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.   

The Hermit, The Seven of Swords and Fortune’s Wheel

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. 

The Queen of Cups and The Ten of Disks

May 17: The Queen of Cups by Mary Allen

My card this time was the Queen of Cups.  The queen herself is virtually invisible on this card in the Thoth deck, just a small dim face almost hidden among blue swirls and green reeds; there are lotuses, a stork, and a large greenish crayfish shell that are more visible than the queen is too. About three quarters of the way down the image is a line separating the upper and lower parts of the picture; below the line is water, with the queen, the blue swirls, the bird, and everything else that appears above reflected in the water below.  As above, so below, is the message of this card. 

This is a very watery card, but when I look at it I think of air.  I’ve been thinking about this card all month when I meditate in the mornings.  I’ve got a few button-pushing things going on, and when I get out of bed, find my slippers, go to the bathroom, feed my cats, I feel a bit of heaviness, a little bit of anxiety roiling around in my solar plexus, like the remnants of an uneasy dream.  Then I go upstairs and sit in the green brocade chair in the corner of my attic study, close my eyes, and meditate for twenty minutes.  In meditating I focus on the moment and the world as it comes wafting through the open-because-it’s-May, east-facing windows on my right: the many-layered tapestry of bird songs, the green-smelling spring air, some background sound which is probably distant traffic on Route 80 but which seems like the happy humming or breathing of the world itself.  And I start to feel lighter, happier, more expansive.  My upper self starts to match my lower self; the part of me above the water line, in the world, gets more like the light airy place of the unconscious. 

It’s kind of the opposite of what Angeles Arrien says when she talks about the as-above-so-below aspect of the Queen of Cups in The Tarot Handbook:  According to her, the double reflection of the water in the Queen of Cups “is representative of the Queen’s constant choice to reflect her feelings accurately.”  In other words, as I read what she’s saying, the Queen lets the dark feelings, the pain and anxiety and other bad feelings left over in the unconscious from earlier traumas, come to the surface instead of pushing them down and keeping them hidden from herself. I can go with that too; I’m all for accepting and admitting those feelings without “blame or judgment,” as Angeles Arrien says. 

Last month I did some more accepting and admitting, letting rise to the surface of those old dark feelings.  I visited the deepest regions of my inner self through a therapy called EMDR and broke off a chunk of the old frozen emotions—shame, terror—that I felt around my mentally ill mother when I was a kid.  Those feelings are still stubbornly stuck inside me, or have been until I’ve located them, every single one of those remnants of trauma, years and years worth of them, and broken them up with EMDR.  I’ve been doing EMDR therapy for longer than I care to say and I’ve yet to come to a place where I don’t feel any of that nameless roiling anxiety, that unspecified dread, at least some of the time—maybe there is no such place—but I feel that dread and anxiety less and less.  I’ve gotten lighter and lighter, happier and happier, more and more peaceful—I can feel it in my solar plexus—as a result of all that finding and releasing of childhood trauma. 

Many years ago I pictured myself like some kind glass of liquid, clear on the top half, inky on the bottom—I knew I was suppressing a lot of stuff.  It wasn’t a good way to live, and I thought if I could just find some way to shake up the glass, the liquid of myself would get all mixed up and become pink and beautiful and healthy.  That is to say, my upper consciousness would match my lower consciousness, my interior world would be lighter and more permeable, more able to breathe, to hear and see and mingle with the beautiful outside world.  And now, in this May, 2016, I think that I can honestly say that my glass of liquid is pretty much the same color all the way through, that as above so below is true in my personal universe.

But that isn’t really what interests me most, I realize, when I look at the Queen of Cups today.  What interests me is the unconscious itself.  In the tarot cards water is a symbol for the unconscious.  With the Thoth-deck Queen of Cups the water takes up half the card, it’s all that water below the line.  In the Rider-Waite deck the Queen of Cups is sitting on a throne with a pool of water at her feet; she’s wearing a kind of cape made of water too. Maybe it’s seeing her sitting on that throne that makes me think again of sitting in my own chair in the mornings trying to access the water of my own unconscious as I meditate.  How you get to that water, that unconscious place, and what you find there is what really interests me. 

Every day it’s different for me.  It takes longer on some days than on others to get my thoughts to shut up to the point where I can make contact, even briefly, with that place of the unconscious.  I try to listen to the sounds but I keep getting distracted, I find myself rehearsing what I’m going to do that day or what I’m going to say somebody or blah blah blah.  This morning I could kind of feel the two worlds, the two states of consciousness, one superimposed on top of the other, the thinking, the incessant blah-blah-blah-ing, on top and the unconscious, that beautiful light airy place of water, showing through underneath.  And then I was there.  I can always tell when I arrive there:  Suddenly I feel my body relax and sink more deeply into the chair, and at the same time some part of me—my spirit, maybe—expands a little, like a flock of birds rising into the air.  It truly is like visiting some other place inside myself.   Sometimes when I arrive there I get a deep feeling of what I can only call being at home.  I didn’t have a real home when I was a kid, my relationship with home was extremely broken, and I’ve always thought I had no early experiences of feeling at home. But it turns out I did, I must have, because I find those feelings, memories of those feelings, when I get to that place when I meditate.  This morning, as well as those feelings, I felt a longing for home.  And I felt, in some deep way I can’t possibly articulate, that the place inside me I found by listening to the sounds around me and getting my thoughts to shut up, if only for a few seconds, was home.  I’ve come across a lot more in there too, in that vast deep airy watery place inside myself, during other very short windows that open while I meditate, and for slightly longer periods while I’m doing EMDR, and a few times in the 1980s when I got there with the help of a hypnotherapist.

As I look at the Queen of Cups now, the cup she holds in the Rider-Waite deck seems like a magic lantern containing an entryway to that magical place, and the watery blur of blue and green in the Thoth deck seems like a promise that we can all find that magical place inside of us and all around us if we just get still enough.

May 2016: The Ten of Disks by Tania Pryputniewicz

I was delighted the Ten of Disks fell as my card of the month! In the Thoth deck, the disks are thick as cut rounds of wood or foil coins full of chocolate you might get in your goody bag at a Pirate Party. Behind the ten main coins positioned in the pattern of the Tree of Life we see the pale green coins of spring, and beyond them, dusky violet coins rimmed in red.

Having sold our home, we are poised here at a respite during which we can afford to fill the family cupboard and portion funds to keep us above the poverty line. The blessing of the card extends to my many jobs I am grateful to, for the way they contribute financial and spiritual dividends: teaching, writing, and stewardship of others, including writing mothers, while raising my family.

In the Rider Waite Smith version of the Ten of Disks, we see a curtain of falling disks obscuring our view of a family: seated grandfather, several dogs, husband with back to us, wife facing us, child clutching mother’s skirt. Rachel Pollack, in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, suggests the card in part refers to, “hidden experience in ordinary things” and suggests the family might fail to “notice the magic all around them.”

Coming out of six months of financial strain, I am acutely aware of the magic all around us again. And the practice of regularly reflecting on one’s life in journal entries or photos or blogs fosters the currency of precisely such an awareness of “the hidden experience in ordinary things.” I have found it to be true of the domestic monastery, but it applies to any life in which one stops to reflect in writing day by day (a hands on form of meditation).

I don’t know if my children and husband see the magic all around us, but I feel it in the Sundays we rise and hop in the van to drive along Route 75 parallel to the sea.  A four-minute spin delivers us to Katy’s Café where its surfboard sign, hung by a pair of chains, greets us with image of a mermaid resting on her side. In we go past the paintings of surfers emerging from sunlit-backed barrels and tables adorned with glass goblet worlds holding cacti and succulents anchored in multicolored pebbles, miniatuure clay surfboards at the ready. A life-sized Neptune covers the supply closet door; even inside the bathroom we’re met by undersea imagery of kelp and fish lit by lone strobing urchin lamp.

