The Empress and the Knight of Cups

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:

Entering theTarot Garden: An Introduction to Tarot

The Eight of Swords and The Prince of Wands

March 24, 2015: The Eight of Swords: The Blood Fold by Tania Pryputniewicz

“Good luck,” Mary says each time before we hang up the phone to write to our cards of the month. This bit of warmth makes it possible for me to pick up the pen, for writing is hard work. We’d been joking, laughing, Do we want to write? No. Will we write? Yes. Mary’s love, like a neck scarf, trails me into the tunnel of alone, the part of our shared Tarot writing journey we do separately, bright promise of her voice on the other side of our twenty-five minutes when we will read our reflections back to one another.

It is not one of my favorite cards--this March’s Eight of Swords, Interference in the Thoth deck--with its purple background and jangle of red lines and triangles, six scimitars and sickle-curved, jagged swords overlaid by two long, straight swords as if set just so on top to bring order to the unruly six.

In my mind’s eye, I see the Rider Waite image for the Eight of Swords: a blindfolded woman standing in front of a row of blades anchored in the ground. A typical Tarot response is that the woman could step left or right in order to cut herself free. Victimhood stars in this interpretation, since she could end her bondage if she chose. What is she gaining by stasis, though, might be a kinder question.

Alejandro Jodorowsy, in The Way of The Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, has an even kinder take: “the mind has ceased to identify with its concepts. It is a powerful orientation, a trance state or deep meditation in which the duality of opposites dissolves in celebration of the present. The solution to problems becomes obvious, beyond the powers of reasoning.”

I want this calm interpretation to be the one I lived. But instead it was a month of withstanding interference and overcoming obstacles to book doctor’s appointments and meetings with the school, counselors and more for my teen-aged daughter in crisis. And trying to understand why—given the myriad good measures we’ve taken to help her--we are still standing in the kitchen at 1 a.m. arguing.

I’m raising my voice, But I am on your side. She persists, No, you’re not. You don’t understand.

My husband emerges woolly with sleep to intervene, can we keep it down, he’s getting up at 5 a.m. to supervise tomorrow’s dive. Our sons at the opposite end of the house begin their fidget awake which means soon they’ll take refuge in our bed. The raw ire now encompasses my husband; we’ve done it again: the family swords are out in the air spinning and glittering for the taking.

I long for the day before when we walked, Husky leaping between us over the kelp washed seashore, where I find a blue plastic sea-horse sand toy and the littlest, a green Miami dolphin baseball cap in wearable condition. My husband finds a canister go-pro, the kind you wear on the side of your head. He’s already turned it on and records a pan of the four of us on the side of the sand dunes comparing treasures.

So destructive, this interference of the mind, the pain families cause one another with the things we say. You don’t understand. I’m on your side. I negate my daughter's words: I do understand. She negates mine: You’re not on my side.

The argument started earlier in her bedroom. Frankly, I am in the wrong--her room is hers. I should know better: When I come in to say goodnight, say goodnight. Resist the urge to restore order: leave the wet towel, the empty mug. You are the only person in this house with your own room, I still can’t help blurting. It isn’t helpful. My daughter remains anchored and I muster the strength to go, abandoning us both to our separate truths. My husband retreats to our bedroom, boys blinking sleepily behind him.

In the logjam of our bed, I think about our house up north where I had a writing cabin with a desk, pastel sketches, sculpture of a man’s torso bearing a poem, sculpture of a woman poked with serpentine holes so the light inside of her rayed out in faint spokes, a painting of a Midwest barn glowing with the surreal blues of winter snow, and a futon where my daughter and her best friend loved to sleep. With a wooden tray of tea and chocolate, I’d cross the chilled deck in the dark and over the gravel drive to knock on the door, the outside bulb wreathed in moths and every other gangly, amber winged creature seeking light.

