The Ace of Wands, Wheel of Fortune, and the Knight of Disks

October 6, 2015: The Ace of Wands and Wheel of Fortune by Mary Allen

I picked the Ace of Wands as my card of the month last time, and then before thinking about what I was doing I picked another card and that turned out to be Fortune.   Both cards made me happy—I figured I was going to have a pretty good month—but all month long I kept wondering what they have to tell me, and now I’m wondering what they have to do with anything that happened to me during the last four weeks.

My card of the month the month before was Death and the whole month was one big long ending/cleansing, so it seemed logical that the next card I would get was Fortune, signifying that something big and new is coming in, that my luck is about to change in some major life-journey way, following the ending of a previous cycle as signified by Death.  And the Ace of Wands seemed like it could be talking about a surge of new energy coming, like a kind of hot cosmic wind blowing the new Fortune in.  But if that was happening all month is was so subtle I barely noticed it.  Maybe the cards are just telling me that’s going to happen, or the wheels have been set in motion or something.  I got the Fortune card again, during my tarot reading this time, right smack dab in the middle of the reading, so it must be telling me something, right?  Not that I’m complaining, I love getting that card, and the Ace of Wands too, I just don’t know what to write about what they had to do with my month.

For the first few weeks my whole life seemed pretty inert, nothing particularly changing, no hot wind from the Ace of Wands, no new Fortune even stirring.   Then one night in the middle of the month at three in the morning when I couldn’t sleep I had the thought that maybe I could take a bunch of essays I’ve been writing over the years and put them together into a book and submit the book to a new non-fiction contest at the University of Iowa.  I had read about the contest a few days earlier and thought it would be nice to send something off for it but decided I didn’t have anything, and I felt excited at the thought of putting together those essays, which I’ve just been writing all on my own because I wanted to, and putting them out into the world. 

I’ve been writing all kinds of stuff on my own for years and not doing much of anything with it, just writing and working on myself and waiting to be finished with something.  Now I’m almost finished with a book, a memoir about my childhood, the writing of which has comingled with a many-years-long project of healing from my childhood, and I seem to be in some kind of watershed moment with my own healing too—I don’t think I’ll ever be finished with that, but I might be reaching some kind of plateau, sort of like a shelf on a mountain I can rest on before attacking another peak. 

It never occurred to me to try to put together a collection of essays and it made me happy and optimistic to get the idea, even though I was still awake at three a.m., thanks to my new smoke alarm, which went off in the middle of the night, blaring beeps as loud and alarming as a fire truck siren, in the hallway just outside my bedroom door.   I got up and stood on a chair to see if I could figure out how to turn it off and then it turned off on its own.  I couldn’t see any button or place to take the battery out—it was some new kind of smoke alarm with a lithium battery that was supposed to last for ten years and then the whole alarm had to be replaced.  I didn’t know what to do or even how to get it off the ceiling.  I could barely reach it, even standing on a chair, and I just decided to go back to bed and hope for the best.  As I was lying there, getting ready to go back to sleep, I felt a distinct lack of trust—how can I trust this thing not to go off and wake me up again—but I went to sleep anyway and then about twenty minutes later there it was again:  beep beep beeping me awake into a sudden state of terror and alarm. 

This time I went down to my basement and found my toolbox; the basement was dark and dank-smelling in the middle of the night, full of lurking spiders and crickets in the drain that I tried to shut out of my awareness.  Back upstairs I found a screwdriver in the toolbox but when I stood on the chair to look there weren’t any screws to turn, and then realized I could just pry the alarm off the ceiling with my hand if I tried.  I put it on the counter, then looked the brand up on my laptop and found all kinds of negative testimonials:  “It’s 2:30 in the morning my kids are all crying and the dog is barking because that thing went off for no reason,” one of them said.  I added my own strongly negative review and figured out to turn the thing off permanently by following the directions on the back, which said to poke through the paper with a slotted screwdriver and turn the screwdriver in a slot.

Then I sent a few emails, got that inspiration about a book of essays, and then I went back to bed.  And now all I can think is that maybe that alarm waking me in the middle of the night—its beeps as loud and full of crazy energy as the zigzagging lines of energy in the background of the Thoth deck Ace of Wands, the skewers of flame coming out of a big wooden wand in the middle of the card like the non-existent fire in my house—had something to tell me about waking up, that my long cycle of sleeping, not publishing, just getting through the days one day at a time with nothing much happening, is about to end.

October 6, 2015: The Knight of Disks by Tania Pryputniewicz

What I love best about the Thoth Knight of Disks is the curve of horse’s neck and the pale greenish blue light of dusk crossing the steed’s mane. Then there’s that grounding rich brown of rider’s cape and the red saddle. The full heads of wheat stalks curve nested like the rings of green and gold sun light emanating from the edge of rider’s shield, the shield standing in as sun with its Leonine metal rays.

The rider appears relaxed, chest open and uncovered, his helmet tipped back off his face. Pensive in profile, he takes in the field outside the borders of the card. Arrien calls him, “Harvester, with his threshing tool in hand.” I happened upon an earlier draft of the knight by Lady Frieda Harris in which we see the horse’s thick fringe of hair (known as feathers) draping across his hooves; I loved seeing behind the wheat for a moment.

How did I embody Harvester this September? If we think of this card as the “earner,” I have to use creative ways to see our abundance. I told my husband this month as we sat fretting about the bills, house full of our own children and each with one or two sleepover friends, that this was harvest enough: our children wanting to bring friends to the hearth.

They rearrange mattresses and lay them out in the living room; they locust through the fridge emerging with mango popsicles. The toaster pops with the coins of waffles. From my son’s room, we hear more giggling than from the room holding the five teenage girls. Their mingled laughter fills the open courtyard between their bedroom and ours.

See? I say, Success! They like to be here. On Monday the refrigerator will be empty but we will fill it again. On Monday we will work, my husband to a sea full of swimmers, and I to the mind’s field full of seekers writing their way to inner truths lit by the internal sun of the heart.

The other harvest is poetry. I bought a three-inch notebook to organize all the loose-leaf pages that lead to the final draft of the poems that made it into my first poetry book. My messy folder, tufted six inches thick with random pages, was bothering me. I sat on the bed in a stripe of sun with my hole punch, punching holes and slipping each handwritten page into three silver rings, topping each section with a final typed version of the poem.

And what remains in the loose-leaf folder is the compost for this year’s crop of poems. This November marks the anniversary of the publication of the first book and I’m eager to finish the second book, maybe a little impatient. It is likely best to sit in that red saddle and watch the sun go down for a bit. 

In the card, the rings of color coming off the rider's shield overlay the true colors of the landscape. I’m considering questions of lens in relation to this next book. And questions of best harvest. Not that I can change the witnesser--lens of child self--present at the commune. But I’m thinking about what attracts people to communes, to leaders, to ideals, to the illusion of peace in outer space when earth is so beautiful.

Do we think we can bring only our best self to start over in a foreign landscape? Who do we hope to meet? Can't our best selves emerge during this lifetime, from this horizon? Are we meant to long for what is not present?

When I look at the Rider Waite version of the Knight of Disks, I see less an image of harvest and more an image of “project” or “manifestation.” Rider Waite’s boy in blue in neutral contemplation holds the offering, hasn’t given it over yet. His horse too rests in patient abeyance. The harness is red as are striations of land beneath the green. Vitality in the landscape, vitality in the restraint; his hand is gloved and he is still fully protected. 

However his face is exposed—he risks being seen. What comes next? Maybe--keep some things just for you--he will place that sun gold pentacle against his chest to warm himself before he gives it away. 

The Death Card and The Death Card

August 28, 2015: The Death Card by Tania Pryputniewicz

So Mary and I both pulled the Death card in August as our card of the month. That’s never happened—pulling the same exact card--in the three years we’ve been on this project. And wouldn’t you know, it’s the juggernaut of cards, the King of Kings, the Arcanum Alejandro Jodoroswky and Marianne Costa in The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards call the Nameless One and Lady Frieda Harris paints with vibrancy, such gleeful fervor emanating from her Thoth deck’s dancing skeleton with his black scythe and black bucket helmet tilted askew.

