back for the next posting at Tarot for Two. In the meantime, here's a link to a post she wrote about creating "synthesis" drawings based on three tarot cards, A Butterfly Lantern for Querents.