The Chariot and the Queen of Swords

August 5, 2016:  The Chariot by Tania Pryputniewicz

Always the framing colors in this card call to me—cobalt blue of Chariot canopy with ice blue interior and shining red rims of wheels. This Chariot, though confined to a sphere, is somehow entirely believable and ready to roll thanks to Lady Frieda Harris and the sacred geometry she uses throughout the deck.

The golden armored charioteer holds a violet-rimmed chalice in lap so we are looking down into its interior. It forms a disk of spinning colors from violet to blue to the very center’s red which we can construe as blood or the Holy Grail in which our life stream spirals in a stilled view of the self in motion. Or an apt image of what we try to do as writers with our words, artificially portioning off stills from a life ever in flux. I’m thinking about that balance of vulnerability and shielding that we navigate always. And the strength it takes to survive the memory field, going in a second time after having lived through the events under scrutiny in order to write about them.

All month long I participated in a thirty-one day poetry challenge offered by Zoetic Press in the hopes of rounding out The Fool in the Corn (my manuscript in progress about an Illinois commune I lived on as a child). What came were a lighter, humor-based series of New Age misadventure poems. I wasn’t expecting to find humor, but there it was--and much welcome, as I considered spiritual tools, teachers, and fellow seekers I encountered after leaving the commune. With a steady habit of daily writing already firmly in place, the challenge was pushing from free-write to culled draft of poem.

Traditionally The Chariot calls on us to consider which vehicle we need in order to move forward, and to size up one’s terrain. Am I going into battle? Heading into a new career? New direction? What is the ordinary life-sized message in the soul metaphor of this card?

As I’m still immersed in child rearing, there’s no great career I’m trying to embark upon. The only battlefield is the one I traverse internally, as when I sat and waited for students to arrive for a poetry workshop I was teaching last month on the theme of Harvest. I waited with a swath of books and ideas about gardens; a deck of constellation and star cards from the boys’ room; my battered copy of a Child’s Garden of Verses still containing my little sister’s signature on the inside cover, with her tiny star dotting the “i” in Christy. I brushed dust off the spine of an old encyclopedia I’d grabbed on plants and fanned and re-fanned my worksheets.

Twenty minutes later when a student finally appeared, I put on the teacher armor and pretended not to doubt myself or be embarrassed no one else came. The class meets once a month; it’s the right speed for my life, and yet, here comes this feeling of not doing enough, being enough.

I place this internal seed of doubt in the chalice and offer it up, writing my way through it with Mary. How blessed I am to reflect on the Chariot card and realize that yes, that thirty-one day challenge was the perfect vehicle for hearing the next layer of the journey out of child’s view of the commune. Sure, the leader was one of the Fools in the Corn, as were perhaps my parents and other followers, initially duped, but what of my own adult self, who had to find her way out of “Fool-dom” and into reality, sorting the True from the Not True. I see now that structures of religion can give us a false sense of security—the answers laid out as if we can somehow magically forego the threshing and sorting of experiences that being human affords us by birthright. As if we won’t have to learn to use our internal compass, regardless of outer chariot.

Maybe that spinning chalice in the Charioteer’s lap is a centrifuge. I want, in my writing, to distill, arrive at, some sanguine insight, some life-giving idea that I haven’t wasted my life believing in false prophets.

When I look once more here at the card, I hone in on the placement of the chalice: middle of body, between heart and root, over the will center, where our free will blooms. Yes, the freedom to choose is a responsibility, but far more, it is a gift. At some point we have to give up our Leaders and listen within. 

And that is what I am doing, resting in process of this second book, still sitting in the Frieda Harris's Chariot and poised at the pale blue tunnel of the entrance to the Now—those blue nested background rings like so many contractions, as of a woman in labor.

August 5, 2016: The Queen of Swords by Mary Allen

This month I had one of those cards of the month where I know what I think the card generally means and I know it’s a good card for me in general, one that I identify with and get fairly often, but I have no idea what if anything it has to say about the particular month we just passed through:  The Queen of Swords.  I picked her while I was on vacation, throwing the cards with Tania at her house.

It was the next to the last day of a seven-day trip so I was in transit.  Nothing in that moment was particularly stable, and my trip home couldn’t have been more unstable, driving in the middle of the night from San Diego to LAX on those much-bigger-than-I’m-used-to highways, getting lost midway there, being terrified of the trucks and traffic and being late when we got closer to LA. 

Then flying into Iowa in the middle of a possible tornado, roiling clouds outside the window, turbulence like I’ve never experienced before.  The Queen of Swords sits high in the blue sky on top of a bank of blue-tinged clouds, and maybe the cards were talking about that trip home, making a sly little comment about it, when they gave me her as my card of the month.

She’s bare breasted, wielding a sword in one hand and grasping a gray old-man mask in the other hand; the idea is that she cut that mask off herself and isn’t afraid to let show her true face show.  And rising up above behind her head, staring toward heaven at the top of a large crystal many-pointed star, is a child’s face; the idea there is that she also sees the world, not through an old, worn-out, false perspective as in a mask, but from a child’s fresh, innocent, honest way of seeing things. 

And I guess I’m not too modest to say that’s true of me. I spend my days writing and engaging in other activities—thinking, meditating, going to twelve-step meetings—that involve seeking clarity, truth, and authenticity beyond roles, trying to take down my old worn preconceived notions and habits and fears and you name it and let my true self show through.  According to Angeles Arrien, the Queen of Swords is a kind of counselor and also seeks counseling for herself when she needs it, that people ask her for clarification when they have the need to get to the bottom of things, and I’m willing to say that that’s true about me too, as a writing coach, sponsor, long-time therapy-goer, twelve-step-meeting attender, and most of all writer who unceasingly tries to get to the bottom of things.

But when I look back on my month I can’t think of any particular instances where I was doing that any more than any other times.  In fact, I was probably doing it less.  There was that trip home, and then recovering from the vacation as well as three weeks of teaching and chronic insomnia before the trip.  I didn’t feel particularly connected to myself during the weeks after I got home and got back into my life; I was sleepy in the afternoons when I was coaching, I took lots of naps, I was grouchy. 

But I did kind of notice the absence of that Queen of Swords part of myself; she wasn’t entirely gone, but it was as if she had stepped aside for a little while, taken a vacation from my life when I did. Noticing that she was gone when I was on vacation made me aware of her in a way I’m usually not; I kind of missed her, though usually I take her for granted. 

Traveling, I felt a little disconnected, discombobulated, not quite myself, and it took a while for the Queen of Swords part of me to slowly and gradually come back to me.  She’s here now again, with me every day, as I write, and coach, and think, and go to meetings, and go for walks and try to observe what there is to see—observing, that was another word that I saw in the Angeles Arrien description of her.  I’m relieved to have her back, to feel that that part of me is back, at least more or less, though I’m still a little sleepy in the afternoons. 

Related link:

Next course from Tania's Wheel of Archetypal Tarot Series:

Calling all Lovers of Tarot: Are You Ready to Make Your Own Deck? starts on September 12, 2016

The Four of Cups and The Eight of Cups

April 22, 2015: The Four of Cups by Mary Allen

My card this month was the four of cups.  The four of cups in the Thoth deck depicts four cups with water pouring out of a lotus fixture at the top, and is, according to Angeles Arrien, supposed to represent emotional luxury and fulfillment -- both internal and external fulfillment. 

At first I couldn’t figure out what in my month had anything to say about me having both internal and external emotional fulfillment.  Maybe the card was just wrong this time? 

Then I remembered that I did have a big moment sometime during the month when I felt a deep sense of satisfaction in the life I’ve made for myself.  I was at a twelve-step meeting with someone who was talking about moving to another part of the country to take a new job and I realized how absolutely unappealing that was to me. 

And in that moment it came to me how truly happy and satisfied I am with the life I’ve got, the life I’ve built for myself with the help of Life over the years – a life that is truly both internally and externally satisfying.  A life with writing -- which is a deeply internally emotionally fulfilling thing -- squarely in the middle of it, a life in which I write faithfully at least two days a week every single week, and in which I get to help others write, and even get paid for doing that.  A life in which I get to live inside my own house and my own self-made life, feeling both internally and externally fulfilled. 

I felt incredibly grateful when I thought of that and the feeling stayed with me for days.  And now writing about this card has reminded me of it and brought that gratitude back.

April 22, 2015: Eight of Cups by Tania Pryputniewicz

… get it right girls! After all we went through, the least you can do is thrive! …

I initially disliked this month’s card, the Thoth Eight of Cups, balking at the one word caption, Indolence, with its hues of purposeful laziness, petulance and excessive wealth, fearing it meant I was doomed to squander my month stewing in unhealthy emotion.

In the Thoth image we see even rows of storm clouds bordered by moody mossy Neptunian hems of green that gradually subside to a lighter blue, with one brief lemon ray to indicate sky before the plunge into a green you could mistake for the sea or a desert out of which sprout peach cups.

A cluster of five cups seem to float in tiny pools sprung up in the desert, but when you look closer, you see a wan peach lily-like plant supporting two down bent blossoms dripping water into the middle row of cups. The very center cup, perhaps the severed root of the flower itself, is empty as are three cups in the sky floating on lily pad leaves.