In the card’s background, I love the blues of the serpent and catfish with glum gold cat’s eyes behind our “blueeyed boy /  Mr. Death” and the down-splayed bell of a flower stuck to pale earthen cave, Scorpion tail curved in warning. Jodorowksy says the “skeleton of Arcanum XIII could be the Fool on x-ray” and I agree, the Fool minus flesh but still dancing.

Rachel Pollack, in 78 Degrees of Wisdom, reminds us that Death card depicts not transformation, but the very moment, “we give up the old masks” and make room for transformation. As long-time Tarot readers, Mary and I often reassure querents, “Oh, but the Death card doesn’t have to signify one’s death or the death of others.” But when it falls for both of us, we don’t buy that line either…and endure a bit of stunned silence.

We select ameliorating cards. I get the 10 of wands and I stop there since it is an image of burnout, a reminder not to shoulder everything alone. Mary pulls a kinder card—the Prince of Cups, but she decides to forego writing about him since he’s her second choice. We slip into child’s play, addressing the Prince, placating him with apologies as if he’ll somehow punish us if she doesn’t write about him. We both know better and it is good to laugh. And it is a blessing to face Death with Mary. Years of sharing images and dreams has woven a hammock of kindness between us. I would visit her from the other side just as she would visit me; our work together would go on regardless of physical form but for today I’m grateful for the sound of her laughter on the other end of the line.

Honestly, in my life, the Death card does refer to the possibility of physical death given the illnesses of several members of my family. But so far everyone’s alive and well.  I thought maybe it referred to the reversal of menopause, a death I thought final with six months of freedom behind me until I went on a desert writing retreat with 120 women and promptly began to bleed.

So I go down the path I tell querents to go down: what in my life is dying metaphorically?

I know what is blooming: a sweet sense of peace I found at the A Room of Her Own Foundation retreat. I’m noticing the stars in a way I haven’t for years what with raising kids and the habitual fear of the dark and fear of men spurred by a spate of sour lover stories and a date rape I was able to write down and begin to let go of in my first book.

My casita at Ghost Ranch sat at the far end of a dusty road nestled at the foot of the mesas. Some nights I walked accompanied by sisters, reveling in learning what burgeoned to the surface in the heart of their desert mirror. But three nights near midnight, I walked alone between the fire ring where women sat sharing chocolate to the rooms in Corral Block by the ranch’s entrance where women splayed across blankets to talk daughters, drink bourbon, wine, water, and watch the Perseid meteors fall.

The long unlit stretch of road was nearly unbearable, my fear eclipsed only for seconds at a time by the beauty of the blue tails left behind meteors streaking to extinction against the Milky Way. Passing the path that lead to the labyrinth, I took comfort in the knowledge of the spiral stone lined path—just its existence--quietly waiting for the next set of feet to enter.

The tiny sphere of my flashlight clipped to my sleeve lit my path one footfall at a time. No animal or man jumped out of the shadows to overtake me, only a classmate from my fairytale class emerging in a row of three halos of light advancing to laughter, a flash of shins. She reached out as we passed abreast to say, “Is that you? It’s me! How about some Sambuca?”

By day, once, a blue-eyed man did step abruptly off the path to face me. But he was in tears, fresh from visiting the burial shrines of several of his friends. He asked if it was my first time at Ghost Ranch, spoke of his love for the land and went on his way.

Also by day, the shadow pain of raising my teenage daughter followed me into fairytale class. I ask, “Which fairytale am I living in? Who am I and who is my daughter?” The answer comes in a draft of a a new poem, My Daughter, My Bluebeard in which I learn that my daughter’s body acts as a living key to the upstairs room where Bluebeard (men at large) has put all his dismembered wives (women at large, including my daughter and I). This is the old fear-based equation and the poem helps me see that this constant hyper vigilant anxiety on my daughter’s and my own behalf is neither sustainable nor desirable.

