The Prince of Disks, The High Priestess, and The Fool

January 15, 2016: The Prince of Disks and The High Priestess by Mary Allen

I picked two cards last time, the Prince of Disks—naked guy in a chariot holding what looks like a brown-leather globe, many smaller glowing-bath-bead-like balls behind him forming a backrest, everything brown and earth-toned, the chariot pulled by a bull—and The High Priestess, the number two major arcana card—white blurry woman semi-hidden behind a net-like screen with something that looks like a white China teapot on top of her head, a harp on her lap, a cradle of blue-ish energy with swirls at either end rising to meet her outstretched arms, and, at her feet, an array of vividly colored flowers, grapes, crystals, and a little camel.

The two cards sat on my coffee table for a couple of weeks surrounded by books and scribbled-on post-it notes and unread parts of the Sunday New York Times, not talking to me at all.  Then a few days after the New Year arrived they suddenly said something.  

My friend JoAnn and I decided to write about the previous year and what we wanted in the year to come.   A long time ago, back in the early 1990s, we made lists of what we wanted.  She wrote down the lists for both of us, and I would have forgotten all about it if I hadn’t happened upon the scrap of yellow notepaper with my list written out in her neat JoAnn handwriting, about nine years later.  On the list were things like, I want to have all my time to write and not have to have a job, I want to publish a book, I want to own my own house.   The very idea that I could have those things was laughable back when we made the lists and I don’t know what gave me the courage to ask for them.  But by the time I found the list nine years later, I had them all:  I had all my time to write because I’d gotten a big book advance and I’d bought a house with part of the money and I had a book that was about to be published.  That certainly got my attention, and ever since then some superstitious part of me has felt like if I can just think positively enough, if I can just do a good enough job of envisioning what I want a la The Secret, I’ll get it, and if I don’t I won’t get it.  (This, despite the fact that I’ve written down plenty of other lists of stuff I wanted and even put the lists in a receiving bowl or written them over and over on sheets of paper that I left in a folder in a drawer, and not gotten any of those things.)

When JoAnn said, a couple of weeks ago, she wanted to write about what she wanted for the coming year, I thought about all of that again.  And when we did the writing I did write about some things that I kind of want now.  My desires for material out-in-the-world things like new houses and not having to work and even book publications have gotten much less urgent over the years as my daily life has gotten happier—not happier because of what I have, but because of how I’ve changed internally; I can barely conjure those desires up at all, though there’s still some small superstitious part of me that feels like I should ask the universe to give me new and better things.  So first I wrote about what I wanted materially, and then I wrote about what I wanted for myself spiritually, that is to say, inside myself, and I realized that the latter had become a lot more important to me than the former.

After I did that writing I went into my living room and sat on my couch and my eyes fell on my two tarot cards of the month, the Prince of Disks and The High Priestess, and what they had to say to me fairly jumped out at me.  For a long time I’ve thought that the High Priestess, with her pale hidden priestess power beaming into the universe through her upraised arms and that oasis full of life and color at her feet, is about manifestation.  About the spiritual power that is behind everything, not just getting a house and a publisher and time to write, but every single part of life, whether we know it or not.  And the Prince of Disks, with his balls and his bull and his ruddy nakedness, looks like, I thought in that post-New Year’s Day moment, the ordinary gifts we accumulate in daily life, what we make every day with our steady efforts, which is a kind of manifestation too.  I thought the Prince of Disks might be talking to me about all the work I’ve done to improve myself and my life in the last twenty years, ever since my book was published and passed more or less unnoticed into the literary ether without bringing me much in the way of further magic:  Ever since then I’ve been working steadily on making my everyday life a life I don’t need divine intervention to want to be in, finding work I don’t want to escape from, figuring out how to feel better about myself, appreciating and improving the house I’ve got instead of thinking I need a new one.   I’ve learned that the universe might buy you a house but you’re going to have to do a lot of work before you can even begin to like it and live in it.  All of that is what I thought about when I looked at the Prince of Disks lying on my coffee table.

Then I looked again at the High Priestess.  Was all of the above just what she was talking to me about too?  Or is it possible I could get another shot at a different, more magical kind of manifestation, now that I’ve done all that work on myself and I’ve also finally, on January 3^rd, finished my second book, the one I thought I finished a couple of times before and couldn’t get published despite the lists in the drawer and the requests in the receiving bowl?   Could the High Priestess be telling me my luck is about to change, that flowers and a camel—different flowers, a new camel—are about to appear at my feet in some magical way that won’t require effort or grappling with expectations or low self-esteem or any of the other everyday challenges that usually go along with this life? I’d like to think so.  At least, I guess I would.

