tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12895524378839288952024-02-19T17:30:29.062-08:00Tarot for TwoTania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-79331508777050602872019-05-20T20:14:00.003-07:002019-05-20T20:14:18.280-07:00The Four of Wands<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><b>April 8, 2019: Four
of Wands by Mary Allen</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">My card this
time was the four of wands: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the Thoth
deck, a circle of gold with wands in the center and the word completion at the
bottom; in the Rider-Waite deck, a picture of two people celebrating under a garland
in front of a castle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Angeles Arrien
says this card means something being completed at the same time that something
else is being initiated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Biddy Tarot
says this card means celebration, joy, harmony, relaxation, homecoming.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A nice card to have as my card of the month,
but what is it saying to me? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Both of these
meanings speak to me about my last month, albeit not in a very loud voice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I went on a desert vacation, driving and
hiking with my friend of many years, Jeannette Miyamoto, first visiting
Sedona—hiking a few of the trails by the vortexes, those “swirling centers of
energy conducive to healing meditation, and self-exploration, said to emanate
from the red rocks in Sedona,” according to the internet—then hiking for three
days in Joshua Tree park, talking, talking, talking in the car and trudging
silently and separately along the trails.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The desert was blooming, small yellow and purple flowers scattered
everywhere across the sand—those flowers sort of looked like the flowers
decorating the garland in the Rider Waite four of wands, now that I think of
it. We meditated at the vortexes, ate in a diner in Joshua Tree the town on our
way back to Jeannette’s house in Idyllwild and on my way back, a day later, via
the Palm Springs airport and two airplanes, to my house for my homecoming,
another kind of completion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s
tempting to stick with all that as my four of wands experience last month.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Harder to write
about are the ways in which I think I may be achieving some larger kind of
completion while at the same time starting something new. I’ve been thinking for a while that I’m
probably at the end of a cycle, maybe a twenty-year cycle of writing but not
publishing, working on fixing the broken things inside myself using EMDR,
staying put while I healed. Nothing has
really changed that much yet, but I can kind of feel it coming in my
bones. And there have been little
signs: a nice email from my former
editor letting me know I’m not quite as washed up as an author as I thought I
was, a new writing project that I think could take me into the world, a kind of
completion of the deep work inside me.
(There’s always more to be done, but I’m down to the really bottom of
the barrel of the traumas inside me, scraping up the last most painful
bits.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Even the trip to the desert with
Jeannette was a kind of simultaneous completing and opening, completing a
cycle—I’ve been going on trips to the desert in March with my friend Jo Ann for
four years (it would have been five except I broke my shoulder last February
and couldn’t go), but now Jo Ann’s spring break time is changing and we won’t being
doing it anymore. I thought I wasn’t
going to go to the desert at all this year, but I got a last-minute chance to
do it with my friend Jeannette. And when
I was down there with her, seeing her house and her life and all the rich lush
ways that she’s been gifted by life, I felt a kind of opening of my inner eyes,
a kind of inner revisiting of what I can have and be and do in my own
life. </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">*Tania will be back for the next posting at Tarot for Two. In the meantime, here's a link to a post she wrote about creating "synthesis" drawings based on three tarot cards, <a href="http://www.taniapryputniewicz.com/2019/04/a-butterfly-lantern-for-querents/" target="_blank">A Butterfly Lantern for Querents</a>.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> </span></div>
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Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-40536891728829173532019-03-06T11:22:00.000-08:002019-03-06T11:34:25.154-08:00The Nine of Wands, the Hierophant, and the Star<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><b>February 15, 2019: The Nine of Wands and The Hierophant by
Tania Pryputniewicz</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Mary and I haven’t blogged at Tarot for Two since April of
2018—and I see why—both of us immobilized (emotionally and physically,
respectively). I lost my mother in January and Mary fell and broke her shoulder
on the ice in February. We still threw cards over the course of the year. I’ve
missed tethering lived actions to the symbols and colors in the cards but I
also trust the in-breath and out-breath in our tarot practice, or “taroting” as
Mary calls it. And it just adds to my gratitude for this hour together
today. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I’m looking at the Nine of Wands I pulled in common with
Mary the month before last and this month’s Hierophant card. The Rider Waite’s
Nine of Wands shows a wounded warrior looking out with bandaged head, scanning
the horizon for trouble. It reminds me of my own habitual way of reacting that
I’m trying to change—old habits from family of origin poverties and periods of
instability, the ups and down I experienced as the oldest daughter in a family
coping with depression and bipolar in our family orbit, something I’m just
starting to explore in my writing about an Illinois commune. As the oldest
child, I often chose to stand psychologically at the helm in a bit of a
hypervigiliant way, worried about my parents and all of us, a habit I needed to
shed as I grew. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Lady Frieda Harris paints the Thoth Nine of Wands as the Sun
in Sagittarius. My father is a Sagittarius. With love he pointed the arrows of
my dreams towards the sun. I grew up in his infectious aura of passion and play
and limitless promise that inspired my love for words and poetry and music, the
fire of love coming out in his hands on the keyboards of the pianos of my
childhood. The Thoth image shows four staves on the top of four staves, ends
tipped by moons fattening through the phases. There’s a downside of
limitlessness when it is attached to mania that involves sorting through
various phases and realities, inherited and actual, that I came late to understanding
as a dreamer myself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This month perceiving the world as it actually is began in a
yoga studio three minutes from my house where I could begin to return to my
body, the body my mother once housed, the body I have felt distant from after
losing her last January. I’m waking up again as I stand and feel my feet on the
yoga mat while I stretch my arms to the sky. I’m revisiting the spiritual
teachings I walked through before I had children—the astrology, the tarot, the
reiki—which I experienced as a young student intellectually and mystically
inspired as my father’s daughter, in love with omen hunting and symbol seeking
to make sense of life, something I learned from him, something that makes the
tarot a natural fit for me. Now I’m looking out at the world, through eyes
and a body increasingly grounded again to the earth as it is today, shedding
the past.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the Thoth Hierophant card I see as an orange robed man:
universal father, teacher, spiritual guide. I resonate with the woman robed in
blue deep in the interior field of the teacher, holding the sword of the mind,
as if to say, “Here is where thought takes form on the Earth.” Learning to
listen, discerning, as a witness, has been an incredible spiritual gift,
probably the very challenge at the threshold that has filled me with enough
empathy to withstand finally seeing the effects mental illness in a family can
have on children, including my child self, and there I see her, standing guard
like that Nine of Wands warrior with bandage headed, looking for what might
next take down the house. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Bringing the body to yoga means eyes closed on the mat,
aware how far off the ground my knees are, how tense and untrusting my body has
been. But eyes closed letting go, without judgment, I feel my muscles being to
let go into the field of gravity that holds me here. Growing up, I watched my
father defy gravity—beautiful, miraculous to follow the imagination down
associative paths in imaginary gardens. But then we all had to come back to
present time and the particulars of building a life on earth. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I too defy gravity in lucid dreams, in poems, in my art, in
my tarot play, but I am a mother with children to raise and have fought to stay
present like everyone else on the planet despite fear, despite challenges
imagined, perceived, or real. The spiritual teacher in the Hierophant suggests
a way forward, with love, eyes open, crescent moon in hand, a respect for the
cycles of sun and moon, and the sword of clarity aimed at this incarnation, the
feet of the one body I inhabit today, here, now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><b>February 15, 2019: The Star and the Nine of Wands by Mary
Allen</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We haven’t written about our cards of the month for a long
time for various reasons, a broken shoulder, a dying mother, many other large
and not-so-large developments in both of our lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’ve continued taroting for two through some
of it, though (I love using the word tarot as a verb) and we’re back on track
with the writing now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t write
about the last card I pulled as my card of the month, the nine of wands, on
12/29/18, or the card I pulled before that, on 12/4/18, The Star was a beautiful
card to have sitting on my mantelpiece for weeks on end, and it’s been talking
to me all this time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Star depicts a woman channeling divine energy, bringing
it down to earth from above.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the
Thoth deck it shows a slightly abstract woman holding one cup in a hand raised
above her head, another cup in a hand at her knee, beautiful geometrical pink
energy pouring down from the raised cup through the woman and out the cup at
the bottom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A pile of clear crystals is
at her feet and there’s a large pink moon, like a crystal marble, in the background,
a navy-blue sky full of swirly white lines that originate in a seven-pointed
star in the upper left-hand corner of the card.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I’ve started writing a novel that takes place in the
afterlife, and whenever I think of it I feel something light and airy around
this project.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s almost as if the book
itself—the 65 pages I’ve got so far—sits in my computer generating a kind of airy
brightness, like a visitor from the afterlife itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have all the feelings of fear before,
during, and about the act of writing it that I usually have, more actually,
because this is fiction and I usually write memoir where you know the story;
here I’m having to make the story up and I don’t even know what it is till it
gets on the page—every time I add to it I struggle with the same old
questions:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Can I do this?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is this good enough? Will anyone ever read
this?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, there it is, brought
through into the world bit by bit by me, in fear and not-so-easy-ness, sitting
in my computer with its own strange light-filled beingness, as if waiting for
the next piece to be added to all the other pieces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The Star card has been showing up for me a lot lately in
readings, and I can’t help thinking that if it’s talking about anything in my
life, it’s talking about this novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not
the novel itself but the writing of it, the way I seem to be bringing it down
and through, perhaps from above, in spite of myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And maybe the nine of wands, strength in the
Thoth deck, or, in the Rider Waite deck, even more appropriately, a bandaged soldier
leaning against a staff, having come through the wars, battered but still standing—that
could be a good symbol for the writing itself, the strength it takes to keep
showing up for that small scary daily birthing, the work and the risk of it,
and all the writing I’ve done over the years that have gotten me ready to do it
now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-75292869298937022102018-04-18T16:37:00.001-07:002018-04-23T12:32:29.648-07:00The Two of Wands, The Ten of Swords and The Four of Disks<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">April 9, 2018: Two of Wands by Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The two of wands
is my current card of the month. It has been for a few months now because for
various reasons Tania and I haven’t been able to write about our cards and pick
new ones. Tania’s mother died at the beginning of January. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I fell and broke my shoulder on February 17 and
I’ve been dealing with that ever since; I had shoulder replacement surgery on
March 14. I have to wear a brace until the end of April so I still can’t type
with two hands and right now I’m using the voice recognition on my computer to
write this. During all that time I’ve had the two of wands sitting on my
mantelpiece and I’ve been wondering what it could be saying to me. I’ve also
thrown the cards a couple of times and gotten the two of wands in those readings.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">My first thought about the two of wands is
that in the Thoth deck it looks like bones—two bones crossing—even a tiny bit
like the shadowy broken bones in the x-rays of my shoulder. (Ha ha:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here’s what the computer voice recognition
did with “Thoth deck” and what I said after it:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The fuck deck fuck the heck ha ha
Tania said pickles the fuck Dexter fuck Dick</i>.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">In the Rider
Waite deck the two of wands shows a man in a red cape and astrakhan hat standing
between two wands anchored in the ground on either side of him; he’s holding
the world and gazing off into a distant vista of water and mountains and trees.