Perhaps the Death card refers to the death of this overpowered, terrified self. That moment in which the masks drop and I get some power back. I am grateful for the desert’s vast space and the women around me who held me psychically in our shared field of sleep. Then, bodily, physically during our inquiry with master teacher Diane Gilliam. She reminds us to go the distance in our work. If you take the easy way out, she says, her gentle voice filling the timeless dream space of our morning class, you’ll find waiting behind the door, the red shoes. Yes, those shoes, the ones in which you can dance yourself and your pretty little red feet to death.

Gilliam also reminds us that helpers for the devastated always appear. Even in the Handless Maiden’s tale, the homeless, betrayed daughter without hands is met by a a woman in white from the underworld. And in the garden, the pear tree lowers its branches so its fruit reaches the maiden’s mouth.

Helpers, such as my sisters in the desert, and pear trees surely exist in my now and in my future and my daughter’s. Surely Death reaps with his scythe my fears: of the dark, of men, of what might befall my daughter…

…and Death finds me dancing as we did barefoot long into our last night at the retreat after the thunderstorm came and went, rain roiling the creek a silt rich brown, mesa cliffs crowned in brilliant white and blue dendritic tines of lightning.

Related information:

Tania's next Tarot and Writing course, Wheel of Archetypal Selves: Moon to Universe, begins online on September 21, 2015. For more information and to register, visit Wheel of Archetypal Selves: Moon to Universe.

August 28, 2015: The Death Card by Mary Allen

Last month we both pulled the same card and it was a funny card to both pull:  Death.  First Tania pulled it as her card of the month and we laughed because it came up in her reading too – she’s been getting Death a lot in the last year or so and whenever it shows up we laugh because we feel as if the cards are kind of taunting her in a friendly sort of way – and then when I pulled Death as my card of the month too we laughed even harder. 

“But what if it means something scary?” I said, suddenly sober, thinking about the time I threw the cards with our mutual friend Tonya the day before 9/11 and we both got the Tower.

“Oh, I think the cards are just fooling with us a little,” Tania said this time, and that made me relax again and feel better about getting Death as my card of the month than I would have otherwise. Death always makes me a little nervous even though it says in all the readings, and Tania always says, “It’s not really about death, it’s about letting go of something old you don’t need any more!”

I figured that since the cards gave both Tania and me Death by way of playing a little joke on us, I probably wouldn’t have much that related to it all month.  But I was wrong.  I’ve never had a card of the month that talked to me as much as Death did this past month.  The whole month was like one big ending/cleansing/cleaning up of the past and there was some real death in it too. 

My friend Rudy’s father died, and the weekend before Rudy left for his parents’ house to spend time with his father before he died, Rudy and I went on a little vacation to a place we went last fall and loved, and this time the campground where the cabin was, was noisy and smoky from a neighboring campfire and not much fun at all.  That felt like a little death on top of the big death of Rudy’s father.

The day after we got back I drove to a client’s house in Montezuma, Iowa, and sat in on a telephone conference between my client and a psychic medium.  My client’s dead son was there, talking to my client through the medium – my client’s been talking to him regularly that way for a few years and I’m helping her write a book about it, which is why I was there; a few of my dead loved ones showed up for the reading too, my father and sister and my fiancé who committed suicide in the early 1990s, Jim Beaman.  The thought of my father and sister made me cry but hearing from Jim Beaman, just a few little things passed on by the medium, which might or might not have come from him, rekindled my sense of him and I’ve felt him around me ever since.   So there we have the dead coming back to us.

This month I also refinanced and paid off some old credit card debt I’ve had hanging around for years, ever since I didn’t sell my second book, which I’m now about to finish again, which is much better than it used to be and almost ready to go back out and take its chances again in the world.  Getting rid of the credit card debt felt like a huge cleansing and so did the de-cluttering vacation I took the week before last, where I went through all my clothes and my bathroom medicine cabinet and hallway closet and a desk upstairs and threw away a bunch of stuff.