January 15, 2016: The Fool by Tania Pryputniewicz

It’s my birthday today; I rose at 5:50 a.m. in the dark in a quiet state of elation which followed me into the kitchen to the spit and spin of coffee beans, the bitter smell of grounds, burbling chirp of water--all the morning rituals that make up a beautiful life as a writer and mother, knowing that on the other side of the dog’s walk, mugs in hand (half my husband’s coffee splashing out onto the sidewalk as Husky lunges after a jackrabbit), on the other side of oatmeal for the middle child and toaster waffles for the second, and after giving up on the sleeping teenager who stayed awake all night to study for finals, I will be throwing a birthday Tarot reading for my January with Mary and writing to December’s card of the month, The Fool.

In the Inner Child deck, The Fool card is titled Little Red Cap. She stands poised with butterfly on finger tip and a basket of apples on one arm, wolf flattened and wrapped around a purple tree trunk just outside of a cabin. A blue light haloes Red Cap’s hand and butterfly, her focus on that one second the butterfly trusted her enough to alight.

The authors of the Inner Child deck (Mark and Isha Lerner) speak of the red cap symbolizing the initial stage of spiritual adventure, reminding us that the jester’s cap in the traditional imagery of the Fool “signifies the presence of divine consciousness.” There’s a way in which Red Cap enters the woods oblivous to dark forces eager to divert her. I love Angeles Arrien’s affirmation: I respect the nature of who I am; there is nothing to fear (The Tarot Handbook: Practical Applications of Ancient Visual Symbols).

Behind me stretches a rich December in which, like a Fool, I committed to blogging three days a week to prompts on Quest 2016. Foolish, with a weekend workshop to teach, dozens of holiday cookies to bake, and a roadtrip to Northern California looming. Like the Fool, I packed my tools in bag and set out. As we drove the ten hours north, sketch pad on lap, I pulled Tarot cards to help me answer blog prompts and doodled in colored pencil when words failed.

Keeping to it meant staying up late at my brother’s table, crook of his tiny sidelamp warming my scalp as I photographed artwork and blogged to the snores of the kids burrowed in their sleeping bags and my husband peeking out of his to ask, What are you doing now? Perfectionism, due to lack of time, waned, so each post was briefer than usual. But coloring my way through the knot of emotions road trips and large gatherings trigger gave me a surplus of peace; I was present to the kids and to my surroundings. Which inevitably fed my eye imagery for the blogposts and resulted in a win-win of quality of life, quality of art in a serene and rhythmic mobius.

In the Thoth deck, The Fool wears a suit of full green. He faces us, unflinching. In the Rider Waite Smith, we see the Fool in profile about to step off the cliff. He’s not braced against freefall, something the creative process requires. I’m thinking of lucid spinning dreams in which you accelerate at ridiculous speed flooded by equal parts terror and joy. There’s no stopping the disintegration and there’s a delicious desparation to find God leveraged by the adrenaline-surged sensation of annihilation. Which might be a form of prayer in action, a motion based experience of faith upon waking to find you still have a body, a life to live before you.

Or a way of allowing the light of source to course through us, as here in the Thoth depiction we see the Fool’s face aglow with pale gold. His raimant, too, from gold boots to gold curls under green cap, capped with divine red feather.  

Given everything--the chronicles of mistrust or pain any one of us at midlife could place on the ledger to prove the world is a dark and dangerous forest--it is foolish to trust, to start again, to quest anew.

And yet, Yes, the Fool says to me, Yes; here we go again.

Related link:

Taking the Slow Express: Tarot Visioning with the Nine of Wands on Quest 2016

The Princess of Cups and Lust

December 12, 2015: The Princess of Cups by Tania Pryputniewicz

My card of the month this time was the Princess of Cups. In the Thoth Deck, she floats in blue sky or water, pale green slippers supported on vines or arms of a leviathan octopus. One hand loosely grasps a lotus and the other holds out a basin supporting a sleepy looking turtle whose shell floats up off his back. Turtle, lotus, and edges of the Princess gown splay out in rays towards us in a unified field of letting go.

“The heart has many mysteries and ambiguities;” writes Alejandro Jodorowsky of this Princess; she may “hesitate between fear of being hurt and the desire to give all of [her]self” ("Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards").