“Welcome to Katy’s,” the barrista beams, pushing menus at us down the counter though we already know we want Davos, acai fruit bowls, Hammerheads, apple-shaped apple juice for the littlest, the middle son sporting his first ox-blood leather jacket and white t-shirt. Katy herself--if we are lucky--with her long blonde braid down her back reminds us to sign the kids up for her summer surf contest. We corral my husband from the inevitiable two or three former students or current trainees he’ll run into and snake a couple tables out back. Over the sound of the surf, the ocean breeze chills while the coffee warms our palms.

I’m grateful for these Ten of Disks mornings with gift of breakfast the five of us gather to share before the scatter:  youngest to skateboard practice, the middle (James Dean boy) to work out at the gym with three buddies, the daughter to lifeguard-aide training, and the husband to tackle the Obstacle course on base…which leaves me free, free to breathe, and best of all, free to harvest the bounty in words.

The Two of Wands and The Universe

January 26, 2015: The Two of Wands, Message in a Bottle, by Tania Pryputniewicz

I took a look at this month’s Thoth Two of Wands with its red-faced grumpy Tibetan doorjies set against a blotchy uteral pink mess of a background suffused with a Kindergarten sky blue and decided to focus on the Rider Waite image instead. The Rider Waite Two of Wands features a cloaked figure holding a staff she rests on a low stone wall; in her other hand sits a tiny replica of the world. Firmly planted behind her is a second staff. I love that she’s holding a world while standing on the ground of her larger world and looking out across the sea. Is she getting ready to step over the stone wall and pass the village on a trek to the sea? Will she set her world down at water’s edge to float aross to foreign shores? Will that world be translated and welcomed by hands on opposite shore?

Metaphorically this feels like an accurate depiction of how I felt in December joining Tracking Wonder’s #Quest2015, a group of business artists looking to collaborate and grow under the stewardship of a man named Jeffrey Davis (now leading us on a #LivetheQuest leg). His introductory video caught my eye—supine on his back in a swath of grass, he sports a pair of vibrant red trousers. The aerial angle of the opening frame conveys a playful sense of welcome, the red fabric a clear message of vitality and an invitation to step outside of familiar adornment.

Joining Tracking Wonder felt a lot like taking my little world in my hands and offering it again—not just to my quiet blogging channels, but out to a vaster, foreign sea. And having to trust the world would be delivered intact. If the wands represent creativity, like the figure in the card, I feel balanced, a wand behind me representing years of writing on a regular basis, and the wand grasped in hand and balanced on the stone wall representing a step up in camaraderie and play, which can only yield new vistas. Notice the warmly cloaked figure wears sturdy boots and a red hat, wearer invigorated, joyful and passionate.

I sense stillness too in this card. A waiting for more good. I sense this in my own body. A calm joy in paired adventures, like this one with Mary for which two of us are publicly co-blogging about our private journey with the Tarot. Angeles Arrien attributes to this card an “optimal balance of energy or sense of sovereignty or being comfortable in your domain.” It mirrors the peace I feel about Tarot for Two, our two voices mingling with the myriad bloggers online inhabiting countless territories. To thrive, one launches one’s ships, and one also looks out to the horizon to receive what is being offered from across the sea, our online version of a “Message in a Bottle.”

Now I'm drawn to revisiting that Thoth Two of Wands with crimson doorjies in front of pink uteral sky. It reminds me of other pinks in cards Mary and I talk about as relating to female problems like the Thoth five of swords and the other one with sludgy cups—maybe I’m thinking of the 8 of cups with its peach-grey desolate horizon line. Ironic that now with two minutes to spare--Mary likely calling any second to say our writing window is up and it’s time to throw cards and select a new card for the month--wouldn’t you know it, the Thoth deck card is “talking to me.” And reminding me I’m still working through female problems in my writing and accurately reflecting that I often feel at the mercy of wounds that just won’t heal.