I encountered many versions of myself during that de-cluttering, in old clothes I used to like but don’t relate to any more or that don’t fit me any more; in the round self-conscious handwriting-of-the-past in old appointment books and on old checks, written to credit card companies I no longer owe money to, phone companies that don’t exist any more, et cetera. I found my partner-of-nine-years who’s married to someone else now, Viktor, too, in the form of a manuscript of beautiful stately poems written by him about his old losses, the wife and baby killed in a car accident in the 1980s, the unhappy fourth marriage, the children who have grown up, and I found some poems written by me during the time when I lived with Viktor, brimming with evidence of that life and that time and my old passionate love for him. I even found Jim Beaman in the form of a pair of dated wire-rimmed glasses and a deposit slip in his handwriting from July 1990.

I kept all of that stuff but I threw mounds of old checks away and I got rid of six fat garbage bags of clothes, a big cardboard boxful of board games Viktor brought to my house for his kids that nobody ever played with, and a bunch of other stuff  -- I carted it all to Goodwill, and when the guy took it out of my trunk and hauled it into the back of the store in a big cart I said to him, “I feel like I just took a big crap.”  He barely cracked a smile but I laughed at my own joke.

To top it all off, when I went over to my shed, somewhere in the middle of my de-cluttering week, to investigate something brown lying in the grass, I found a little pile of unidentifiable decomposing fur, a ribcage with a fat black fly buzzing next to it, and what might’ve been a rabbit’s foot attached to the end of a jutting bone.  I didn’t know what to do about it and it’s still sitting out there, slowly disintegrating, falling further and further to pieces, disappearing into the ground.   

The Chariot and The Knight of Swords

July 21, 2015: The Chariot by Mary Allen

My card this month was the Chariot.  I got the Chariot during my reading too, in the waxing moon position, so I figured the Chariot might have something to tell me – I still think it probably does, though I haven’t quite figured out what yet.

All the readings I found on this card were pretty vague; mostly what I got out of them is that the Chariot has something to do with change and also determination, confidence, and directed controlled energy.  I’ve always read this card as meaning the pause before – i.e., the moment before -- some big change is going to come, but I couldn’t find that anywhere in any of the online sources I consulted so I don’t know where I got it.  The closest I could come to it was in the Angeles Arrien book, where she says the Thoth “Chariot depicts a figure in contemplation or quietude sitting within a chariot readied for activity.”

Someone gave me a Motherpeace deck a couple of months ago and there the card shows a small woman riding in a conveyance drawn by two goats with wings; the woman is holding a thick brown branch with a ball on the end of it.  Most of the Motherpeace cards—which are round and were designed in the 1970s and which I’ve always thought were too dated while at the same time too untraditional to be interesting, but which, it turns out now, I kind of like—show small women doing something; most of them are naked, but the woman on the Chariot is wearing a dress.  She’s an Amazon from northern Africa and the goddess just gave her an apple for a job well done, according to the guide that came with the cards. 

I love that idea and I’m very happy in general that my card of the month was the Chariot—it’s saying something good, is pretty much all I’ve managed to take from it in my thinking so far.  Which is often the main thing I look for when I pull a card—is it a good card, or is it a bad card or a boring doesn’t-say-much-of-anything-good-or-bad card?  I love thinking that my life this past month involved a job well done, that my behavior last month involved change with directed controlled energy, but I’m going to have to stretch to actually connect that with something in real life— my real life—last month.

The only thing I can think of is this talk I gave in the middle of the month.  The talk was on a Wednesday morning at eleven a.m. and I got a terrible night’s sleep the night before, I had one of those night’s where you can’t go to sleep and then somehow you can’t stay asleep.  When I finally got up in the morning I couldn’t imagine how I was possibly going to be able to marshal the energy to go down and talk for an hour – my subject was how to edit like a zen master – in front of an auditorium full of people.  It was not going to be easy, to say the least.  (The victory of the Chariot may involve triumph over some struggle.)  But, as the Chariot predicted, I was somehow able to rise to the challenge. I reread my notes, marshaled my psychic energy, and went down and gave that talk, and everybody loved it. 