I’ve been thinking a lot about the heart also in relation to Quest 2016 (an online adventure for which questers quest by musing on prompts created by visionaries). I’ve responded so far by pulling Tarot cards, usually three, and in addition to writing about the cards, sketching a synthesis image in colored pencil. The heart and the eye often figure. 

I went to a wedding this month with my husband. On our way to our chairs, we walked through tunnels of green hedges laced overhead with firefly-sized points of light. We emerged in front of a fountain, its basin adrift with red rose petals.

We sat facing the gazebo in the unusually windy December late afternoon, shafts of sunlight passing through thick pale gold and lavender trunks of the eucalyptus grove, waiting, listening to a classical trio and the lilt of violin. In that waiting, stilled as we were without our children or cellphones, I considered what it would take to give more. As a wife.

After the ceremony, I stood by the heat lamps watching the women in furs. As the waiters circulated, I ate warm mushroom tops full of melting cheese and noodle sachets soft with olive oil. We could see the photographer, perched perpetually between his umbrella lights, profusely wiping his brow. When it was our turn to be documented, I brought him a cup of water.

Inside the banquet tent, the billowed ceiling glittered in the glow of three tiered crystal chandeliers. White and peach rose bouquets floated three feet off the dining tables at even intervals on slim metal vase stems, meridians of tables below lined with candles and evergreens braided with red roses. Halfway through dinner, laurel crowns winking with white lights, a dozen ballerinas fluttered over to the head table to bless the bride and groom.

Everywhere: evidence of the bride’s love of light and jewels from arbor to chandelier to table to her own beaded gown.  I watched all night, separate as usual, but a little more merged and trusting. Here was beauty; I could let go. I danced with my husband, many songs in a row.  My husband I knew best; we came to know the rest by dancing, dancing, dancing.

Somewhere during dinner it began to rain. By ten o’clock, on our way to the parking lot, my husband pulled me into one of the arbor archways, his shirt damp from dancing, his heart-heat wicking through the silk of my blue dress. He kissed me to the sound of rain on the leaves--just us—with a suitor’s kiss. I looked up into the night sky where the eucalyptus tree limbs vanished into the misting rain, tree’s upper half retaining shape as a hive of pale blue lights threaded for yards up into the sky in its own anchored star field.

On the freeway, the rain fell in thick gusts. I was afraid. But the one bum windshield wiper only folded once, kindly waiting until I had passed the ambling semi with its dragon exhalations of roiled mist and rain coursing over our hood. The gas gauge’s red needle hovered mournfully over E forcing one more stop between storm and hearth.

The kids were wide awake when we walked in. Someone had spilled red candle wax on the rug. Someone’s homework remained undone. Half-eaten tamales crowned dinner dishes strewn about the counter. The husky howled mournfully, destitute of her walk.

All night the wind. All night I heard it, waking to the cats batting at the blinds to be let in, to be let out, husband warm each time I returned to sleep beside him. All night I thought again about the pastor’s words: he said we come to know our spouse more than anyone else, even more than our children.  Since children come after the marriage, they serve to deepen it.

I’m thinking of the heart, and “heart seeing.” We see with our eyes and yet the heart sees in its own way. Here the Princess of Cups has her eyes closed, even as she lets go, trusting what she is offering to be received by a benevolent world—turtle to arrive at its next bit of land, cut stem of flower to land in water. Maybe this Princess of Cups represents the eternally young part inside of every parent…the youthful self passing through the lessons of unconditional love and letting go no matter what body-age she or he is.

I saw it most clearly during the solo dances: in the face of the mother dancing with her son the groom, for as wise as she looked she looked like a little girl too, and in the face of the father dancing with his daughter. We watched, riveted, as each pair conversed, tilting this way to lean closer to hear, drawing back to laugh and smile. Drew closer once more at dance’s end for one last hug. Then, the hands dropping to side, parent-child watching as grown-child walked away--without a glance backwards--to dance with the spouse of their newly blessed forever.

December 12, 2105: Lust by Mary Allen

My card last month was Lust, or Strength as it’s called in other tarot decks.  It’s the eleventh major arcana card, which follows the tenth card or Wheel of Fortune, which was my card of the month before this one.