But now I wonder about that merging of psychic fields. Should I have kept that cabin separate? Maybe. But letting my daughter use my studio for sleepovers during the ups and downs of salvaging my marriage was often what I had left to offer. Under the roof of the healed marriage, it is my turn to respect her room, be-hair-banded, be-shoed, be-littered as it may be from empty plates to her clothes-pinned water colors draped above the desk, all hers to keep or clear. Maybe that awareness of the dance of merging and separation is the celebration of the present of which Jodorowsky speaks.

Or maybe the card shows how our daughters see us as we grapple with how to deal with them. Come on Mom, take off the blindfold. Come on Mom, don’t be so stupid, free yourself. But give me what I want, at all costs.

I know that craving well. To be mirrored. Loved. What she doesn’t know is that my blindfold is a blood-fold, a living web I see through before I make decisions regarding her, weighing needs vs. wishes across years of living she doesn’t understand littered with compromise, marriage, childbirth, and persisting with my passion to write.

Or, to step one more time into the figure on the card, maybe I am the blindfolded daughter standing in front of the Eight of swords linked inextricably to the Major Arcanum VIII, Mother Justice card. She sits on her throne with eyes open, unafraid, sword of truth in one hand. Scales in the other. Impenetrably aware of the next right thing to do, without personal attachment--something I struggle to relearn in the presence of those I love when they crave something from me. I’m learning Mother, still learning, how to withstand my own unmet cravings. Help me to teach my daughter to withstand hers.

March 24, 2015: The Prince of Wands by Mary Allen

My card this month was the Prince of Wands:  male figure in a chariot drawn by a lion, everything in shades of red and gold, the boy/man (he doesn’t really look like a boy or a man), the lion, the wheels of the chariot, the corona of flames coming out of the boy/man’s head, the flames all around him, the spears of flame coming up from the bottom of the picture – everything is red and gold.  The prince is holding a set of reins loosely in one hand, a staff with a bird’s head in the other, and there’s a kind of fountain of watery flames leaping out of the front of his chariot, like something you might see on a pedestrian mall except there would be no fire involved.

This was the perfect card for me this month.  I went to Tucson with my friend JoAnn; we stayed in a rented house in the desert and wrote and hiked on trails in the Saguaro National Park.  The colors of this card are the colors of the desert and the sunburst around the prince’s head looks vaguely Southwestern.  He’s moving, being drawn along across an abstract tan landscape like the desert floor – the way we were constantly moving throughout the trip, zooming through the sky in separate airplanes to get there, walking every day along tan sandy hiking trails, burning through the ten-day vacation, our time in that magical red and gold place getting shorter with every passing day -- and around the figure on the card, I see, in the spaces between the flames surrounding his head and the flames surrounding his body are little black things that look like bees. 

There are bees in the Arizona desert, it turns out, Africanized ones; you read about them at the visitor’s center before you go up on the trail – if you have an encounter with them run, it says on a laminated poster, and I did encounter them at one point, in the form of a loud, loud, getting louder and louder helicopter-like buzzing coming from the left and passing over and behind me and then heading off to the right as I started running up the path toward my friend, who was at least a half mile up ahead of me on the trail.  Those bees gave me pause, to say the least.  But in the end they didn’t stop me from going back out on the trail the next day.

Angeles Arrien says the Prince of Wands is a card for “mastery of unlimited creative expression that is totally inspired from deeply within” – that the fact that the prince holds the reins loosely in his hand, while the lion charges ahead pulling him in the chariot, means he’s allowing creativity to take him where it wants to go without restricting it or restraining it, and I would say that that’s an apt metaphor for my month too, my ten days in Arizona.  

JoAnn and I wrote every day, sitting across from each other in a sunny room, the door cracked despite the threat of flies and errant bees wandering in, to admit the warm Arizona air, trying to let go and let the language come out of us, to let the writing pull us along to the images and the meaning.  That kind of writing does feel a little like sitting in a chariot being pulled forward by a lion, a fountain of flames leaping in front of you, something growing inside a circle in your heart like there is in the boy/man’s chest, and maybe some scary bees flying along beside you.