Against all the odds, and even a little miraculously, I felt good, happy, confident standing there in front of my audience – most of them writers who’d come to Iowa City to attend the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival, a program I taught in a few weeks earlier, and which my talk was a part of.  I looked out at their faces and saw that they were truly interested in what I was saying, and I felt interested in what I was saying too.  I was present in the room instead of nervous and they were present too.  Three or four people left during the talk – I could see them gathering up their bags and exiting through the back door – but my Chariot confidence remained unshaken.  There were more questions than I could answer at the end and people came up front and talked to me and everybody seemed excited about what I had said.  I was excited about it too. 

I could practically feel myself being pulled along in my Chariot – on to who knows what future triumphs and speeches and publications.   As the afternoon wore on I started to feel my tiredness, and I didn’t quite know what to do with myself while my slightly inflated ego sank back down to regular size.  But the feeling that something had gone well never left me, and I’m grateful for my time in the Chariot, and sometimes I can even remember that I’m still in the Chariot, being carried forward by life.

July 21, 2015: The Knight of Swords by Tania Pryputniewicz

My card this month was the Knight of Swords. In the Thoth deck, horse and rider skim through a blue sky high above cloud-like rivulets of water. I love the tawny caramel of horse outlined in darker brown, the elfin gold-green armor and matching pixie helmet of the knight. Three swallows fly below the horse bearing his colors in winged mimicry. Both backs of horse and rider share a body line, just as horse’s rear leg and rider’s leg fold at the same angle, seamless in their commitment to forward motion.

They’re setting off diagonally; even the birds agree. We don’t see the rider’s eyes, but the horse’s are blue, wide open. His muzzle and profile line meld into front hoove line. Four propellers, transparent as dragonfly wings, spin on top of the knight’s helmet and are labeled North, South, East, and West. Where is this duo headed with such purposeful haste? Angeles Arrien reminds us that the card, “Combining the elements of water and air, metaphorically, is a symbol for passionate thinking.”

This card fell during some intense weeks of reckoning with mortality due to my aging parents. I’m poured through childhood memories, as if on a Ferris wheel, up, up for birds’ eye view, then plummeted back to the ground level of the now where my children live. The psychic umbilical cord doubles; I stand midlife, one half of the cord trammeling back to my parents and the other surging towards my children.

There’s never much more to offer than physical presence so I prepare to visit. Even as I pack my green suitcase, I get a phone call from the lifeguard stand: my daughter hyperextended her arm doing a cartwheel in the surf.  I reign in my fears about dying, what’s left to say or do in my life, my parents’ lives, have they done what they came here to do--have any of us?—and I tend to my daughter, anchored to her need. But by dusk the entourage of doubts and memories return with what I recognize now as the “fear-of-death/loss migraine” in tow.

Alejandro Jodoroswsky writes in relation to the Knight of Swords, “I guide [my horse] in a large leap that projects me from realm of intellect into the mystery of the emotional.” The realm I enter does not feel guidable; I’m definitely out of my head and in the heart’s underworld of projected grief, as if out of time with my loved ones already. My husband makes dinner for the kids and by instinct they all steer clear of my door, coming only to kiss me, nudging aside the stack of pillows over my head, calling Mom, Mom, good night.

By sunrise, I know, like the knight, it is best not to look up or stop  for now, better to dwell in the green spring of the possibility that my parents, and all of us, will have more seasons together. I’ve no other task than to allow that supple strong-legged horse carry me to and away from my parents as often as I can escape while I care for my children and write my way true.

The Moon and The Devil

June 27, 2015: The Moon Card by Tania Pryputniewicz

Last Card of the Month writing with Mary was on May 1, so I’ve lived with The Moon now for two months. Mary was battling resistance to her selection, The Devil, so she chose a few more cards. I love that she second-guesses the pull, knows better than to force a negative. No being punished or nailed down; we view the Tarot as a spontaneous mirror and never judge our spontaneous hands reaching out for another image.