At one point, when I was sitting in my recliner, idly staring at this version
of the two of wands (I have lots of time to idly stare around the room these
days), it came to me that it might be saying something about carrying the world
on your shoulders and being forced to put it down. Angeles Arrien says the two
of wands is about balancing inner and outer power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This time is teaching me many things about
personal power, where it begins and where it ends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mostly I’ve learned we have a lot less of it
than we imagine we do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And there’s
another kind of power that comes in accepting that.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I read online this
morning that the two of wands is the card for partnerships, two people working
together successfully, and that makes sense to me in terms of what’s been going
on since I’ve had this broken, trying-to-heal shoulder. In October my old
friend John came from Washington, DC, with the idea of trying out Iowa City to
see if he wanted to move here. He was going to find a place to live but in the
end he just ended up staying with me, and when I broke my shoulder it seemed
like a miracle to have him here in my house. He’s had to help me in all kinds
of ways and he’s done it graciously and generously and without complaining. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">In the beginning I couldn’t get into or out of
bed by myself—it turns out it takes two shoulders to get in and out of a bed,
although I can do it now and I still have only one working shoulder.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">But in the beginning I had to call his name
at four o’clock in the morning and he would be in my doorway instantly, come
around my side of the bed, take my hand and help me get up so I could go to the
bathroom and take another Percocet. One night when the pain was especially bad
he sat on the edge of my bed and read me an essay by Emmett Fox.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">He read another one to me the first night I
had to sleep in the recliner after surgery—we stayed up till one in the morning
in my living room, him lying on the couch across from me, reading aloud in the
lamplight.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">(I slept in the recliner for
eight days, then moved to my bed, where I recline every night on a huge nest of
pillows.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">John says I’m like the princess
in the Princess and the Pea.)</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">He’s
cooked for me and done the dishes and brought my laundry down to the
basement.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">For the first two weeks after
the surgery I had to stand there in the kitchen while he taped Press and Stick
Glad Wrap over my shoulder and upper arm so I could very carefully get into the
bathtub and wash my hair without getting my bandage wet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Everything has felt
shaky and tentative ever sense I slipped on the ice without warning, crashed to
the sidewalk, and found myself in this incredibly vulnerable, trapped, and
painful place. I could never be doing it without John here. Now he mainly has
to take my brace off so I can go in the bathroom and carefully change my shirt—I
wear tops my friend Anne made for me, with snaps on the left shoulder for easy
removal and replacement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I’m
finished changing I stand in the middle of the kitchen floor and John helps me
back into the brace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He adjusts the
straps, pats me on the back, and says, “Now you’re ready to go out into the
world and do stuff.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<!--StartFragment-->
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">It’s a joke, of course. I can’t go out into the
world right now. All I can do is sit and hold the world in my hand, stare out
my window at the house across the street and the gray sky and the bare tree
branches, and wait for spring to come. </span>
<!--EndFragment--></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">April 9, 2018: Ten of Swords, Four of
Disks by Tania Pryputniewicz<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When Mary and I
pulled cards in January just two weeks after my mother died, I pulled the Ten
of Swords, “Ruin” with its image of ten sword handles ringing the periphery,
points poised to pierce a central heart, the main and thickest sword breaking
apart. I didn’t want that card for the month and tried a Mary tactic: I chose a
second card. I’m grateful Mary has taught me it’s ok to do so. You could
interpret the action conversationally a number of ways, as if saying to the
Tarot deck, “I don’t want this card,” or, “Show me another version of the same
message,” or “Can you give me a different lesson right now?” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">So I pulled the
Four of Disks—a relief! But since I couldn’t entirely let go of the memory of
having pulled the Ten of Swords, I kept both cards out all month. And both
spoke to me as is often the case. I love Angeles Arrien’s phrase for the Ten of
Swords, “Fear of ruin,” specifically love (the heart image) and finances (the
scales at the top). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the evaporative
state following my mother’s passing, I lost confidence, certainly retreating
from the world with a bruised heart, more prone to succumbing to fears in a Ten
of Swords way, passing through the initiation of a myriad “firsts” as a motherless
daughter—everything, from sleeping to cooking—no task too tiny to haul up the
free-floating anxiety: Here I go into another part of my life without my
mother. The hospice nurse forewarned us that it is natural to take for granted
the loving net of mother presence. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">And
then all of a sudden</i>, she said, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">When
you lose her, you wonder, “Can I do this without her?” <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In counter to
that worry, the Four of Disks in the Thoth Deck (aptly named “Power”) never
fails to give me a feeling of serenity. We see a structure made up of four linked
towers ringed by a moat. There’s a wide sunlit path leading to a shining golden
inner courtyard. I experience that sunny safe feeling here in our Southern
California home which is situated on the bend of the street, backyard sanctuary
where I write ringed by tall fence boards. In the front yard, we enjoy perpetual
summer: the yellow rosebush blooming and a blueberry bush offering up its
blueberries all year long. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The smallest
actions are the ones that heal the heart gradually, nothing fancy. Like walking
in the late afternoon sun in the San Diego desert, stepping around boulders,
lizards fleeing, turkey vultures wheeling overhead as my youngest scampers up and over the boulders. My middle son uses a rock to chalk a giant treble clef, claiming
his love of music. My husband hikes ahead and uses his phone to look up the names
of the peaks surrounding us. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I don’t mind
hiking nameless hills as long as I’m with my family. I can handle this level of
visibility in my role as a mother. It’s easier than the daughter-self haunting
me at night, the way the dreamtime I used to love is just another time during
which unwelcome and unanticipated questions rise: <i>Y</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ou
lost your mother…where is she now?</i> And I wake crying from Ten of Swords dreams
replaying it all back to me, still burning off the scenes of my mother
suffering as we cared for her the best we could. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Better the
waking world of agency, gradually overlaid with present activity, where I sand
down our rusting mailbox, primer it, and fend off my husband’s suggestions for
how to do the job. I kindly remind him I’m the daughter of a piano tuner/wood-worker,
and carry on, tape off the bronze medallion where the letters spell, “MAIL”,
then primer it rust brown, and best of all, put on a top coat, a rich and glossy
forest green. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It is a tiny
symbol of my willingness to engage again, spiffing up a box that holds words,
mine going out and letters from editors coming back in the slow old-fashioned
way. Soon I’ll feel up to stepping out past the perimeter of our gate and back
into the world, but for now, it is a beginning: Stamps ferry my words to and
from my green mailbox while I stay behind my own front door. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-61781799427284297192018-04-04T12:04:00.002-07:002018-04-04T19:20:12.013-07:00The Hanged One<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">January 22, 2018: The Hanged One by Tania
Pryputniewicz<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The Hanged One
sat behind glass in my Polish grandfather’s desk in my bedroom all November,
December, and into January during the months of caring for my mother (her
cancer returned) in her final days. “By suspending time, we can have all the
time in the world,” writes Joan Bunning of the Rider-Waite-Smith Hanged One (<u>Learning
the Tarot</u>). And I think of the way time slowed caring for my mother in the
reverse stages you experience watching your children gain mobility and freedom,
only this was witnessing my mother lose both. It triggered a physical pain in
the middle of my chest that hasn’t left yet.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">“The Universal
symbol associated with the repetitive patterns is the labyrinth,” writes Angeles
Arrien of the blue squares within squares Lady Frieda Harris puts in the
background of her version of the Hanged One. The central figure hangs upside
down by one foot just as we see in the Rider Waite version. A crowning light
pours from the head, a nod to the body’s physical reality: blood rushing to
fill the head and the senses. It doubles as a spiritual metaphor: golden halo
of illumination or awareness earned in moments of forced stillness. This was
the case for me and my siblings after seeing the black and white image of the
cancer’s snow falling through my mother’s throat, lungs, and torso, when the
doctor wouldn’t yet say it was certain she would die or when, something they
wait as long as possible to admit is inevitable with that kind of a resurgence
of cancer cells. But we all knew.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Hanging
suspended but able, caring for her in the two months she’ll have left, we watch
her steps slow until she needs to be steadied by a cane, then a walker, then a
wheelchair. And then, just like when I held my husband’s hand and crushed it in
time to the contractions of our first child, when my mother was no longer able
to swallow or talk, her hand clung to mine with a pulsed grip, waves of faint
but present life force coming through her fingers to mine and we had to guess
just as we did with our babies when she was hungry, when she was tired, when
she was cold.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And time nearly
ceased, remember? Just like the kindergarten hours. All the time to notice the
sidewalk one square at a time, to come to know intimately the block around the
house, the steps of each of the neighboring houses: one set painted purple, the
next set yellow, the next blue, then a darker red set, peeling. We knew each
garden. And where the rosemary lived. I’d stop the wheelchair and we’d crush a
little between our fingers and proceed, lifting our fingertips to our faces.