 

In the Thoth deck Lust (or Strength) shows a naked woman mounted on the back of a giant beast—a lion with five heads, all but one of which are human:  there’s a king, a priest, two women, and a creepy dreamlike animal with something like a malformed small head coming out of the back of its head. Angeles Arrien (“The Tarot Handbook:  Practical Applications of Ancient VisualSymbols”) explains that Lust in the Thoth deck doesn’t really refer to lust the way we think of it but rather comes from the root luster, as in radiance.  The literal meaning of the card, if a Tarot card can have a literal meaning, is related to Beauty and the Beast.  But in the Tarot cards, of course, the beast is the beast within.  The Lust card is all about working with our negative thoughts, bringing light, more light, to the dark places inside ourselves.  The woman on the card, according to Angeles Arrien, has “overcome old fears tied with the past.” 

I’ve been doing plenty of that lately—trying to do it at least—wrestling with my childhood fear of my mother which has somehow morphed, like a shape-shifting animal, into fear of rejection by editors and agents and publishers.  I’m finishing a book I’ve worked on forever and instead of feeling happy and triumphant all I can manage to feel is dread and anxiety.  But even as I write those words the feelings change into something else; the words don’t even begin to capture what’s been going on inside of me, its subtlety, its light and shadows.  I think of how interior stuff is never so simple.  It’s as complicated and strange, as beautiful and ugly as the world of dreams and the images on the cards themselves, which are like dreams.  It, whatever it is—meaning, spirit, emotion—resists being translated into words, and it’s only through looking at the picture and at the world around us, that we can even begin to see it. 

The Lust of the card refers to light and although I’ve never thought of it this card in terms of light, maybe that is what it’s all about.  It’s the middle of December as I write this, almost the equinox, the shortest day of the year, and we’ve been having a series of short gray almost lightless days.  But a few days ago the sun came out and I went for a walk.  Even though it should be winter it still feels like late fall here, no snow on the ground, temperatures in the fifties, and when I was outside walking I noticed how every bit of the world touched by sunlight was shining:  Individual blades of grass, the little green leaves still clinging to a slender young tree, flecks of mica in the sidewalk, even the old brown dead oak leaves littering the ground were all shining as if sending out their own light; there were stars of light on car hoods, reflections blazing in windows.  Sitting at my kitchen table later on the same day my ex-partner’s twenty-seven-year-old son, who’s majoring in electrical engineering at the University, explained to me that scientists used to think that electricity, that mystery that produces light, was made up of electrons but now they think it’s something like a cloud and at the same time also electrons.  Which seems to me like the cards and even like life itself, part dream, part hard-edged reality, sometimes one thing, sometimes the other, all interspersed with no real the boundaries between them.

The interesting thing I see in the Lust card when I look at it now is the way the naked woman riding the lion, leaning back as if metaphorically slayed by the light, the power, the energy of what she’s gotten on top of, is holding a chalice full of orange light, like the sunrise, up to the horizon.  Up to the horizon because she and the beast with many heads and the squiggly circles around them (representing old troubling thoughts according to Angeles Arrien), are all below ground.

The heads on the beasts look like faces you’d see in a dream or maybe a nightmare.  Quite a few years ago, when I had my first round of struggling with being an author in the world, with being published and where I thought it would take me and was afraid it wouldn’t take me in my life, I had dreams fairly regularly that three lions came into my house through the back door.  They were enormous and powerful, I knew they could tear me to pieces at any moment, but here they were paying me a visit, showing me forbearance, giving me the gift and the miracle of their presence, letting me know that I was special enough to have lions in my house.   And that reminds me of a dream I had last night, where I was in a place (some dream landscape or building) and King Henry the VIII in his later years was there, fat, puffed up with self-importance, scary, all powerful, someone who could destroy you in the blink of an eye if he wanted to—but, for the moment at least, he kind of liked me. 

What all of this is telling me there’s no way to know.  The meaning is just as mysterious and impossible to translate as the card and the dreams themselves.  But I hope it’s saying I’m going to get another chance to ride on the back of the big old beast of luck and fate in the form of publishing and have it take me somewhere, or at least give me another chance to encounter the dream faces inside myself, my hopes and fears and the projections of my ego—my little piece of the universal ego. 

Once in a zoo in Chicago I saw a glassed-in exhibit of long-dead garter snake with two heads.  Both heads had a brain, it said on a card under the snake, but only one of the brains was capable of intelligence.  And ever since then I’ve thought of the ego as something like that second head on the snake, a second, stupid head that grows up automatically on your neck when you have some success.   Which, now that I think of it, is kind of like the creepy grinning animal or maybe snake head on the Lust card, with a small second malformed head staring out of the base of its skull.

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.