“What did you get?” Mary asked. When she heard I pulled the Moon, she suggested that I go inward in order to find peace around the heightened survivor’s panic I’ve been unable to quell as my three kids (especially my daughter) careen toward puberty. “Use the Moon to go see what is inside you, for you,” Mary said, like there was just a trapdoor to open and stairs to descend, and all I needed to do was go. She’s right; she’s journeyed the card intimately: see her post about how the Moon card prevailed through the grief of losing her sister. 

Mary reminded me that the tall jackal figures on either side of the valley of two hills in the Thoth deck are sentries protecting us so we are safe to review our hidden selves without fear of exposure or danger from the outside world. Arrien says, “The guardians of the gate are the Ra Kings from ancient Egypt, the Sun gods, who protect our life force and energy as we change and reclaim our authentic selves.”

I love this idea that our life force is sun driven.

I looked at the card closely and right away recognized a bathtub view of the female body lying supine. The pale red and blue hills below the earth’s horizon line form breasts and the scarab (Khepi, Egyptian God of Transformations according to Arrien) encircles an underground sun with its two foremost feelers. Scarab and sun are haloed by two pale yellow circles that feel uteral to me. Especially the ring that forms a tip at the loins of the two large blue legs, ending in the hills of knees, nesting the two sun gods, one per thigh.

I think of Frida Kahlo’s bathtub portrait (What I Saw in the Water, also known by the title, What the Water Gave Me) painted from inside pain’s hyper alert state of slowed time. We could say it is Frida’s Moon map, memories bobbing on the surface of the water, stilled for her to see. And for us to witness, looking over her shoulder, blessing vicariously her story and our own buried sorrow wicked to the surface in resonant sympathy.

All month long, finding five minutes here and there in which to rest while burning sandalwood incense, I felt that quiet, protected, moony place again inside, even as my son interrupted, flinging open bedroom door to bring me his latest smoothie variations of fresh pineapple, almonds, vanilla, kale, raspberries, and yogurt over ice.

During Tarot class, I came across Eden Gray’s mention of the stream between the two cups of the Temperance Angel as transferring “the Life force from the imagination (Moon) into activity of the conscious (Sun) [in such a way that] the will is developed and imagination purified” so that nothing is ever lost. Eileen Connolly, speaking of the Star Card, reminds us “we can’t know the question nor the answer” when approaching the Superconscious or God force itself.

I spend so much time white-knuckling life, putting up shields in fear this or that might happen to my daughter or my sons; but now I see the shield keeps out the good God force too. It is a blessing to return to meditation where body and mind can replenish. I’m thinking of sci-fi movies in which cyborg assassins shut off to rejuvenate, blue and gold light sparking beneath metal frame. When those cyborg eyes click open again, the whole robot is fully restored and ready to overcome any obstacle or threat.

In the Thoth Moon depiction, between the blue hills or knees of the supine self, another world crowns with swirling red and blue path lines. It looks like a blown glass marble, pale yellow but mostly blue like the Earth from space. Maybe during incarnation our path is lined with blood. Pain forces our attention, darkens the hem of the skirt, anchors us.

Reading Alejandro Jodorowsky on the negative aspect of the Star card, I came across this line, which at first made me defensive. He writes: if we want to view the Star card negatively, we could say, “she is squandering her energy on the past, haunted by the unresolved neuroses of the inner child.”

I could take this to mean I’ve squandered my time on projects that were twenty obsessive years in the making, such as November Butterfly in which I wrote about women across time and our inherited relationship to victim stance, charisma, danger and power. But just the act of taking that time to write about my trauma and that of others has allowed the “neuroses of the inner child” to speak, and freed her clutching grip on large portions of my psyche. As a result, there’s room in my inner house now for the kind of joy I’m experiencing in meditation, actively practicing Connolly’s concept of immersing without resistance to the ever present God force.

