The Eight of Swords and The Prince of Wands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ace of Disks and The Princess of Swords

February 2, 2015: The Ace of Disks by Mary Allen

I kind of cheated when I pulled my card of the month last time:  I fanned the deck out on my coffee table and was about to pick a card from somewhere in the middle when I suddenly felt drawn to the card all the way on the right hand end.  I turned it over thinking I would put it back if I didn’t like it.  But I did like it – it was the Ace of Disks, one my favorite cards in the deck – so I kept it.  Then to make up for the fact that I kind of cheated when I pulled it I picked another card, which turned out to be the Prince of Disks.  I kept that card too, but all month long I’ve kind of felt like my card/s of the month weren’t exactly…  I don’t know … legitimate, as if there could be such a thing with a tarot card.

         The Ace of Disks in the Thoth deck represents the wings of the Archangels, or at least that’s always how I describe it when I’m reading the cards for someone:  There are layers on layers of deep blue-green peacock-feather like wings, and there are some brown rings like the growth rings of bark in a tree, and at the center is a circle with two pentacles, one inside the other, inside it, and inside that are three little disks, which, I read somewhere recently, represent actual money, the angel’s wings and the bark representing layers and levels of spiritual growth and gifts.  In the Rider Waite deck the Ace of Pentacles – they call disks pentacles in that deck, which I’ve always loved – is a picture of an arm extending out a cloud, the arm of God, and cupped in the palm of the hand is a golden disk.  That card always reminds me of a dream I had during an earlier era of our lives and our tarot-card reading together.  In the dream I was in a magical place – some spiritual realm I’ve never visited before or since in a dream although I long to -- and you were there with me, Tania, and I knew that you were my spiritual teacher.  In the distance on the horizon were mountains, like the mountains in the background of many of the Rider Waite cards, and resting along the top of the dream mountains was a big arm, and balancing in the palm of the hand at the end of the arm was a golden pentacle and while we watched it rose up into the sky and became the moon.  I told you I was afraid to be there in that place and you said, in your exact everyday Tania voice, “Then think of yourself at home and you’ll find yourself there.” 

I did, and I woke up, in the dream, not in my own house which in real life I had already bought by then, with money I got from a book contract, but in my old apartment in the house owned by my landlord, where I was always aware that I was living in someone else’s house. “I used to live in your house, but I have my own house now,” I said to that landlord once, very definitely, in a dream.  But the truth is that it’s taken me many years to feel like my own house is my own house, to really feel in any way like I own my own life and my house and I can do with it what I want.

         I had my kitchen redone last month, after years and years of living in my house and the kitchen getting shabbier and shabbier and me not having any money to fix it and also somehow feeling like it wasn’t okay for me to fix it, wasn’t okay to call someone up and employ them to fix it for me.  I had some money I inherited from my sister (there’s the Ace of Disks) and I used it to change my kitchen:  I picked a paint color, sort of a celestial blue, and paid a handyman, my handyman, whom I’m not afraid to ask to do something for me, to paint the walls, and I had new floors put down and I bought a new stove and had shelves put up on the walls and now, as I sit here writing this, I find myself in a newer nicer landscape than I used to inhabit in this house, a kitchen that belongs to me and where I feel like belong, which is clean and pleasant to be in, where I feel at home.  I do believe that, now, if I should find myself in that magical place again with you, dear Tania, my beautiful spiritual tarot teacher, and you told me to think of home and I did, I would find myself here, in this house that belongs to me instead of in someone else’s house – in my new spiritual house instead of back in the old tired not safe belonging to someone else house.  And maybe I wouldn’t even be afraid in that magical spiritual place any more, maybe I could stay there with you and the cards and the hand of God lying across the top of the mountain and the disk that rises up out of it into the sky and becomes the moon.

February 17: 2015 The Princess of Swords by Tania Pryputniewicz

I’m always drawn to the green light in the Princess of Swords. I was going to say that the green light shrouds her, but it doesn’t—she is green, thighs and arms and face lined gold due to the light emanating from behind rubble of dark clouds substantial enough apparently to brace her two slippered feet. Her sheer blue gown drapes off her thighs in swordfish pleats through which the green gold of her body permeates. Her helmet is the same dim blue as down-facing sword she holds in her right arm. She's just finished a decisive swipe at the sky. The loose infinity loop of light could be something she wards off or it could be the energy created by her act of protection.  Her other arm rests on a grey altar, the kind I’d imagine used to sacrafice an animal. Smoke drifts up from it and most of her body leans away from the altar.

Mary speaks of this card as doing battle with the universe, the mental aspect of the swords. I’m wondering if the opposition is real or imagined, as in worries the mind has created that arc back, revisit, in the guise of truth. The greens of the card feel youthful, spring-driven, blue behind the smoke cheerful. Engaged fully, The Princess of Swords appears confident though her cloud footing strikes me as tenuous or risky.

In a month during which I’m feeling internally alarmed by the external alarm comprised of my 14 year old daughter trying to maintain equilibrium, this vibrant image gives me strength. Aswirl with anxiety, I’m guilty of projecting my worst fears onto my daughter. The particulars of her stress belong to her, but I just know when I was her age, in hormonal overwhelm and confused by my parents’ divorce, I ran away one long night, wondering if it mattered to live. The turmoil felt real and “forever” at the time but I survived just fine.

If I can take this Princess of Swords with me into this time, put on her light blue shift and blue helmet, I can begin to see the accretion of tiny decisive actions I’ve taken to help my daughter as creating something tangible, like that gold partial mobius on the card. I’d like to close that loop of gold, keep one for me, and and trust she has her own. I buy her a CD player and relaxing CD music to help her sleep. In the doctor’s office, I open my purse and take out my pocket Georgia O’Keeffe; we thumb through the flowers. I read her a passage from my pocket Pema Chodron while we wait for the pediatrician.

My girl is furious and loving by turns, as I am with her; many midnights in tandem exhaustion we spar. But the sun comes up and we try again. I don’t understand what the billowing dark clouds beneath my daughter are truly comprised of, but they feel formidable and real to both of us. Most likely, simply worries grown larger than us both, normal teenage hormones, normal responses to body and mind stresses beyond both of our control.

The lithe green girl here on the card still has on her ballet slippers. As a child I loved to dance; the shoes remind me that even dancers in delicate shoes are powerful and that this phase of stress is a dance. The Princess of Swords will at some point run down the bubbles of her trouble cloud and into the forest, where her toes will again be surrounded by violets, forget-me-nots, and ferns. She is neither mother nor daughter, but some kind of intermediary. Perhaps a neutral, loving party able to see this time as a temporary test lined with love and possiblity to grow closer.  Angeles Arrien calls the Princess the “mood-shifter” and perhaps this is what I’m struggling to teach my daughter (since I am still learning myself)—how to let emotions come and then to let emotions go.

The altar for me represents traditions of sacrafice…perhaps structured spiritual paths. Just as the Princess is off the altar, to the side, I too feel off-kilter, no book learning or tradition to fix our lives. Because no-one has been exactly where we are in time, with our tangle of now: getting in the car perpetually late to school with two cups of hot tea--peach for me, honey chamomile for my daughter--spilling across our hands, the Husky, two little brothers, my make-up bag she’s borrowing these days, my eye-shadows banged loose of their color panes into crumbled bronze dust as if off back of butterfly wings, her backpack, a stack of books and outfits for kickboxing strewn behind her she’ll assemble as we jockey back and forth in two-lane traffic backed up into town in our low-slung four door with cracked windshield and side mirror under easy scrutiny of the four-wheel drive trucks and luxury cars as we lurch along at 5 miles an hour for the half hour drive to school that should take ten minutes.

On the way to the car, I’d found an apple under our hedge, the fourth apple I couldn’t find when making lunches and burning the littlest’s oatmeal ten minutes beind the time we needed to leave. We pass the Hotel Del at 8:50, hard-pressed to make it. Somehow I manage to drop off the big kids just before the tardy bell, the littlest throwing on his socks and shoes as we round the bend to his school. It is the first day in a couple of weeks all three of the children have gone to school.

In the quiet of the house, in a stupor, I take photos of the cat brushing up against the Husky, feeling guilty for not doing more but it is all I can do before turning to face the day’s tasks, the Dr. appts to schedule, the counselor to email, the socks to match, the garage to call about the van repair, the electrician for the lights in the bathroom that seem to have shorted out again. I sit in the stripe of sun and love these unlikely friends--cat and dog--rubbing noses so affectionately, just like the day last week my daughter plunked down shoulder to shoulder in the sun with me, just because, “Hi, Mom,” she said, “Hi.” “What? What do you want?” I asked, feeling grumpy and beholden, bracing for the next crisis.

“Nothing, nothing,” she said. And we went on from there, taking selfies and fighting over who would take the photos, a string of photos I'll look at before turning out the lights on my way to bed, heart lifted and mood shifted.

The Two of Wands and The Universe

January 26, 2015: The Two of Wands, Message in a Bottle, by Tania Pryputniewicz

I took a look at this month’s Thoth Two of Wands with its red-faced grumpy Tibetan doorjies set against a blotchy uteral pink mess of a background suffused with a Kindergarten sky blue and decided to focus on the Rider Waite image instead. The Rider Waite Two of Wands features a cloaked figure holding a staff she rests on a low stone wall; in her other hand sits a tiny replica of the world. Firmly planted behind her is a second staff. I love that she’s holding a world while standing on the ground of her larger world and looking out across the sea. Is she getting ready to step over the stone wall and pass the village on a trek to the sea? Will she set her world down at water’s edge to float aross to foreign shores? Will that world be translated and welcomed by hands on opposite shore?

Metaphorically this feels like an accurate depiction of how I felt in December joining Tracking Wonder’s #Quest2015, a group of business artists looking to collaborate and grow under the stewardship of a man named Jeffrey Davis (now leading us on a #LivetheQuest leg). His introductory video caught my eye—supine on his back in a swath of grass, he sports a pair of vibrant red trousers. The aerial angle of the opening frame conveys a playful sense of welcome, the red fabric a clear message of vitality and an invitation to step outside of familiar adornment.

Joining Tracking Wonder felt a lot like taking my little world in my hands and offering it again—not just to my quiet blogging channels, but out to a vaster, foreign sea. And having to trust the world would be delivered intact. If the wands represent creativity, like the figure in the card, I feel balanced, a wand behind me representing years of writing on a regular basis, and the wand grasped in hand and balanced on the stone wall representing a step up in camaraderie and play, which can only yield new vistas. Notice the warmly cloaked figure wears sturdy boots and a red hat, wearer invigorated, joyful and passionate.

I sense stillness too in this card. A waiting for more good. I sense this in my own body. A calm joy in paired adventures, like this one with Mary for which two of us are publicly co-blogging about our private journey with the Tarot. Angeles Arrien attributes to this card an “optimal balance of energy or sense of sovereignty or being comfortable in your domain.” It mirrors the peace I feel about Tarot for Two, our two voices mingling with the myriad bloggers online inhabiting countless territories. To thrive, one launches one’s ships, and one also looks out to the horizon to receive what is being offered from across the sea, our online version of a “Message in a Bottle.”

Now I'm drawn to revisiting that Thoth Two of Wands with crimson doorjies in front of pink uteral sky. It reminds me of other pinks in cards Mary and I talk about as relating to female problems like the Thoth five of swords and the other one with sludgy cups—maybe I’m thinking of the 8 of cups with its peach-grey desolate horizon line. Ironic that now with two minutes to spare--Mary likely calling any second to say our writing window is up and it’s time to throw cards and select a new card for the month--wouldn’t you know it, the Thoth deck card is “talking to me.” And reminding me I’m still working through female problems in my writing and accurately reflecting that I often feel at the mercy of wounds that just won’t heal.