Our favorite garden sat behind a lattice brown fence we called, “The Roses”
with its six different rose bushes and one bright red soft-petalled rose that
persisted the last two weeks of her life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The day she decided
to ask for end of life meds, she named the rose Gabriella after her hospice nurse
and I cried with her as I pushed her in the wheelchair to the flower stand on
the corner where we could buy Gabriella a “thank you” rose as red as the one
we’d named after her and left alive in the garden. Mom picked out a card meant
for congratulating a new mother in which a pink fairy godmother rains stars
from her wand into a pink baby carriage. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">That’s
Gabriella</i>, she said, of the fairy, and I took solace in the metaphor of the
baby in the carriage as a harbinger of hope, a symbol of my mother getting
ready to cross into whatever rebirth there is in death. As she moved closer to
her time, I felt the incredible grip on my body—my husband and children pulling
on me at <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>home to return—Christmas, my
husband’s birthday—against my mother’s request that the three of her
children come to her bedside again since she’d decided she was done. I wanted
desperately to be in both places. But the Hanged One visited us all—even my
mother—when the hospice nurse read her vitals and said, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You might be ready, but your body is still strong. It might take longer
than you want.</i> And it did: ten days longer.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And so we took
her daily to the roses. After the slowed gaze at leaves stuck to the sidewalk
squares and the frantic tracking of every bench that Mom might need to rest on when
her ankles swelled and her knees began to buckle, we reveled in the sweet
relief of the wheelchair, its rolling peace, Mom drifting to sleep, her neck tilting
back as we passed the gardens we’d formerly only been able to shuffle past. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">On her last trip
to the coffee shop, our favorite, named Timeless, where my sister-in-law
introduced us to Oat milk Cappuccinos, Mom could only swallow a quarter bite of
the triple layer chocolate cake I bought for her. A little two-year old at the
table next to us stood on his chair, his father’s hand gripping the back of his
shirt. He stared in that little child way, continually: at mom’s wheelchair, at
her half-open eyes, at the way I held the fork to her mouth, the tiny cup of
coffee to her lips, watched me wipe her chin as his father did for him. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And the Hanged
One visited at night in the hours, when, finally I fell asleep, only to startle
awake to hear Mom sliding back out of bed, asking for soup, to talk, to paint
on her Buddha board, soft black lines of her brush strokes of water fading as
we talked. One night the mirror on the inside of her bedroom door disoriented
her. She so gradually slipped into the hallucination wreathe of the pain meds I
nearly missed it, except for when she sat looking at the book titles on the
shelf across from us, swinging her little bunny-eared slippers back and forth,
and she said, “Oh how shiny those book spines are,” and when I said, “Which
books?” and she replied, “That Viking Knitting” books, I realized she was
drifting…for the book spines actually read, “Vintage Knitting.” The Hanged One
visited as we sat pinned still, watching our mother change while we remained the
same: her children, of sound body and mind, while she morphed and slid into
changing realities, and then, the third day before she passed, into the coma of
sleep. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">“When the Hanged
One shows its serene and secret face, it is time to connect and explore the mysteries
only you can scribe and decode,” I read on-line (pyreus.com). But I was at a
loss to scribe and decode that first night of sleeping alone in my brother’s
house after they came for her body. We’d finally turned off the Celtic music
that had looped through her room all hours of the day and night the last four days
but I couldn’t bear to turn off her bedside light we’d also taken to leaving on
for her. The house felt thick and full and there was no cheerful Hanged One’s
halo of light to be found. I struggled to find peace, to feel calm, but the air
was just thick and heavy. Some crossings are made in the dark and alone. I know
in the days to come, light will break through whatever this darkness of loss is
and unpack the gifts of my mother’s life locked in my memory and in the
memories of our large and loving family, and those of her friends. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Another of the
Hanged One’s metaphors is the ladder. Both labyrinth and ladder feel accurate
to me. I am listening as I always have for what I am to learn. Someone, meaning
well, asked if I had asked my mother all my questions, if I had had all the
conversations I needed to have with her, had I had enough time. It’s probably a
question I would have asked too before I lost a parent. Yes, we talked. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">“No” is the
other answer, because now I live past her life into each day full of questions
I couldn’t have imagined I’d have for her. But as a writer, I have a lifetime
of pages of memories in my journals I’ve kept since I was a child. And the
solace of knowing we loved her through those Hanged One days by eating my
brother’s wife’s beautiful cooking, taking our mother to the rose garden,
watching the sunsets above the bay. That we fed her chocolate and coffee, binge-watched
The Great British Bake-Off, that she left us a few days after one more night
with The Sound of Music and Porco Rosso, that we held her hand and watched her
watch the pilot flying up into the clouds to approach the glittering Milky Way,
a Milky Way that turned out to be made up of the airplanes flown by pilots who
had already crossed over to the other side.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><b><span style="font-size: large;">April Update:</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">*Mary will be posting again with me later this month. In the meantime, I'm including a link to a beautiful Tarot entry she wrote about prevailing through grief after losing her sister; this entry was also featured at <i>Tiferet</i> Journal: </span></span><a href="http://tarotfortwo.blogspot.com/p/marys-favorites.html" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">The Moon</span></a></div>
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Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-80247223874323295202017-09-01T16:31:00.001-07:002017-09-01T16:31:57.594-07:00The Star Card, The Queen of Wands, and The Six of Wands<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">July 31, 2017: The Star Card by Tania
Pryputniewicz July 31, 2017</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I love the
graceful curves of the embodied Star in the Thoth Deck, her arms, legs and hair
radiant with celestial blue lavender. The tiny white star embedded in the pale
maroon planet behind Star Woman’s body mirrors a tiny blue star spilling out of
the top cup of two she holds in her hands. The path of the light trails coming
off the star points escape in concentric angular rings. The Wild Wood Tarot calls
this card The Pole Star, that star by which the first human travelers
navigated; they write that the star fields “wheel around it in fixed position.”
Angles Arrien writes that the card reminds us that each of us “is an opening for
light or a gateway through with the Absolute can manifest.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I piled the kids
in the car this month and promised them we’d stop at Moonlight Beach in
Encinitas where they could play along the shore break if they first agreed to
come with me on a garden/incense run. Not to the formal Meditation Garden where
they’d have to observe the rule of silence (according to the floating officer
of the Peace on duty) but to a different Peace Garden just up the street. In
this second garden, created by an ordinary woman, you are invited to select a palm-sized
white rock or two and choose a couple of colored pens from a ribbon suspended
on a tree branch.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The kids knew
what to do. They dropped down and began to draw, the garden at their feet full
of messages left by others, the most recent still readable, the older stones
fading under the southern California sun. Since my earlier visit with a friend,
a laminated photo of Gandhi had been added with the quote “be the change you
want to see” as well as a sign reminding dog walkers to refrain from allowing
their dogs to relieve themselves on the art. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We added our rocks, snapped photos in front of
the hanging wooden hearts and rainbow pinwheels, and then dashed into the Self
Realization Fellowship gift shop for sandalwood incense. I also picked up a
tiny free blue book, Cosmic Chants.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">After just one
night of chanting at dusk along the beach the Star card feeling comes on strong.
One of the lines from that night’s chant, “Opal Flame,” opens with, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shining, opening in hall of matter, O Star,
I peep through thee into the land of astral light that kindles life in
everything</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I walked along watching
the few rays of light make it through the cloud cover to shine far out on the
sea. All the while, at my feet, was this lovely miniature mirror realm of
clouds reflected in the sheen of retreating waves. This shifting landscape
washed free every time a new wave broke. I felt as if I could fall through the
clouds at my feet.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">That night I had
a dream that I was walking by the sea. The sun was a deep orange-red and
hanging low in the sky. Every time I took a step I floated up off the ground. I
was overjoyed at my newfound skill. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I love the way
and heaven and earth exist so nested: the incense, the little free blue book
from the gift shop, Moonlight Beach, the peace garden, and the chant reminding
me I need only put my hand on my heart and I am home again, close, but far, starbound
and earthbound at the same time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">July 31, 2017: The Queen of Wands and Six
of Wands by Mary Allen</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I picked two
cards last month: The Queen of Wands and the six of Wands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both happy auspicious cards but also cards
that feel a little generic to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
queen, according to Angeles Arrien, represents self-mastery or
self-reclamation:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s got her hand on
the head of a leopard sitting beside her, which is supposed to mean she’s come
through many dark places and chooses to remember them; hence, a gold leopard
with black spots. The six is the card for victory. In the Rider Waite deck the
six shows a prince riding in on a horse with followers beside him; he’s wearing
a garland on his head and there’s another one on the wand he holds in his
hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A great card to have for your card
of the month, even if you did pick it as an afterthought after you picked the
queen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The symbol that
speaks the most loudly to me right now as I look at these cards is the symbol
at the ends of the two upper wands in the Thoth deck six of wands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As far as I can tell, this symbol is the
Winged Eye of Horus, with roots in ancient Egypt, but the colors and imagery
look like Pueblo Indian things to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s turquoise, with red markings and red circles, and has snakes at the
base like you find in the desert, all of which reminds me of Taos, New Mexico.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I went to Taos
when this was my card of the month (one of them).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was down there for a week working with a
client on her manuscript, and when we weren’t working we went for walks in the
clear bright air.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One afternoon we
walked to an abandoned monastery and stood beside a tall white cross at the end
of a sandy path in the middle of an endless field of scrub brush.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We placed stones at the base of the cross and
then stood there looking out at the wide blue sky and the towering blue-tinged
clouds, surrounded by the quiet and the wind and the sunlight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I got stuck in
the Denver airport overnight on my way down there, and before that I taught for
a week and a weekend, gave an hour-long speech, and did many other things that
made me feel like I was caught up in a tornado, whipped around from one thing
to the next.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was more or less what
my whole month was like from beginning to end, with only that one moment of
peace and stillness among the scrub brush at the base of a cross.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I came through it, I wasn’t thrown off
the horse of myself at any point, including when I was lying on the hard floor
of the airport, hungry and exhausted and feeling flung to the ground by a
tornado in the form of the lightning storm that hit the airport during the time
my flight was scheduled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I came through
it all and was spit out the other end, I learned something from it all, I
managed to be myself, reclaim myself, through it all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I suppose that is a kind of victory.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Related Links:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="https://poetrymom.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-poem-for-lisa-meditation-garden.html" target="_blank">A Poem for Lisa: Encinitas Meditation Garden</a></span></div>
Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-45340863739610560802017-07-11T13:04:00.001-07:002017-07-11T13:07:18.972-07:00The Two of Wands and The Wheel of Fortune<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">June 2, 2017: The Two of Wands by Mary
Allen</span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">My card this
month was the two of wands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Power
