June 2, 2017: The Two of Wands by Mary
Allen
My card this
month was the two of wands. Power
brought down to earth and made personal, I’ve read this card means. The Thoth deck two of wands shows two crossed
red dorjes, an ancient traditional Tibetan weapon. The dorjes on the card have cartoonish little
angry-looking faces at one end, and although Angeles Arrien says that this card
is about coming into your own power from deep within in a balanced way, I can’t
avoid thinking it’s about those little faces.
So when this card falls I’ve always thought that it was talking, at
least a little bit, about power struggles.
The two of wands in the Rider Waite tells a very different story, and
that’s the story that speaks to me about this card and my month last
month. The Rider Waite two of wands shows
a man in a red cape and hat standing between two tall brown wands, holding a
model of the earth, staring out at a landscape of mountains and trees and
water.
I guess I can
say that my month was about power brought down to the earth and made
personal. The way I do that is by
writing, which as I see it involves connecting to some universal creative power
floating in the air sort of like electricity, connecting to it and bringing it
to earth and making it personal, through writing. For me this involves seeing
and noticing and doing something with what I’ve seen and noticed, capturing it
as precisely as I can, with all of its detail and meaning, and mirroring it
back to the universe as I write about it.
I read recently that
Saint Leontius, a sixth-century Greek Orthodox priest, said that creation can’t
worship God directly but only through us, that the role of humans in this world
is to make God’s creations visible. I
love that idea—that’s what I’m talking about.
To make God’s creations visible you have to see them, and to write you
have to see too, see the precise room or landscape or whatever else inhabits
your memories or your fictional characters are inhabiting in the story. You can’t be vague about it, and in that way
you hold the globe in your hand examining it while you bring power down to
earth and make it personal, it’s the very examining that brings power to earth
and makes it personal.
And that’s what
I was trying to do all month. I spent a
lot of the month working on an essay about my desert vacation in March with my
friend JoAnn. The whole time I was
writing I was sitting there at my desk trying to focus the language to capture
the details and the meaning, to let the meaning arise from the details, and
when I was on the vacation I spent the whole time walking around trying to
notice the details, trying to capture them in my mind so I could capture them
and make something out of them, mirror them back to the universe, through a
piece of writing.
And ever since
then I’ve been doing that with other things too. Now that my desert vacation is over and I’m
back in real life I’ve been walking around looking, noticing, trying to be
present, to see whatever there is to see.
I’ve kind of gotten into the habit of it, noticing the world so I can
write about it, and it is a kind of power brought down to earth and made
personal.
June 2, 2017: The Wheel of Fortune by
Tania Pryputniewicz
All month long I
glance at the Thoth Wheel of Fortune card on my desk. Behind the pale green wheel
in the center of the card, I see lightning bolts, their top jags ending in
stars. “The stars exploding into lightning bolts represent the experience of awakening
to the possibilities that can turn our lives in more positive and expansive
directions,” writes Angeles Arrien in relation to the Wheel of Fortune. The
quote accurately reflects what I’m experiencing as I take scenes from my
childhood that I first described in poetry and develop them in prose for a new
writing project of mine.
Last week my memoir
teacher asked us to make memory maps—to look down at the river of our lives and
look for the places where the river turned, tracking pivot points or places we
turned in a new direction. I spent a day going through old boxes in the garage,
pulling out college syllabi and high school versions of poems, delighted to
find I’m still obsessed with the same imagery (poems then, poems now, and the
new prose). I can’t believe how much emotion and insight the same set of core
images continues to offer.
And the other
surprise is to discover, through writing about various poverties, the currency I didn't realize I gained. For example, last week I wrote a scene based on the
time we were living in a campground in the wooden camper my father built for
us. We’d left the Illinois commune and arrived on the Russian River in the
summer. By fall we were still house hunting, so I started public school in the
fifth grade while living in the campground.
It all came back
vividly: the sound of the rain dripping off the redwood leaves onto the roof,
the smell of campfires, the intermittent sleep I’d get in the loft with my
brother and sister, waking to rain wet socks when the wood seams of the camper
warped and parted. Christmas neared, and with it, the obligation to play Secret
Santa for a classmate. Making the best of our situation, I made a cardboard
elephant puzzle. I watched as unobtrusively as possible as my classmate opened her
cardboard puzzle. She turned the pieces over a few times, rummaged beneath the
tissue, and then pushed the gift back into her desk and ran to see what her
friends unwrapped. I wished I’d been able to give her something store bought, a
Santa hat, glitter socks, a bow.
Once written
out, down on paper, the energy trapped inside the memory released and the wheel
of how I saw myself shifted, but this time, I was not just a witnessing child,
but a child who grew up to become a mother. I get to bring motherhood’s lens of
empathy and love back into the memories now. For me, empathy for other human
beings is the un-measureable bounty and gift of poverty. The Wheel of Fortune
goes up, the wheel goes down; sometimes you "have," sometimes you "have not." But skimming the Ferris wheel of the past
allows me to rise to the top where the sun warms both past self and current
witness.
The Motherpeace Tarot
(round cards) version of the Wheel of Fortune depicts a blue sky and the
planets of the solar system crossing the midline of the card in a row. The
card’s edge is ringed by the astrological sign of the zodiac as if to say, our
fortune is our birth sign, each one
of us bearing our unique mask, coming into incarnation with a specific set of
circumstances and parents, each one of us equally valuable. The fortune is
learning to recognize the value in who we are and what we have to contribute.
Under my roof, these
final school days of June, it is hard to feel like a contributing member, hard
to feel successful: one child oversleeps, a second needs hair color for crazy
hair day and tells me at 6:30 a.m., our last-minute shopping trip putting the
middle child in prime position for a tardy. The wash out spray-in colors, only
stocked at Halloween, are nowhere to be found. So instead we apply clouds of
the big sister’s hairspray and 12 packets of shades of glitter from blue to
gold to deep crimson (all for just $2.47—thank you Wal-Mart).
I put my youngest
son in front of the flowering hedge and snap his photo. It is the way he’ll rain
gold and iridescent Tinkerbelle Blue all over his desk and teacher’s floor that
makes me smile. I take the middle son in late, stand there with him during the attendance
lady’s lecture, vow to get a red marker to mark the days of absence and vow to
write out a new contract for the kids so I can stop being the heavy in a life
abundant: Twelve shades of glitter to choose from on crazy hair day, and a
mother who loves her kids as much as my father loved me and my siblings (so
much so that he built that wooden camper for us to live in by hand).
Additional link:
Tarot for Two's latest podcast is live today; Mary and I take up the question of whether or not the Tarot deck is just a deck of cards or not:
