The Two of Wands, The Ten of Swords and The Four of Disks

April 9, 2018: Two of Wands by Mary Allen

The two of wands is my current card of the month. It has been for a few months now because for various reasons Tania and I haven’t been able to write about our cards and pick new ones. Tania’s mother died at the beginning of January.  I fell and broke my shoulder on February 17 and I’ve been dealing with that ever since; I had shoulder replacement surgery on March 14. I have to wear a brace until the end of April so I still can’t type with two hands and right now I’m using the voice recognition on my computer to write this. During all that time I’ve had the two of wands sitting on my mantelpiece and I’ve been wondering what it could be saying to me. I’ve also thrown the cards a couple of times and gotten the two of wands in those readings.

My first thought about the two of wands is that in the Thoth deck it looks like bones—two bones crossing—even a tiny bit like the shadowy broken bones in the x-rays of my shoulder. (Ha ha:  Here’s what the computer voice recognition did with “Thoth deck” and what I said after it:  The fuck deck fuck the heck ha ha Tania said pickles the fuck Dexter fuck Dick.) 

In the Rider Waite deck the two of wands shows a man in a red cape and astrakhan hat standing between two wands anchored in the ground on either side of him; he’s holding the world and gazing off into a distant vista of water and mountains and trees. At one point, when I was sitting in my recliner, idly staring at this version of the two of wands (I have lots of time to idly stare around the room these days), it came to me that it might be saying something about carrying the world on your shoulders and being forced to put it down. Angeles Arrien says the two of wands is about balancing inner and outer power.  This time is teaching me many things about personal power, where it begins and where it ends.  Mostly I’ve learned we have a lot less of it than we imagine we do.   And there’s another kind of power that comes in accepting that.

I read online this morning that the two of wands is the card for partnerships, two people working together successfully, and that makes sense to me in terms of what’s been going on since I’ve had this broken, trying-to-heal shoulder. In October my old friend John came from Washington, DC, with the idea of trying out Iowa City to see if he wanted to move here. He was going to find a place to live but in the end he just ended up staying with me, and when I broke my shoulder it seemed like a miracle to have him here in my house. He’s had to help me in all kinds of ways and he’s done it graciously and generously and without complaining.  In the beginning I couldn’t get into or out of bed by myself—it turns out it takes two shoulders to get in and out of a bed, although I can do it now and I still have only one working shoulder.  

But in the beginning I had to call his name at four o’clock in the morning and he would be in my doorway instantly, come around my side of the bed, take my hand and help me get up so I could go to the bathroom and take another Percocet. One night when the pain was especially bad he sat on the edge of my bed and read me an essay by Emmett Fox.  He read another one to me the first night I had to sleep in the recliner after surgery—we stayed up till one in the morning in my living room, him lying on the couch across from me, reading aloud in the lamplight.  (I slept in the recliner for eight days, then moved to my bed, where I recline every night on a huge nest of pillows.  John says I’m like the princess in the Princess and the Pea.)  He’s cooked for me and done the dishes and brought my laundry down to the basement.  For the first two weeks after the surgery I had to stand there in the kitchen while he taped Press and Stick Glad Wrap over my shoulder and upper arm so I could very carefully get into the bathtub and wash my hair without getting my bandage wet.

Everything has felt shaky and tentative ever sense I slipped on the ice without warning, crashed to the sidewalk, and found myself in this incredibly vulnerable, trapped, and painful place. I could never be doing it without John here. Now he mainly has to take my brace off so I can go in the bathroom and carefully change my shirt—I wear tops my friend Anne made for me, with snaps on the left shoulder for easy removal and replacement.  When I’m finished changing I stand in the middle of the kitchen floor and John helps me back into the brace.  He adjusts the straps, pats me on the back, and says, “Now you’re ready to go out into the world and do stuff.”  

It’s a joke, of course. I can’t go out into the world right now. All I can do is sit and hold the world in my hand, stare out my window at the house across the street and the gray sky and the bare tree branches, and wait for spring to come. 

April 9, 2018: Ten of Swords, Four of Disks by Tania Pryputniewicz

When Mary and I pulled cards in January just two weeks after my mother died, I pulled the Ten of Swords, “Ruin” with its image of ten sword handles ringing the periphery, points poised to pierce a central heart, the main and thickest sword breaking apart. I didn’t want that card for the month and tried a Mary tactic: I chose a second card. I’m grateful Mary has taught me it’s ok to do so. You could interpret the action conversationally a number of ways, as if saying to the Tarot deck, “I don’t want this card,” or, “Show me another version of the same message,” or “Can you give me a different lesson right now?”