Then I look again to the Rider Waite figure, so gently poised. And realize that both Rider Waite and Thoth images feel accurate. I go in, dislodge a little of that stuck female problem past, and a little more Kindergarten sky blue emerges. The squinched up doorjie faces make me smile still--they look like twins in a time-out. Perhaps internal twins I’m trying to merge. I can rage through my time-out or take stock calmly and put on that red hat and face the sea.

January 26, 2015: The Universe by Mary Allen

My card this month was the Universe.  I used to get this card fairly often about twenty years ago, around the time I sold my book in an almost magical way and bought the house I live in now with the advance.  Back then I thought the card was telling me that the universe was waving its big old wand over my life and maybe it was, but the manifestations I thought I was going to get as a result didn’t quite manifest, I went back to being in a seven of swords (“futility,” according to the Thoth deck, which has words at the bottom of all the minor arcana), five of cups (“disappointment) kind of place, and the Universe didn’t show up much during all those years.  Now here it is back again, and I wonder what it’s saying to me this time. 

            Angeles Arrien says that the Universe card “symbolizes the unity of positive and negative forces both internally and externally,” that the naked woman grabbing a sickle in one hand (she’s a hermaphrodite, according to Angeles Arrien, but I prefer to think of her as a woman and besides, she has breasts) while holding onto a snake/wheel with the other hand – that she uses the sickle to cut through limitations and become free and move forward, and that we, like the diamond-back snake that shows up in the card, are “required to transform before we can experience new worlds internally and externally.” 

I’ve always thought this card, which is the last card in the major arcana cycle, said you were at the end of a cycle, that you had burned off all the bad karma of that particular cycle, and that you have the wheel of your own life in your own hands now.   And I would say that there’s some truth to both of those interpretations in terms of where I find myself in my life at this particular moment:  I’ve used EMDR – my particular sickle – to cut away most of the inner limitations that were making it impossible for me to move forward – it turned out, back in 1995, when I got that big book advance and I thought I was going to be a bestselling author from then on, that I had way, way too many deeply buried fears and doubts and self-hatreds to be able to go off into the world and thrive while succeeding.  And I do feel that I’m at the end of my long cycle of inner work – not that I won’t have to do inner work any more, but that I’ve changed as a result of all the work I have done:  I feel peaceful, healed, complete inside, for the most part anyway.

            And, I have to say, the Universe card has been talking to me this month in an everyday way in the everyday world.  This month my book The Rooms of Heaven, which has been around and pretty much languishing without much of anybody paying attention to it, for fifteen years, somehow found its way onto a Best Nonfiction of 2014 list put out by Tin House.  Maybe not the end all and be all of success but not nothing to dismiss at either, plus it feels like a little wink from the universe.  And also this month, I used money I got from my sister – a quarter of my sister’s retirement account, because she died, of ALS, before retirement age – to update my kitchen, the kitchen of the house I bought back in 1995 and haven’t had the time or the energy or the attention, not to mention the money, to fix up since.  I had my kitchen painted a pale luminous celestial blue – once in a trance, during my first set of encounters with the magical universe inside of us, in an even earlier cycle of my life, I saw an ugly green desk blotter turn a beautiful celestial blue, a blue a little bit like the color of my kitchen walls now. 

I put new wood floors down in my kitchen too, and a few days later, during EMDR, I saw a little vision of a wide glossy hardwood floor in my newly-refurbished –through-the-grace-of-EMDR interior, and the message I got along with the vision was that there’s a floor now between my unconscious and the upper air of my life, and now I can move on without my old deep fears and self-hatreds seeping up out the basement, ruining everything I encounter.  I can move on to wherever I’m going and fill the upper part of my house – my life in the world, in the upper air -- with new things. 

I don’t know what those new things are, don’t know what the universe is going to bring me now or even if it’s going to bring me anything.  But I do feel, somehow, the “completion and integration of great inner work,” as Angeles Arrien would put it, and I feel more than ever before that I am “not only at home in the external world but also at home within myself.”