Angeles Arrien says the card depicts a state of feeling depleted, which feels accurate for me. I’ve been in an exhausting rut, reacting to my 14 year old daughter’s life, fearing the power struggles might go on forever. I keep forgetting that I have a choice about how stressed out I become. Wanting some relief, I turned to the Rider Waite Eight of Cups, called by some “Success Abandoned.” Here, a figure in red cape turns away from eight full cups to go after an elusive new goal.

In synchronicity, working with my Tarot writing students this month, I come across the Poet Tarot Deck’s Wheel of Fortune card featuring Edna St. Vincent Millay. When I look for example poems by Millay, I discover a selection on google books discussing her natal chart and birth placement as a Pisces Eight, which connects her to the Eight of Cups. The Poet Tarot handbook assigns Millay to the Wheel of Fortune Arcanum due to the ups and downs she experienced during periods of wildly vacillating public support. Still, she wrote. Regardless. Maybe the Eight of Cups “elusive new goal” is simply to write that next poem….

But just as I question Indolence, I’m wondering about Success Abandoned. I prefer the Rider Waite’s red cape to signify the figure’s vitality and warmth, an inner confidence. And prefer to think the figure is drawn to new pools, stopping to look into each new mirror, as writers are apt to do, much like the children in C.S. Lewis’s "The Magician’s Nephew," remember them? Polly and Digory?  The two kids steal a couple of magic rings, which have the power to transport them (yellow: go, green: return) to a strange forest pocked with pools that are portals to other worlds.  They end up on the run from a powerful witch named Jadis, a tall and terrible stone queen they wake from enchantment who manages to trail them back into our world.

Last year when I was reading the Chronicles of Narnia to my own children and writing daily Haiku, I wrote three for my husband based on The Magician’s Nephew:

Sleep: our yellow ring.

Dawn: our green. True magician:

Love’s concentric rings.

The woods between: you’re

Digory, I’m Polly, with vague

Shared past, still willing.

Not for thrill of new

or fear of witch. But that you

came to retrieve me.

On the run, hiding in the garage from the kids, leaning up against the washing machine, my husband listens to me, calms me, when things get too intense. Though I’m grateful he’s so present, can take over here and there, I am most of the time the first body absorbing the emotions circling our home at any given moment. Only after reaching out to my friends to say how down I felt do I realize how much I’ve gotten used to a perpetual state of Eight of Cups exhaustion.

Dance! One friend says… Shake out the anger! Walk away!

Read "Gift from the Sea," another says, and it pulls me up short, puts my struggles in perspective, to discover the grief of Anne Morrow Lindbergh (she lost an infant to a kidnapper). And yet, Lindbergh writes. Seashell by seashell (her chapters named after shells), Lindbergh considers her family of five, displays for us her ledger of joys and challenges with equanimity.

Read Sharon Olds! Another says. And I do…and I see everywhere around me women not giving in to their exhaustion but finding a way to make a path, word by word, to wholeness.

This month and last, then, I’ve had two of the Eights that correspond to the Major VIII, Strength. These minor Eights—chosen blindness (Eight of  Swords), and chosen exhaustion (Eight of Cups) are meant to remind me to call on the best of Arcanum VIII, Strength, to heal. When I look at the Rider Waite Strength card, girl bending gently at waist to restrain lion’s jaw, I’m initially angry to see such a harmonious rendering of what I perceive as a far bloodier internal battle to gain equilibrium.

In this case, I prefer the Thoth Strength card: a naked woman astride the many-headed lion, cauldron of her uteral blood raised to sky and worms either coming to feed or scattering away from her chalice of self. This woman is thoroughly underground—only her blood breaks the horizon line—blood she discards monthly, blood of childbirth, blood that goes into the bloodline of her future children.

The kind of wrangling to right a teenage daughter and oneself means wrangling with one’s own matrilineal lines of power and pain. It means respecting the trials of my ancestors—my two grandmothers—one withstanding the shock frequencies of EST passing through her brain, the other waiting up all night for her husband to come home from the bar, and further back to distant Polish and Italian and Irish foremothers walking barefoot in their gardens or the gardens of others they tended.

Perhaps the storm clouds in this month’s Eight of Cups are ancestral, a backdrop of the crush of emotions that pour in to the charged, lemon bright air of the now between my daughter and I, a sort of mixed blessing and challenge: get it right girls! After all we went through, the least you can do is thrive!

What I can do for now is give thanks for the strength of my grandmothers, for the lens of the Tarot, for Mary’s friendship, and for this lifelong affliction/blessing of writing that allows me to breathe and try again tomorrow.

Related link:

Tania's next Tarot Writing class, Wheel of Archetypal Selves: Stasis to Radiance, Hanged One to Star is forming online. To read a course description and to sign up visit her website.