So I pulled the Four of Disks—a relief! But since I couldn’t entirely let go of the memory of having pulled the Ten of Swords, I kept both cards out all month. And both spoke to me as is often the case. I love Angeles Arrien’s phrase for the Ten of Swords, “Fear of ruin,” specifically love (the heart image) and finances (the scales at the top).

In the evaporative state following my mother’s passing, I lost confidence, certainly retreating from the world with a bruised heart, more prone to succumbing to fears in a Ten of Swords way, passing through the initiation of a myriad “firsts” as a motherless daughter—everything, from sleeping to cooking—no task too tiny to haul up the free-floating anxiety: Here I go into another part of my life without my mother. The hospice nurse forewarned us that it is natural to take for granted the loving net of mother presence. And then all of a sudden, she said, When you lose her, you wonder, “Can I do this without her?”

In counter to that worry, the Four of Disks in the Thoth Deck (aptly named “Power”) never fails to give me a feeling of serenity. We see a structure made up of four linked towers ringed by a moat. There’s a wide sunlit path leading to a shining golden inner courtyard. I experience that sunny safe feeling here in our Southern California home which is situated on the bend of the street, backyard sanctuary where I write ringed by tall fence boards. In the front yard, we enjoy perpetual summer: the yellow rosebush blooming and a blueberry bush offering up its blueberries all year long.

The smallest actions are the ones that heal the heart gradually, nothing fancy. Like walking in the late afternoon sun in the San Diego desert, stepping around boulders, lizards fleeing, turkey vultures wheeling overhead as my youngest scampers up and over the boulders. My middle son uses a rock to chalk a giant treble clef, claiming his love of music. My husband hikes ahead and uses his phone to look up the names of the peaks surrounding us.

I don’t mind hiking nameless hills as long as I’m with my family. I can handle this level of visibility in my role as a mother. It’s easier than the daughter-self haunting me at night, the way the dreamtime I used to love is just another time during which unwelcome and unanticipated questions rise: You lost your mother…where is she now? And I wake crying from Ten of Swords dreams replaying it all back to me, still burning off the scenes of my mother suffering as we cared for her the best we could.

Better the waking world of agency, gradually overlaid with present activity, where I sand down our rusting mailbox, primer it, and fend off my husband’s suggestions for how to do the job. I kindly remind him I’m the daughter of a piano tuner/wood-worker, and carry on, tape off the bronze medallion where the letters spell, “MAIL”, then primer it rust brown, and best of all, put on a top coat, a rich and glossy forest green.

It is a tiny symbol of my willingness to engage again, spiffing up a box that holds words, mine going out and letters from editors coming back in the slow old-fashioned way. Soon I’ll feel up to stepping out past the perimeter of our gate and back into the world, but for now, it is a beginning: Stamps ferry my words to and from my green mailbox while I stay behind my own front door.

The Two of Wands and The Wheel of Fortune

June 2, 2017: The Two of Wands by Mary Allen

My card this month was the two of wands.  Power brought down to earth and made personal, I’ve read this card means.  The Thoth deck two of wands shows two crossed red dorjes, an ancient traditional Tibetan weapon.  The dorjes on the card have cartoonish little angry-looking faces at one end, and although Angeles Arrien says that this card is about coming into your own power from deep within in a balanced way, I can’t avoid thinking it’s about those little faces.  So when this card falls I’ve always thought that it was talking, at least a little bit, about power struggles.  The two of wands in the Rider Waite tells a very different story, and that’s the story that speaks to me about this card and my month last month.  The Rider Waite two of wands shows a man in a red cape and hat standing between two tall brown wands, holding a model of the earth, staring out at a landscape of mountains and trees and water. 

I guess I can say that my month was about power brought down to the earth and made personal.  The way I do that is by writing, which as I see it involves connecting to some universal creative power floating in the air sort of like electricity, connecting to it and bringing it to earth and making it personal, through writing. For me this involves seeing and noticing and doing something with what I’ve seen and noticed, capturing it as precisely as I can, with all of its detail and meaning, and mirroring it back to the universe as I write about it. 

I read recently that Saint Leontius, a sixth-century Greek Orthodox priest, said that creation can’t worship God directly but only through us, that the role of humans in this world is to make God’s creations visible.  I love that idea—that’s what I’m talking about.  To make God’s creations visible you have to see them, and to write you have to see too, see the precise room or landscape or whatever else inhabits your memories or your fictional characters are inhabiting in the story.   You can’t be vague about it, and in that way you hold the globe in your hand examining it while you bring power down to earth and make it personal, it’s the very examining that brings power to earth and makes it personal.           