Then I look again to the Rider Waite figure, so gently poised. And realize that both Rider Waite and Thoth images feel accurate. I go in, dislodge a little of that stuck female problem past, and a little more Kindergarten sky blue emerges. The squinched up doorjie faces make me smile still--they look like twins in a time-out. Perhaps internal twins I’m trying to merge. I can rage through my time-out or take stock calmly and put on that red hat and face the sea.

January 26, 2015: The Universe by Mary Allen

My card this month was the Universe.  I used to get this card fairly often about twenty years ago, around the time I sold my book in an almost magical way and bought the house I live in now with the advance.  Back then I thought the card was telling me that the universe was waving its big old wand over my life and maybe it was, but the manifestations I thought I was going to get as a result didn’t quite manifest, I went back to being in a seven of swords (“futility,” according to the Thoth deck, which has words at the bottom of all the minor arcana), five of cups (“disappointment) kind of place, and the Universe didn’t show up much during all those years.  Now here it is back again, and I wonder what it’s saying to me this time. 

            Angeles Arrien says that the Universe card “symbolizes the unity of positive and negative forces both internally and externally,” that the naked woman grabbing a sickle in one hand (she’s a hermaphrodite, according to Angeles Arrien, but I prefer to think of her as a woman and besides, she has breasts) while holding onto a snake/wheel with the other hand – that she uses the sickle to cut through limitations and become free and move forward, and that we, like the diamond-back snake that shows up in the card, are “required to transform before we can experience new worlds internally and externally.” 

I’ve always thought this card, which is the last card in the major arcana cycle, said you were at the end of a cycle, that you had burned off all the bad karma of that particular cycle, and that you have the wheel of your own life in your own hands now.   And I would say that there’s some truth to both of those interpretations in terms of where I find myself in my life at this particular moment:  I’ve used EMDR – my particular sickle – to cut away most of the inner limitations that were making it impossible for me to move forward – it turned out, back in 1995, when I got that big book advance and I thought I was going to be a bestselling author from then on, that I had way, way too many deeply buried fears and doubts and self-hatreds to be able to go off into the world and thrive while succeeding.  And I do feel that I’m at the end of my long cycle of inner work – not that I won’t have to do inner work any more, but that I’ve changed as a result of all the work I have done:  I feel peaceful, healed, complete inside, for the most part anyway.

            And, I have to say, the Universe card has been talking to me this month in an everyday way in the everyday world.  This month my book The Rooms of Heaven, which has been around and pretty much languishing without much of anybody paying attention to it, for fifteen years, somehow found its way onto a Best Nonfiction of 2014 list put out by Tin House.  Maybe not the end all and be all of success but not nothing to dismiss at either, plus it feels like a little wink from the universe.  And also this month, I used money I got from my sister – a quarter of my sister’s retirement account, because she died, of ALS, before retirement age – to update my kitchen, the kitchen of the house I bought back in 1995 and haven’t had the time or the energy or the attention, not to mention the money, to fix up since.  I had my kitchen painted a pale luminous celestial blue – once in a trance, during my first set of encounters with the magical universe inside of us, in an even earlier cycle of my life, I saw an ugly green desk blotter turn a beautiful celestial blue, a blue a little bit like the color of my kitchen walls now. 

I put new wood floors down in my kitchen too, and a few days later, during EMDR, I saw a little vision of a wide glossy hardwood floor in my newly-refurbished –through-the-grace-of-EMDR interior, and the message I got along with the vision was that there’s a floor now between my unconscious and the upper air of my life, and now I can move on without my old deep fears and self-hatreds seeping up out the basement, ruining everything I encounter.  I can move on to wherever I’m going and fill the upper part of my house – my life in the world, in the upper air -- with new things. 

I don’t know what those new things are, don’t know what the universe is going to bring me now or even if it’s going to bring me anything.  But I do feel, somehow, the “completion and integration of great inner work,” as Angeles Arrien would put it, and I feel more than ever before that I am “not only at home in the external world but also at home within myself.”