I’m reminded of a particular type of flying dream I have now and again, bordering on horrific, in which my body disintegrates as a fractional core self hurtles forward in forced acquiescence. The terror is always balanced by an intense joy—as if my cells are singing in celebration of God/life force.  I tried to paint the sensation years ago when I lived in Iowa City, titling the blue and dark orange melting figure, The Fear/Joy.

How do we take the lesson of trusting life again “off the cushion” and into the day? ("Off the cushion" is a line from a beautiful meditation astrologer Bonnie Orgren shared with me, The accomplishment of Kwan Yin, by Donna Mitchell-Moniak). I practiced earlier this week while walking my Siberian Husky, letting the black loop of her leash rest lightly in my palm and borders of my body blend out to meet the black-eyed Susans swirling on their pale lime stalks, extending the blending of boundaries down to sand and beyond to the wan blue bay water receding towards the Blue Bridge…

…which worked until my Husky spotted a tiny wild rabbit, and we were off in reckless pursuit of a bobbing white tail vanishing through sage bush until my weight countered the dog enough to drag us to a panting halt beneath the high noon sun. I’ll try again when I’m not attached to the other end of a leash.

June 27, 2015: The Devil Card by Mary Allen

My card of the month was the Devil.  Oh no, the Devil! I thought when I pulled it, and I pulled another card to see if I could get something that would tell me something different.  That time I got the 7 of Wands (Valor) which I thought might be telling me the same thing as the Devil so I picked another card (2 of Swords, Peace) and at that point I just gave up.

The Devil in the Thoth deck has a picture of a goat stuck to a big brown wooden something that can only be described as a dick and at the bottom of that are two oval balls.  The balls have small ghostly contorted figures of men inside them; the goat himself has long twisty horns, a third eye in the middle of his forehead and a rakish crown of blue flowers sitting askew on his head.  As depictions of the Devil goes this one is pretty benign even if it’s a little embarrassing. 

The Devil in the Rider-Waite deck has harpy feet, bat wings, and a reversed pentagram on his forehead, and the Devil in the Tarot of Marseille (this was the first tarot deck I ever had, bought on a whim when I saw it at a bookstore, the images turned out to be way too abstract for me to even begin to make heads or tails of) – that Devil has boobs, a face on the belly, eyes on the knees, male genitalia, and its own set of bat wings.  What could all these images possibly be telling me during the last month?

I’ve decided to go with the interpretation in the Angeles Arrien book, which, like the Thoth Devil it describes, is the most benign one I can find.  She says the Devil represents (or reinforces, or comments on or whatever) maintaining stability and humor in all aspects of life. (I guess being strapped to a big dick equals stability, the humor needs no explanation.)  She also says, and here’s the part that speaks to me about the spiritual pathway I’ve been traveling since I picked this card (a good month and a half ago now):  The Devil represents the need to face whatever we might consider our bedevilments or problems.  

I think I can honestly say I did that during the last month or so.  Prompted by some inner necessity, and without even thinking about this card, I typed out a list of the main thought patterns that still bedevil me in my life – things like not being able to get and hold onto any clear adult sense of myself; the idea that it’s somehow not safe to feel like everything is safe and good, etc.  (There were six of them, like the six wand-wielding men battling the one man who’s standing on higher plane above them, in the Rider-Waite seven of wands, my second card of the month.) 

I also typed out a prayer listing six alternative thoughts I’d rather think:  Thank you for helping me know deep inside that it’s safe and good to feel safe and good, etc.  And every day since then I’ve been reading that prayer a couple of times a day.  And every time, after I do that, I feel something light and airy opening up inside myself; I’m filled with happiness and optimism and peace – peace like the meaning of the two of swords, my third card of the month. 

Maybe the next time I pull the Devil or something like him as my card of the month I won’t be so scared, though I doubt it.  I’ll just pull another card and maybe another one after that, and try to listen to whatever Life has to say to me and remember that life is safe and good and that it is safe and good to feel safe and good.

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.