And that’s what I was trying to do all month.  I spent a lot of the month working on an essay about my desert vacation in March with my friend JoAnn.  The whole time I was writing I was sitting there at my desk trying to focus the language to capture the details and the meaning, to let the meaning arise from the details, and when I was on the vacation I spent the whole time walking around trying to notice the details, trying to capture them in my mind so I could capture them and make something out of them, mirror them back to the universe, through a piece of writing. 

And ever since then I’ve been doing that with other things too.  Now that my desert vacation is over and I’m back in real life I’ve been walking around looking, noticing, trying to be present, to see whatever there is to see.   I’ve kind of gotten into the habit of it, noticing the world so I can write about it, and it is a kind of power brought down to earth and made personal.

June 2, 2017: The Wheel of Fortune by Tania Pryputniewicz

All month long I glance at the Thoth Wheel of Fortune card on my desk. Behind the pale green wheel in the center of the card, I see lightning bolts, their top jags ending in stars. “The stars exploding into lightning bolts represent the experience of awakening to the possibilities that can turn our lives in more positive and expansive directions,” writes Angeles Arrien in relation to the Wheel of Fortune. The quote accurately reflects what I’m experiencing as I take scenes from my childhood that I first described in poetry and develop them in prose for a new writing project of mine.

Last week my memoir teacher asked us to make memory maps—to look down at the river of our lives and look for the places where the river turned, tracking pivot points or places we turned in a new direction. I spent a day going through old boxes in the garage, pulling out college syllabi and high school versions of poems, delighted to find I’m still obsessed with the same imagery (poems then, poems now, and the new prose). I can’t believe how much emotion and insight the same set of core images continues to offer.

And the other surprise is to discover, through writing about various poverties, the currency I didn't realize I gained. For example, last week I wrote a scene based on the time we were living in a campground in the wooden camper my father built for us. We’d left the Illinois commune and arrived on the Russian River in the summer. By fall we were still house hunting, so I started public school in the fifth grade while living in the campground.

It all came back vividly: the sound of the rain dripping off the redwood leaves onto the roof, the smell of campfires, the intermittent sleep I’d get in the loft with my brother and sister, waking to rain wet socks when the wood seams of the camper warped and parted. Christmas neared, and with it, the obligation to play Secret Santa for a classmate. Making the best of our situation, I made a cardboard elephant puzzle. I watched as unobtrusively as possible as my classmate opened her cardboard puzzle. She turned the pieces over a few times, rummaged beneath the tissue, and then pushed the gift back into her desk and ran to see what her friends unwrapped. I wished I’d been able to give her something store bought, a Santa hat, glitter socks, a bow.

Once written out, down on paper, the energy trapped inside the memory released and the wheel of how I saw myself shifted, but this time, I was not just a witnessing child, but a child who grew up to become a mother. I get to bring motherhood’s lens of empathy and love back into the memories now. For me, empathy for other human beings is the un-measureable bounty and gift of poverty. The Wheel of Fortune goes up, the wheel goes down; sometimes you "have," sometimes you "have not."  But skimming the Ferris wheel of the past allows me to rise to the top where the sun warms both past self and current witness.

The Motherpeace Tarot (round cards) version of the Wheel of Fortune depicts a blue sky and the planets of the solar system crossing the midline of the card in a row. The card’s edge is ringed by the astrological sign of the zodiac as if to say, our fortune is our birth sign, each one of us bearing our unique mask, coming into incarnation with a specific set of circumstances and parents, each one of us equally valuable. The fortune is learning to recognize the value in who we are and what we have to contribute.

Under my roof, these final school days of June, it is hard to feel like a contributing member, hard to feel successful: one child oversleeps, a second needs hair color for crazy hair day and tells me at 6:30 a.m., our last-minute shopping trip putting the middle child in prime position for a tardy. The wash out spray-in colors, only stocked at Halloween, are nowhere to be found. So instead we apply clouds of the big sister’s hairspray and 12 packets of shades of glitter from blue to gold to deep crimson (all for just $2.47—thank you Wal-Mart).

I put my youngest son in front of the flowering hedge and snap his photo. It is the way he’ll rain gold and iridescent Tinkerbelle Blue all over his desk and teacher’s floor that makes me smile. I take the middle son in late, stand there with him during the attendance lady’s lecture, vow to get a red marker to mark the days of absence and vow to write out a new contract for the kids so I can stop being the heavy in a life abundant: Twelve shades of glitter to choose from on crazy hair day, and a mother who loves her kids as much as my father loved me and my siblings (so much so that he built that wooden camper for us to live in by hand).

Additional link:

Tarot for Two's latest podcast is live today; Mary and I take up the question of whether or not the Tarot deck is just a deck of cards or not:

Tarot for Two podcast 3: Is it just a deck of cards?

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.”