brought down to earth and made personal, I’ve read this card means.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Thoth deck two of wands shows two crossed
red dorjes, an ancient traditional Tibetan weapon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So when this card falls I’ve always thought that it was talking, at
least a little bit, about power struggles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I guess I can
say that my month was about power brought down to the earth and made
personal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
love that idea—that’s what I’m talking about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And that’s what
I was trying to do all month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I spent a
lot of the month working on an essay about my desert vacation in March with my
friend JoAnn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And ever since
then I’ve been doing that with other things too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">June 2, 2017: The Wheel of Fortune by
Tania Pryputniewicz</span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">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.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And the other
surprise is to discover, through writing about various <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">poverties</i>, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">currency</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is </i>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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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).</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Additional link:</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">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:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;"><a href="https://youtu.be/q4oBxMzthRA" target="_blank">Tarot for Two podcast 3: Is it just a deck of cards?</a></span></div>
Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-69999245634327660722017-05-16T14:33:00.001-07:002017-05-16T14:33:32.801-07:00The Seven of Disks, Two of Swords and The Ace of Swords<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">May 5, 2017: The Seven of Disk by Tania Pryputniewicz</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">Last month when the Seven of Disks in the Thoth deck fell as my card of the month, I joked with Mary that the blue tree-like branches, arched and feathered, draped to form an owl with blue coins for eyes. Owls belong to the Illinois landscape of my childhood; I’m reminded of one little white owl I once caught sitting on a branch, nearly invisible in the falling snow and blue dusk. How swiftly she surveyed the landscape in one sweep! Equally brief: The sudden portal of our eye contact. Then she was gone.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">The Rider Waite version of the Seven of Disks could be part of this landscape too—we see a gardener in a tan smock, blue leggings, and tan boots leaning on his hoe while gazing down at his garden of vines bearing seven blossoms. His expression is morose, bereft, despondent. The harvest is abundant and apparent—Why the long face? Did he want more?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">The line I remember in relation to this card is “fear of failure” or “failure of the imagination” to see oneself thriving materially. When I referred back to Angeles Arrien, though, I found the phrase, “picture of fear of failure, or fear of success.” That particular variation on my memory, “fear of success,” intrigued me. Am I afraid of succeeding? Too comfortable hanging back? Relative anonymity has provided a beautiful shield behind which to incubate and create.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">So how does the Seven of Disks relate? In a month when my online class enrollment dipped, at first I felt like the mournful gardener. But very quickly, I realized I could redirect my teaching energy into the new prose project I’ve started. And while writing prose is not entirely new to me, poetry has been the “home form” for years. While raising my children, teaching, and blogging, I discovered I can write poems in short distracted bursts around pick up and drop off, ER rooms, lunch making, bake sales and what it takes to run a household with a frequently traveling husband.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">But writing prose requires more unbroken stretches. Additionally I am anxious as I go back into the terrain mapped in the poems. I’m doing this by re-examining an old prose manuscript I wrote just after finishing my MFA. It is overwhelming to see how many ways I’ve tried to write about it all—reincarnation, poverty, and mental duress—and still I am rummaging around, very much like that troubled gardener in the Seven of Disks looking down at his seeds emerging, vining, blossoming. And I’m wondering, how will I ever convey the beauty in the poison, the gifts in the obstacles? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">Mercifully, the press of “now” interrupts to keep me grounded. My son wants his guitar and amp dropped off in town, the dentist calls looking for my youngest son due in the chair ten minutes ago. As I drive to town, I’m panicked I’ll never have the time to see my story’s structure clearly enough, never know how to create a garden a reader could walk through with me. But even deeper than that is the fear of dying. Today I am laughing about it a bit—I feel desperate as a century plant tossing up all my seeds at once! I remember these feelings surfacing during the editing of my first book—and even further back between being accepted to the Writers’ Workshop and actually arriving there to start—this gripping fear that I’d die or somehow get in my own way and not be able to do the work.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">Of course, the only antidote is to keep writing. And to keep reading memoirs by other writers. Like <i>H is for Hawk</i>…which teaches me that you must allow yourself to love what you love without censor and bring that love to the page. And to allow time for the transition from writing poems—with their one luminous image focus—to writing prose, which is more like weaving a hammock than suspending a single crystal coin to catch the sunlight. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">May 5, 2017: The Two of Swords and Ace of Swords by Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">I ended up with two cards of the month last month. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">Before I pick my card of the month I spread all the cards out face down on the coffee table and then run my hand back and forth about three inches above them, hoping to feel some heat or impulse or something that will help me pick the right card, a happy auspicious card that will tell me something good is going to happen in the next month instead of something I don’t want to hear. When I was picking my card of the month last time my attention was strongly drawn to a certain spot in the row of cards, so I picked a card from there. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">I have to admit that I cheat a little when I pick my card of the month, pull it out and peek at the bottom and if I see it’s something I definitely don’t want—the three of swords, say, or the Tower or the 10 of swords—actually I don’t even have the 10 of swords in my deck because I took it out, but if it’s something else that I definitely do not want I put it back and pick another one. This time it was something I did want—the two of swords (Peace, in the Thoth deck, something maybe not quite as unambiguously favorable in the Rider Waite deck, more about that below), so I kept the two of swords. But then I thought, why not see what the card next to it is, since you felt so drawn to pull something out of this spot, what if that card is something better than the two of swords. So I picked that card out too and it turned out to be the ace of swords. So I decided to keep them both and have two cards of the month this time.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">The ace of swords, like all the aces, is about a gift from God or the universe. With the ace of swords it could be a gift of clarity or something else related to thought. I particularly like the aces in the Rider Waite deck. (Last time Tania and I decided we’d start looking at those cards too, in addition to the Thoth deck which we always use.) The four Rider Waite aces all show a hand coming out of a small cloud in the sky, and the hand, surrounded by white lines of light, is always holding something. With the ace of swords it’s a big sword with a crown at the top and two green garlands drooping from the crown. The sword looks kind of like Ex Calibur and there’s something vaguely Arthurian about the whole card: A line of small purple and blue mountains at the bottom look like medieval mountains, the regal crown with red jewels and garlands looks like King Arthur’s crown as it’s usually depicted. I guess I can say I like that ace of swords better than the Thoth one, which is also beautiful—that sword is bigger and looks, not exactly contemporary but timeless and a bit abstract. You don’t get the sense of history from it, not medieval history or any history, and instead of a crown at the top there’s a crown of huge rays of light (I do actually love those rays of light), and the sword is resting on a field of yellow light with a bed of clouds around the edges. They look like clouds you’d see from the window of an airplane instead of a cloud producing the hand of God above a medieval landscape. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">But I like the Thoth two of swords a little better than the Rider Waite two of swords, not necessarily because of how the Rider Waite two looks but because of something about it that I don’t like thinking is true of me in the last month. In the Thoth deck the two of swords is a simple image of two swords crossing, there’s a blue lotus at the crossing point, pleasing white geometric shapes in the background. At the bottom is the word peace. (All Thoth minor arcana cards have a word at the bottom; some of them bother me a little or don’t exactly capture what I think the card is about, but that’s not the case with peace for the two of swords.) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">The Rider Waite two of swords shows a woman sitting on a bench holding two swords, her arms are crossed and the two swords stick out at angles. There’s a shore and an ocean behind her, a yellow sliver of moon in a blue sky above, and a blindfold over her eyes. That blindfold that makes all the difference between the two twos. Whereas the two in the Thoth deck is about simple peace, the two in the Rider Waite deck suggests a slightly more complicated peace, peace achieved through denial, through not seeing something. At least that’s what it suggests to me, and when I see the image my heart sinks just a little.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">So what does this say to me about my month? When I looked at these three cards all month, the Thoth ace of swords and two two of swords, I thought of my meditation practice: How every morning I sit in the green brocade chair in the corner of my attic study, close my eyes, listen to the sounds around me, and meditate for twenty minutes. During that time I almost always do achieve peace, not for the entire twenty minutes, not by a long shot, but for at least a few moments here and there when I somehow manage to stop thinking and just listen to the sounds are me. When I get to that place I feel the gifts of light and energy and peace and clarity, I feel life itself, all around me, and I know in a deep way that that’s always there and all I have to do is get peaceful and quiet enough inside to find it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">So is there something I don’t want to see, something I need to put a blindfold of denial on about, in order to achieve peace, a la the two of swords in the Rider Waite deck? I suppose so. There always is. Right now it’s a few messy relationships issues, worries about money and not getting published and all kinds of other stuff. Maybe I am putting on a mental blindfold, trying not to think about those things. But maybe the card isn’t talking about that, doesn’t have to be talking about that, or maybe I don’t have to worry about (deal with) whether it is or not. Maybe I can just think of myself sitting in that chair every morning trying to turn my back on the ocean of thinking, worrying, planning, projecting, that seems to go on inside my head during every waking, non-meditating minute, whether I’m aware of it or not. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Additional Links:</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;">Tarot for Two's First Podcast, on YouTube:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://youtu.be/ItxNSDsMY1Y" target="_blank">How Does The Tarot Work?</a></span></span></div>
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Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-59228245357960574172017-04-20T15:51:00.000-07:002017-04-20T15:51:07.817-07:00The Empress and the Knight of Cups<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">April 7, 2017: The Empress by Mary Allen</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">My card this
month was the Empress, the third major arcana card in the deck. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to Angeles Arrien the Empress is
about love with wisdom. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The Empress
isn’t one of the cards I associate with myself or particularly relate to,
although I love how it (she) looks in the Thoth deck:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A crowned female figure holding a lotus, her face
viewed from the side, two moons and a bower of green leaves surrounding her, a
swan and a shield with a double phoenix on it at her feet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Except she doesn’t really have feet—her lower
body is green—the whole card is predominantly green and pink, she’s wearing a
pink top covered with symbols—and the green striped lower body might be a
mermaid’s tail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At first glance I can’t
figure out what she, and love with wisdom, had to do with the month I just went
through.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I spent two
weeks in the desert last month, on a writing hiking vacation with my friend
JoAnn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We stayed in the same Air BnB
house in 29 Palms we stayed in last year, sat across from each other at a
formica table on the sun porch and wrote every morning and then went for a long
hike somewhere in Joshua Tree National Park every afternoon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I decided to write about the vacation during
the vacation, which made me notice everything, made me more mindful more often,
than I would have otherwise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I love the
desert, love Joshua Tree, love hiking along the stony sandy trails that wind
among the huge ancient tan granite boulders in the park, I love that house and
the bedroom I’ve slept in there for two weeks, two years in a row now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I love the sound of the oleander scratching
on the window at night when I get into bed, I love sitting on the back patio in
the sunshine every morning looking out across the sandy yard dotted with
cactuses to the mountains in the distance, I love the air, the light, the
cactuses, the mourning doves that roost on the clothesline and the hummingbird
that sips and sips from the hummingbird feeder at the corner of the house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I loved every single thing about that
vacation, and I suppose you could say that by writing about it while I was there
I loved it with wisdom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Knowing I was
going to write about it made me feel, if not exactly wise, then awake, aware,
which I suppose is a kind of wisdom.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I don’t see the
desert in the Empress, the way I could see it in the Prince of Wands with his
golden corona and vehicle of fire, which I picked as my card of the month a
couple of years ago during another trip to the desert with JoAnn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Empress is a watery card rather than a
fiery one, all those pinks and greens and lotuses and water birds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the empress herself is resting in a bower
of her own making, an inner bower made of peace and loveliness and happiness,
and my desert vacation rests in my memory as a time of airiness and peace and
happiness, and the desert with its fierceness has a kind of loveliness of its
own.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">A couple of days
before the end of our vacation, JoAnn and I hiked a steep trail up one side of
a mountain and down the other side to an oasis, a place where forty-nine
ancient enormous palm trees grow in a fold among the rocks, fed by a spring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We sat there for a while on a large flat
piece of granite, eating almonds and drinking bottled water, listening to the
wind rattle the flat dry leaves of the palm trees, breathing the cool, green,
moist, pure air.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The green and pink
Empress sitting in her leafy bower makes me think of that cool green oasis
resting in the middle of the hard tan desert, and of our vacation opening like
a window of summer in the middle of our winters.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">April 7, 2017: The Knight of Cups by
Tania Pryputniewicz<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Oh the birds of
San Diego are happy, warbling over one another’s songs in elaborate riffs and
rounds! I’m sitting in the sun at a new wooden rectangular table on our back
patio. At first I was sad to move aside the old weathered round umbrella table
where I usually write, but the new one affords me room to scatter out my sketchpad,
colored pencils, and my Tarot book library.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Before we hung
up to write, I asked Mary where she’d be sitting. I can see her in my mind’s
eye at her kitchen table in Iowa. How cheerful to be so vividly bridged these
mornings, to be “taroting” (the verb Mary coined for our tarot play), together
again.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">For two months
now the Knight of Cups has presided over my altar. A pair of heart-shaped
shadows catches my eye first. They form the bottoms of the horse’s hooves as he
kicks up his heels. This white horse with a blue bridle bears a rider with blue
wings that echo pale blue shell-shaped sweeping waves, foamed, and one ethereal
blue peacock at the card’s bottom.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I love most the
rider’s wings. I’ve often thought the wings belonged to the horse, but the
wings spring from the shoulders of the green-armored knight. The knight holds a
chalice to the sky, a red crab emerging at cup’s rim. He’s offering up his heart
and the heart’s questions. In the image of the crab I see a layer of
protection, the color red so vibrant, a salute to the passionate heart. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The images suit
the heart work I engaged in this month. On the heels of completing a cycle of
poems about the commune I lived on as a child, I started mining the material
again in prose. I’m still excavating divorce, loss, geographical and
psychological moves—not in order to blame, but to understand motivations. Like
every writer, I must balance heart concerns for those I write about with concerns
for younger versions of myself. I need all three tools: chalice of open heart,
sheltering shell of the crab, and wings for aerial perspective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Alejandro
Jodorowsky puts these words in the mouth of the Knight of Cups: “My sole
desire, to realize this endless talent with which I’ve been invested, is to survive
so that I may remain within its service” (with Marianne Costa, <u>The Way of
Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards</u>). The part of this quote that interests
me most is the line: “to survive so that I may remain in its service.” In other
words, to write about difficult things, but to not get lost or feel eclipsed.
To survive, thrive, and be of greater service on the other side of whatever I
discover. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">When my husband
and I walk the dog at 6 a.m., usually the sky and sea mirror back blues. But this
morning found us under a light pink sky, ocean’s surface beveling towards us in
gentle silt grey and light pink waves. Near the parking lot we passed a crab.
Upside down and yards from the tide line, it glittered wet and bright
red as the chalice in the Knight of Cups card. My vote: dropped by a fisherman.
My husband: dropped by a bird. I love that the crab showed up scant hours before today’s Card of the Month writing.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I also see in
this Knight of Cups my husband and I offering up our hearts like parallel
knights in pursuit of our loves. He spends hours swimming in the sea and running
on land and mentoring others to bring their bodies to peak performance. And I
spend hours writing and when I can, mentoring others to
find their words. As the Shadow of Oz deck so beautifully states in relation to
the Knight of Cups, you must find a way to appreciate, “The overwhelming beauty
haunting your situation.” For today, I carry on, blissfully haunted by colors from
the blue prairie snow skies of the past to the sunrise pinks of now.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Upcoming on-line class
taught by Tania:</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.taniapryputniewicz.com/?p=4115" target="_blank">Entering theTarot Garden: An Introduction to Tarot</a><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-91046264074735869922017-01-29T16:55:00.000-08:002017-01-29T16:55:42.959-08:00The Three of Cups and The Hierophant<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">January 20, 2017: Inauguration Day, or
Three of Cups by Tania Pryputniewicz<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">It’s raining
here in San Diego, fitting for the blues I woke with today and assuaged by
writing my own inauguration poems with my students in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Election Blues: The Gift of Agency in Poetry</i> class I teach and
consider my act of rebellion. We sat writing our poems even as we all as a nation were heading for a
poetless inauguration ceremony for the swearing in of the 45th President of the United States and people were either getting on trains or not
getting on trains to attend or not attend the inauguration, or enroute or not enroute
to attend the following day’s Women’s March on Washington in Washington D. C.
and in sister cities in the United States and globally from Mexico City to
Sydney to New Delhi, to London <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and
Paradise Bay, Antarctica, and hundreds more.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Earlier this
week on the radio, I heard someone speaking about how it is never good to
boycott an inauguration ceremony because in a democracy the peaceful transition
of power is a big part of what we stand for--but what comes to mind is the
President Elect stating his own reservations about honoring the peaceful
transition of power should Hillary Clinton win during the Presidential debates
leading up to the election.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In another
snippet of radio interview this week, I overheard a woman designer speaking
about a male designer helping with inauguration decoration; the phrase they
used, that it would be characterized by “soft sensuality,” triggered
speculation that the inauguration would suffer from Trump’s brand of beauty
pageantry, girls on stage or in the wings. Other comments followed,
speculating that “soft sensuality” might be used here to pull in television
viewers either curious to see what was meant by the phrase or those attracted
to the lifestyle Trump formerly lived as when he was taped making lewd comments
and accused by former pageant contestants of entering their dressing areas
because he owned it all. These kinds of banterings, more often than not,
consume the air-waves, and I, more often than not, have children in the car on
the way to or from school listening, always, and I more often than not turn off
the radio in favor of silence when my children are with me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">How does this
relate to my card of the month, The Three of Cups? In the Thoth deck, golden
light overflows from down bent lotuses into rich red pomegranate chalices. How
can this image relate to this month and the intensely charged political climate
of fear, anxiety, and opposition? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In Pamela Waite
Smith’s version of The Three of Cups, three women raise their cups to the sky;
one wears a white robe, one wears gold, the third, red. One dons blue boots,
one yellow boots, and the third, feet shrouded by the robes of her companions,
perhaps goes barefoot. Flowers garland the heads of the trio; a cluster of
grapes trails the down bent palm of the wearer of the golden gown.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Maybe this card
is a tiny symbol of the joyful, celebratory, strength created by groups of
women such as those gathering to march as an antidote to the myriad collective
upsets, knitting and wearing pink hats in an attempt to reclaim a word so
disparagingly used by the incoming President. Or on behalf of the seeming
failure of checks and balances as the incoming administration’s candidate
confirmations barrel along unopposed despite so many concerns raised about
qualifications in the hearings. Maybe this card is a pictorial version of
joining hearts through bridgework, as one might do, during this kind of strife,
helping communities galvanize to take practical and ethical action on behalf of
the greater good for all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Angeles Arrien
says the cups in this card symbolize the “abundant communicating heart.” At
night, I have been raising my own heart to the sky, to the stars, praying,
listening for the next right action to take towards harmony. So that harvest be
possible, oranges ripen on trees, pumpkins on the vine, like those at the feet
of the Three of Cups women. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I also see in
this Three of Cups an image of the women in the Obama family celebrating their
hours under the White House roof: the hundreds of dancers, performers, writers,
and children of all nationalities Michelle Obama invited to perform and visit,
the thousands of young African American girls now believing they have a chance
to be President--indeed cause for donning of gowns and the braiding of flowers
in our hair. No matter who sits in the White House, there are children to
raise, hungry to feed, people to love right in front of us in our own country
and across the seas globally. Thank you Michelle, Satia, and Malia for the
hours of your life you gave to us. I raise my pomegranate chalice to yours,
draw strength and courage, from the example you set.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">January 20, 2017: The Hierophant by Mary
Allen<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">My card of the
month this time was The Hierophant, the fifth Major Arcana card in the
deck.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Hierophant is also my life
card.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(You can figure out your life card
by adding together the numbers of your birthday, including the year, if you
come up with a double-digit number higher than 22 you add the two digits
together.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve always been sort of
dismayed by having the Hierophant as my life card, thinking, probably rightly,
that it predicted a lifetime full of painful lessons and opportunities for
growth for me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The minor arcana fives
aren’t much fun either, depicting, as they do, strife, poverty, defeat and
disappointment, mostly all in the mind, as the minor arcana usually are.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I’ve read that
the Hierophant was originally meant to represent the pope or some other
powerful figure in organized religion, maybe the power of organized religion
itself, a concept that doesn’t mean much to me when I pull this card.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much more meaningful to me, and closer to how
I look at it, is Angeles Arrien’s interpretation that the Hierophant has to do
with learning and teaching experienced through life challenges. These days when
I look at the Hierophant—big bearded orange-outfitted male figure with a
smaller, blue-dress-wearing female figure standing in front of him, a tiny baby
penciled into a star in the male figure’s heart—I think of higher powers, my
higher power, which, as someone who has belonged to a twelve-step program for
almost twenty-five years, I’ve cultivated a relationship with, tried to turn my
will and my life over to daily, for so long I can hardly remember not doing it.
I’ve grown into the habit of at least trying to live in concert with my higher
power, of wondering what my higher power could be trying to teach me or tell me
with all the major and many of the minor events of my life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So when this card came up for me as my last
card of the month, I wondered what the universe, Life, my higher power was
going to be teaching me or telling me in the weeks to come.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I did have an
interesting December.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And for once the
lessons I seemed to be called upon to learn weren’t painful ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For at least thirty years I’ve had a
recurring dream that I had to fly to Hawaii and I was scared to and I couldn’t
bring myself to get on the plane, and last month, on the 15<sup>th</sup> of
December, I was called on, in the form of a text from my ex-partner’s oldest
daughter, to actually get on a plane and fly to Hawaii.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Plane ticket, lodging, other expenses all
provided.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I couldn’t help but look at it
as a higher power thing, as my higher power calling me to give up that old
fear, whatever it was, not exactly fear of flying but more like fear of moving
forward in life, fear of getting off the ground.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Flying to Hawaii
in real life was nothing like flying there or actually not flying there in the
dream and I had a lovely trip, full of warmth and sunshine, the ocean, palm
trees, coconuts, walks on the beach, time with my ex-partner’s family which, it
turns out, is still one of my families even though he and I haven’t been a
couple and have hardly spoken to each other for at least five years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was there too and it was nice to spend
time with him, but whatever lessons I was supposed to learn from him in this
lifetime have already been learned, so it was painless, easy, simple, and not
particularly significant to be around him for six days. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So maybe here the Hierophant message could be
about lessons learned, big lumps of old spiritual food having been finally
swallowed and digested.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Donald Trump was
inaugurated as our 45<sup>th</sup> president a week or so ago, when I had this
card as my card of the month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And as I
look at the Hierophant now I’m thinking that maybe, in the larger spiritual sense
which the tarot cards talk to us about through symbols, our current political
circumstances could be happening for a reason, that we’re getting Donald Trump
for our 45<sup>th</sup> president so we can learn something, maybe many
things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lessons about how to have faith
and accept others and affect change, about how destructive and bad form
blaming, mocking, and name-calling are, ditto the objectification of women,
homophobia, racism, and who knows what.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In any case, it seems we are all being called on to stay close to our
best selves and higher powers, to stand in the shadow of them and be protected
by them so we can learn what there is to learn.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-3568634544442344362016-12-14T09:46:00.001-08:002016-12-14T12:49:29.605-08:00The Lovers and The 2016 Election<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">November 20, 2016: The Lovers by Mary
Allen <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">My card of the
month in this 2016 election month was the Lovers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Right before I picked it, about a week before
the election, the image of Donald Trump passed across my mind and when the card
I turned over turned out to be the Lovers, I thought that was a good sign, a
sign that my candidate, Hillary Clinton, was going to win the election.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Having that card on my mantle in the days
leading up to the election made me optimistic—I pictured myself being happy and
relieved on the night of November 8—and I kept thinking that the only possible
interpretation of that card had to do with me loving what she stands for, my
values, my democracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I even thought of
that card when it started to look like Trump was going to win the election, I
kept thinking that there was still some hope because, after all, I picked the
Lovers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We all know how
that story turned out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So now I’m trying
to figure out what, on a deeper level, the Lovers could have been talking
about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course, there’s always the
possibility it could be talking about something in my own personal life instead
of the public arena.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And there’s also
the possibility it could be talking about… nothing, that is, as we sometimes
say when the cards don’t seem to be talking to us at any given moment or we
hate what we think they’re saying, Oh well, it’s just a deck of cards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I don’t think so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s nothing in my personal life right now
that’s even close to being as compelling to me as what’s going on in America and
if there was ever a time the cards were going to talk to me, I think, this
would be it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So how I can interpret the
Lovers in this moment?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">To me, this is a
huge moment in history, much bigger than what we usually think of as
politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Probably opportunity as well
as danger, as the Chinese symbol for crisis tells us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So maybe the Lovers is about the opportunity
this crisis represents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe what’s
really happening here, on a larger spiritual plane, is that this current crisis
in our public lives in America—it is a crisis, I don’t care what anyone thinks,
we have a guy who insists there’s no global warming becoming the head of the
EPA, white supremacists being appointed to key positions where they can make
decisions and influence the whole country—but maybe all that is somehow bringing
us to the opposite of what it looks like now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Maybe on a deeper level this is what we need in order to truly become the
Lovers, with the king and queen finally getting married, with women getting
equal power with men, with everyone, white, black, brown, gay, trans, anything,
becoming included in the cosmic love, becoming equal members of the couple with
everyone else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It doesn’t look
like that’s happening right now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
fact, it looks like just the opposite is happening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It looks like instead of being a time for the
Lovers it’s a time for Haters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
Haters are in ascendency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Stephen
Bannon, about to move into the White House as Donald Trump’s right hand man,
has actually said he celebrates hate, and DT himself got where he did by
playing on his supporters’ fear and hate.) But maybe this will be a kind of
healing crisis, where even though we don’t know it we’re getting what we need,
where we’re getting real, bringing the poison to the surface, seeing what
happens if we ignore the poison or coast along without worrying about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe we’re getting motivated to go deeper,
fight harder, to get to where we need to go, so that everyone can get behind
being the Lovers instead of the Haters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">December 14, 2016: A Short Note from Tania Pryputniewicz </span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Mary and I decided to shift our Tarot Card of the Month writing
lens to write about current events this month. We spoke for a moment, our
usual, “Hello, love you, talk to you on the other side of writing,”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and hung up to write. And don’t you know I
didn’t--couldn't yet face--writing a thing about the election. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know I’m not alone, as a writer, in terms of
having this stunned response to the results.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I loved what Mary wrote so much and I feel blessed to have her
words during this month in which I lost mine. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-9996715612352883222016-11-03T12:30:00.000-07:002016-11-03T12:33:38.963-07:00Taking Stock at Tarot for Two: Five Years of Tarot Card-of-the-Month Writing<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">October 28, 2016: Tania Pryputniewicz’s Five Year Card-of-the-Month Retrospective
<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">What a blessing to hear Mary’s sleepy little voice all the
way in Iowa! She is drinking the rest of yesterday’s tea and I am here with my
thrice-heated coffee and whipping cream ready to celebrate five years of our Tarot Card of the Month practice. We decided to take stock—neither of us realizing we
were at the five-year mark—but just instinctually coming up for air with our
process to see if we want to shift our focus in some way. We asked, which cards
have we gotten and written to over the years? Might we want to narrow our engagement, for
example, with just a pool of Majors? People cards?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I set aside this morning after kid drop-off to sit at my
computer and go through my entries. But the universe played a joke on me, or
maybe it was the Tarot herself, and the power clicked off in the house just as
I sat down. I forgot about the scheduled power outage—Power Company note magneted to
the fridge, drifting as magneted fliers do to the bottom beneath The Space
Night poster along with the template for clipping Box Tops for Fifth grade, the notice about the Rummage Sale and the photo of me and and a dear mom
friend at the taping of American Ninja Warrior in Los Angeles.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">With black blank screen staring up at me, powerless, I
reached up on my shelf, past the Eiffel Tower postcard and one of Mary’s early
author photo possibilities and moved aside the adjoined postal stamps of Electra
and Ironman flying in a tiny red frame that I gave my husband for Valentine’s
Day. Behind it sits the red “Tarot with Mary” folder so used and worn that its seam
has long since broken apart. The folder halves act as flimsy, frayed bookends
for a two-inch stack of looseleaf Tarot pages.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I have to pour through the handwritten entries individually
to make my list, some entries undated. How could I not date certain entries? I
must have been in a rush to lift the grief out of my skin and onto the page, to relate it to the healing aura and colors of the card in question, knowing that
Mary, on the other side of 25 minutes would listen to me read out loud, would
laugh at the funny parts, would let out a sigh at the sad parts, wait for me to
finish, and then repeat back to me her favorite phrases in my exact words. That
she would then read me her writing and give me the respite of coming out of
myself long enough to listen to her, her joys, her pains, and to take notes and
capture the phrases of hers I fell in love with as she anchored her life and
lived experience of hope to her card of the month.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Over the years, 21 times a Major fell, 7 times I drew people
cards, 6 times I chose a wands card, and an equal number of times I drew cups and
swords (5 times). As a Capricorn, just as I’d expect, of all the suits, disks
fell the most (8 times). Only once the Ace fell, the Ace of Cups, my third
entry, during a hard time in my marriage. It followed closely on the heels of the
Ten of swords (during a period of trial separation). I remember thinking, what
is that Ace saying to me? And yes, I had to learn to love myself, by myself again,
in order for the marriage to thrive. Into that dark time came Mary’s voice and
the birth of our ritual of card pulling and card writing, one of the most tangible practices I can think of for experiencing the kind of self-love the Ace of Cups
promises.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">All the way from that first Ten of swords to this month’s
Star Card, I see that no cataloging of which cards fell can convey the blessing
of shared inquiry with Mary. Our friendship, fertile and rich from the years we
lived in Iowa City, picked up again after a ten-year quiet period. We began again
to walk the heartland, just not geographically anymore. These days we walk the heartland
of the spirit using the Tarot to lift us up. So many pages of writing and hours
of phone calls later, I am overflowing with gratitude. I’m thinking of the Star
card—with her mediator body of blue and lavendar holding up to sky one cup and
spilling out of the other cup the watery starlight of her visions. With Mary
I’ve been to heaven and hell and always returned to this body, this life, on
the earth we share with renewed hope and strength to face the month until our
next appointment with the Tarot.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><b>October
28, 2016: Mary Allen’s 5 Year Card-of-the-Month Retrospective</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">We decided last time
that this time we’d take a retrospective look at all of our cards of the month
so far.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seemed like a good idea;
we’ve been doing this for a while.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then
we realized this morning that we’ve been doing this for almost exactly five
years—we started on October 6, 2011—and it seemed like an even better idea.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">So this morning I
read through most of my card-of-the-month writing, beginning back in 2011.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was sort of shocked to realize I was still
with my former long-time </span><span lang="DA" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: DA;">partner </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">(we
were together for nine and a half years) when I picked that very first card
(the Ace of Wands), then interested to see how I got the Five of Cups
(disappointment) a couple of months later, on the morning of the very day I
found out he was maybe with someone else, and how I got the Seven of Cups
(debauch) a month later, after he and that woman had gotten together and he and
I had broken up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">It felt sort of good
to look back and see how I used the cards and writing about the cards to search
for meaning and healing in all that, how I moved through it and out the other
end and then moved on to future cards and months.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was interesting to see my life through the
lens of the cards over the last five years, passing through two devastating
losses, the loss of that partner being one, and through various phases of other
relationships and with myself, of happiness and optimism or worry or misery, of
my own healing or lack thereof. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Some months were more
interesting than others:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the writing was
better or the connection between the card and the month was clearer or what
happened that month was more interesting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The month I got the Prince of Wands (male figure in a chariot, sun rays
all around his head, everything in shades of gold and red) and my friend JoAnn
and I were on vacation in the desert and I had a near encounter on a hiking
trail with a swarm of Africanized bees, just like the little black bees flying
around Prince of Wands’ head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">There was the month I
got the Moon and my sister died—my second big loss during the five-year period,
by far the more devastating one—and I wrote about her going to the other world
and me traveling to the underworld of the flu and my own grief afterwards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was that month when both Tania and I
picked the Death card and I decluttered my house, refinanced a bunch of debt,
and found a dead rabbit beside my shed, and when my friend John’s father
died.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">There was the time I
got Lust in December, a card Angeles Arrien tells us has to do with luster, or
radiance, then I went for a walk on a short cold day in the middle of a series
of short gray almost lightless days, and the sun came out and every leaf and
blade of grass and piece of mica in the sidewalk were glowing as if illuminated
by a light from within.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The time I had
the Ace of Wands and my fire alarm went off in the middle of the night and I
lay awake for hours afterwards and decided to put my short pieces into a collection.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">There were certain
cards that came up more than once, some I never saw at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Overall I got 18 major arcana cards, 12
people cards (the Queen of Cups, the Princess of Cups, and the Princess of
Wands came up over and over), 5 aces, and more cups than any other minor
arcana.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I got the Sun once, the Star
twice, the Chariot three times, the Hermit twice, the Devil a couple of times,
and— just once— the Universe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I feel as if I should
make some kind of final statement about all of this, but I find I can’t really
think of anything to say.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is there
to say about life itself, the way it keeps going on, when even the big moments,
the Universe, the Chariot, the Sun, the Star, just lead to other mostly smaller
moments, to worries and disappointments, the seven of wands, the five of disks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then those pass too and we move on to
something else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-27492133506189679802016-10-06T13:10:00.003-07:002016-10-06T14:11:45.547-07:00The Hermit, The Seven of Swords and Fortune’s Wheel<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">September 16, 2016: The Hermit by Mary
Allen</span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I had a vision
involving my card of the month this month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Sometimes I have a hard time figuring out what to say about the card of
the month because I’m not sure exactly where the card and the month intersect—I
don’t really know what the card said about the month—but this month I don’t
have that problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This month the
problem I have is describing the vision.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Let’s start with
the easy part:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The card was the Hermit,
the ninth major Arcana card.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the
Thoth deck the Hermit is an abstract figure:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>All you see that’s person-like is a hand and a head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rest of the card is full of symbols:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a large paper-hat-shaped crystal, a
peacock-feather background, something that looks like an egg with a snake
wrapped around it and something that looks like a sperm heading directly ward
the center of the card; Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding hell, down in
the corner, one dog head looking back at the past or at whatever’s coming from
behind, the other two looking forward.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The face of the
Hermit is featureless, turning to the side, and the hand is holding a diamond-shaped
crystal lamp that contains a small glowing sun.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s that sun inside that little lamp, held by the hand in the rough
center of the card, that seems to be the focal point of the card, and it was
that lamp that I saw during the vision I had this month. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I had just been
traveling around in the deep dark waters of my earliest childhood via EMDR (it
stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing; it’s a kind of therapy
that helps with symptoms of PTSD and other inner disturbances; I do it once a
month with my friend who’s a therapist and once a month with my regular, paid
therapist; on this day I was doing it with my friend).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was deep trauma in my early childhood
which is stored now in my unconscious, in the very bottom of the basement of my
mental house, under some trap door that in regular life you could never get
open. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">It’s only
through the agency and the miracle of EMDR that I can go there at all, how I
got there on this day, how EMDR works, is too much to write about now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What I want to say is that at the end of my time
down there, when my session was almost over and it was time to start coming up
from below, my friend suggested I might picture a container inside myself where
I could store those painful feelings until I needed to take them out
again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe a container with a lock on
it, she said, using an image she’d learned in her therapy training, a good
image that works to help many people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">But in that
moment it came to me that I didn’t want an interior container with a lock on
it, I didn’t want or need to keep those feelings locked away, that was the
problem I’d been having all along.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And a
vision of something started forming in my mind—if mind is a word you can use to
describe the vast airy mysterious world of consciousness that lives inside of
us or that we live inside and that isn’t inside or outside of anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In that moment in that place I started
seeing something, some image started forming vaguely inside me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">It was familiar
but I couldn’t figure out what it was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some
small vessel full of light.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Light that
would illuminate the feelings I had just dredged up from the deepest darkest
place inside me, the subbasement of the unconscious underneath a trap door. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A vessel that would hold the energy of those
feelings, not keep them locked away somewhere but transform them, turn them
into a glowing warmth inside me, starting somewhere around my solar plexus and
spreading out, filling me with their light and healing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">It wasn’t until
I was on my home that I realized that what I was seeing in that vision was the
light in the lamp at the heart of the Hermit card.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then I was stunned by the synchronicity
of it—by the way that life collaborates with dreams and the unconscious and the
tarot cards, maybe even the ordinary details of the everyday world itself, to talk
to us about out deepest selves and about our healing, as if life has a mind and
a consciousness of its own that’s just waiting for us to ask it a question. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;">September 16, 2016: The Seven of Swords and The Wheel of Fortune by Tania Pryputniewicz<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Sometimes Mary
and I pull Tarot cards we respond to negatively—so we select again. Why not? Even
though I’m a Tarot seeker committed to equanimity, I get a wrinkle in the
spiritual cape like anyone else when I get certain cards on certain days. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Which is what
happened this month when I drew “Futility,” also known as the Seven of Swords in the Thoth deck. We see a central sword starting to fracture under impending tips
of six other swords. But notice: the six sword tips are not actually touching
or fully breaking the main sword. It is an apt metaphor for how imagined trouble
creates fractures in mindset such as feelings of failure or hopelessness. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Not wanting to
spend the entire month in a “Futility” narrowed state, I pulled The Wheel of
Fortune as my back-up. I felt immediately cheered reading Angeles Arrien’s
promise for this card that “expansion and abundance come with the willingness
to change and keep things moving by taking risks and being open to new
opportunities” (<i>The Tarot Handbook: Practical Applications of Ancient Visual Symbols, </i>Arcus Publishing Company).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Still, I kept my
Seven of Swords out of some kind of Tarot allegiance. And both cards spoke to
me this month. It started when I got my latest Social Security statement detailing
my life earnings. Or not detailing them—years of zeros stared up at me starting
sixteen years back (when the first of my three children came along) with a few $500
to $1000 per year earnings sprinkled in there.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I know better
than to reduce my worth as a person to my earnings, but I couldn’t help but do
the math. The lifetime sum of money, which I started earning at the age of 16,
averages out to earnings of just under $400 a month. I hamster-wheeled through
my past, reviewing what seemed at first a futility of repeated tasks that have
only slowly started to yield financial gain: years of journaling, editing, making
art, blogging about writing and motherhood, teaching poetry, blogging, and
Tarot writing online, in person, and at writing retreats, editing and publishing
poetry, and making poetry movies--all in disparate sequences that prioritized
my children, my marriage, and my mental health.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I’ve often felt
frustrated trying to figure out how to earn more while keeping the family
mobile as peacefully as possibly balanced. But something shifted me out of
Seven of Swords angst and into The Wheel of Fortune this month, just as
the cards suggested. In part due to the obvious—that I live a privileged life
and have a partner lucky enough to persist in a career he loves and secure
enough about his own views of parenting that he encouraged me to stay home with
our children, and also due to conversations with other mothers. And a
conversation with my brother. He listened to me vent on the one hand and then he
listened to me talk passionately about the latest group of classes I’ve
designed and he said, “You are a fabulous mother. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">And</i> you are so much more than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">only</i>
a mother.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">All the at-home prioritization
is a soul investment you can’t see mirrored in a Social Security statement—a
document not set up to account for the cost of childcare for three children,
the acting-as-a-taxi time, the doctor time, the food preparation and shopping,
the emotional and psychological cost of supporting the wage earner…all those blessed
and chosen hidden costs which are truly the cost of presence. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">My poet friend
said, “You take a pen to that Social Security statement: Next to all those
so-called zeros, you write in what you were doing all those years! All those
hours of time with your children! Make up your own Social Security statement. You’ve
been investing in creating socially creative and responsible adults.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">My shift from
Seven of Swords thinking to Wheel of Fortune blessings might also be prompted in part
by the Paragrams in my purse, those 1x2 inch cards you can get in a tiny
envelope for free at the Self Realization Fellowship Garden just down the block
from the Encinitas Meditation Garden with excerpts taken from the teachings of
Paramahansa Yogananda… which I keep right next to my little red Pocket Pema
Chodron…. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">…which means
when I’m sitting in my battered, dusty, blue van waiting for my son to race out
of the house in time to catch the school bus--and out he comes with tennis
shoes in one hand, back pack unzipped and listing last night’s math homework,
bowl of oatmeal in the other hand, milk sloshing out across the van carpet as he slides
in--I use those twenty second not to lay on the horn or yell, but to select a
Paragram and read it. Or to open to Pema, to read how we are perpetual
children ourselves, that all of us eternally long to fall back into our mother’s
protective aura, perpetually not feeling “ready” to risk. Pema says we get
stuck in wanting to wait to feel fully ready to risk (<i>Awakening Loving-Kindness</i>, Shambhala Pocket Classics).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">But we’ll never
be ready…so we just need to keep jumping into the fray.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">There must be plenty
of other mothers and stay-at-home fathers sharing this stymied mix of
heart-centered joy/satisfaction of doing right by the kids and low self-esteem
that gradually creeps in when we are not earning (or at least not earning as much as the
primary wage-earner). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I can do my tiny
part to change the culture of how we view stay-at-home moms and dads by
changing how I treat myself: I can stop being cruel (goodbye Seven of Swords) about
my long list of zeroes…stop seeing them as evidence of a Fool choosing not to
earn…and see them instead as reminders of the repeated choice to stay within
arm’s reach of my children during the years they needed me. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And I can
welcome the Wheel of Fortune: the children blossoming in their independence. From
under my son’s door, I hear the lovely strains of his guitar music. On my
kitchen table, I see the intricate fern spiral designs taking form inside of my
daughter’s Medusa drawing. And under my palm for a second before he’s off to
shower, heat radiates up from the sweaty forehead of my youngest just back from
skateboard practice. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-63584938556013835242016-09-02T15:20:00.001-07:002016-09-03T09:26:39.116-07:00The Chariot and the Queen of Swords<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">August 5, 2016: </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The Chariot by Tania Pryputniewicz</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Always the
framing colors in this card call to me—cobalt blue of Chariot canopy with ice blue
interior and shining red rims of wheels. This Chariot, though confined to a sphere,
is somehow entirely believable and ready to roll thanks to Lady Frieda Harris and
the sacred geometry she uses throughout the deck.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The golden armored
charioteer holds a violet-rimmed chalice in lap so we are looking down into its
interior. It forms a disk of spinning colors from violet to blue to the very
center’s red which we can construe as blood or the Holy Grail in which our life
stream spirals in a stilled view of the self in motion. Or an apt image of what
we try to do as writers with our words, artificially portioning off stills from
a life ever in flux. I’m thinking about that balance of vulnerability and shielding
that we navigate always. And the strength it takes to survive the memory field, going in a second time after
having lived through the events under scrutiny in order to write about them.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">All month long I
participated in a thirty-one day poetry challenge offered by Zoetic Press in the hopes of rounding out <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fool in the Corn</i> (my manuscript in
progress about an Illinois commune I lived on as a child). What came were a lighter,
humor-based series of New Age misadventure poems. I wasn’t expecting to find
humor, but there it was--and much welcome, as I considered spiritual tools, teachers,
and fellow seekers I encountered after leaving the commune. With a steady habit
of daily writing already firmly in place, the challenge was pushing from
free-write to culled draft of poem. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Traditionally
The Chariot calls on us to consider which vehicle we need in order to move
forward, and to size up one’s terrain. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Am
I going into battle? Heading into a new career? New direction? What is the ordinary
life-sized message in the soul metaphor of this card?</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">As I’m still
immersed in child rearing, there’s no great career I’m trying to embark upon. The
only battlefield is the one I traverse internally, as when I sat and waited for
students to arrive for a poetry workshop I was teaching last month on the theme
of Harvest. I waited with a swath of books and ideas about gardens; a deck of constellation
and star cards from the boys’ room; my battered copy of a Child’s Garden of
Verses still containing my little sister’s signature on the inside cover, with
her tiny star dotting the “i” in Christy. I brushed dust off the spine of an
old encyclopedia I’d grabbed on plants and fanned and re-fanned my worksheets.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Twenty minutes
later when a student finally appeared, I put on the teacher armor and pretended
not to doubt myself or be embarrassed no one else came. The class meets once a month; it’s
the right speed for my life, and yet, here comes this feeling of not doing enough, being
enough. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I place this
internal seed of doubt in the chalice and offer it up, writing my way through
it with Mary. How blessed I am to reflect on the Chariot card and realize that
yes, that thirty-one day challenge was the perfect vehicle for hearing the next
layer of the journey out of child’s view of the commune. Sure, the leader was
one of the Fools in the Corn, as were perhaps my parents and other followers,
initially duped, but what of my own adult self, who had to find her way out of “Fool-dom”
and into reality, sorting the True from the Not True. I see now that structures of religion can
give us a false sense of security—the answers laid out as if we can somehow
magically forego the threshing and sorting of experiences that being human
affords us by birthright. As if we won’t have to learn to use our internal
compass, regardless of outer chariot.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Maybe that spinning
chalice in the Charioteer’s lap is a centrifuge. I want, in my writing, to
distill, arrive at, some sanguine insight, some life-giving idea that I haven’t
wasted my life believing in false prophets. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">When I look once
more here at the card, I hone in on the placement of the chalice: middle of
body, between heart and root, over the will center, where our free will blooms.
Yes, the freedom to choose is a responsibility, but far more, it is a gift. At
some point we have to give up our Leaders and listen within.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And that is what
I am doing, resting in process of this second book, still sitting in the Frieda Harris's
Chariot and poised at the pale blue tunnel of the entrance to the Now—those blue nested
background rings like so many contractions, as of a woman in labor.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>August 5, 2016:
The Queen of Swords by Mary Allen</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">This month I had
one of those cards of the month where I know what I think the card generally
means and I know it’s a good card for me in general, one that I identify with
and get fairly often, but I have no idea what if anything it has to say about
the particular month we just passed through:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Queen of Swords.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I picked her
while I was on vacation, throwing the cards with Tania at her house. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">It was the next
to the last day of a seven-day trip so I was in transit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing in that moment was particularly
stable, and my trip home couldn’t have been more unstable, driving in the
middle of the night from San Diego to LAX on those much-bigger-than-I’m-used-to
highways, getting lost midway there, being terrified of the trucks and traffic
and being late when we got closer to LA.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Then flying into
Iowa in the middle of a possible tornado, roiling clouds outside the window,
turbulence like I’ve never experienced before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Queen of Swords sits high in the blue sky on top of a bank of
blue-tinged clouds, and maybe the cards were talking about that trip home,
making a sly little comment about it, when they gave me her as my card of the
month. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">She’s bare
breasted, wielding a sword in one hand and grasping a gray old-man mask in the
other hand; the idea is that she cut that mask off herself and isn’t afraid to
let show her true face show.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And rising
up above behind her head, staring toward heaven at the top of a large crystal
many-pointed star, is a child’s face; the idea there is that she also sees the
world, not through an old, worn-out, false perspective as in a mask, but from a
child’s fresh, innocent, honest way of seeing things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And I guess I’m
not too modest to say that’s true of me. I spend my days writing and engaging
in other activities—thinking, meditating, going to twelve-step meetings—that
involve seeking clarity, truth, and authenticity beyond roles, trying to take
down my old worn preconceived notions and habits and fears and you name it and
let my true self show through.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According
to Angeles Arrien, the Queen of Swords is a kind of counselor and also seeks
counseling for herself when she needs it, that people ask her for clarification
when they have the need to get to the bottom of things, and I’m willing to say
that that’s true about me too, as a writing coach, sponsor, long-time
therapy-goer, twelve-step-meeting attender, and most of all writer who
unceasingly tries to get to the bottom of things. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">But when I look
back on my month I can’t think of any particular instances where I was doing
that any more than any other times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
fact, I was probably doing it less.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There was that trip home, and then recovering from the vacation as well
as three weeks of teaching and chronic insomnia before the trip.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t feel particularly connected to
myself during the weeks after I got home and got back into my life; I was
sleepy in the afternoons when I was coaching, I took lots of naps, I was grouchy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">But I did kind
of notice the absence of that Queen of Swords part of myself; she wasn’t
entirely gone, but it was as if she had stepped aside for a little while, taken
a vacation from my life when I did. Noticing that she was gone when I was on vacation
made me aware of her in a way I’m usually not; I kind of missed her, though
usually I take her for granted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Traveling, I
felt a little disconnected, discombobulated, not quite myself, and it took a
while for the Queen of Swords part of me to slowly and gradually come back to
me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s here now again, with me every
day, as I write, and coach, and think, and go to meetings, and go for walks and
try to observe what there is to see—observing, that was another word that I saw
in the Angeles Arrien description of her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I’m relieved to have her back, to feel that that part of me is back, at
least more or less, though I’m still a little sleepy in the afternoons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><b>Related link:</b></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">Next course from Tania's Wheel of Archetypal Tarot Series:</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><a href="http://www.taniapryputniewicz.com/?p=3699" target="_blank">Calling all Lovers of Tarot: Are You Ready to Make Your Own Deck?</a> starts on September 12, 2016</span></span></span></div>
Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-72964326262028196412016-05-27T13:21:00.003-07:002021-04-29T16:09:45.992-07:00The Queen of Cups and The Ten of Disks<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">May 17: The Queen of Cups
by Mary Allen</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">My card this
time was the Queen of Cups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The queen
herself is virtually invisible on this card in the Thoth deck, just a small dim
face almost hidden among blue swirls and green reeds; there are lotuses, a
stork, and a large greenish crayfish shell that are more visible than the queen
is too. About three quarters of the way down the image is a line separating the
upper and lower parts of the picture; below the line is water, with the queen,
the blue swirls, the bird, and everything else that appears above reflected in
the water below.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As above, so below, is
the message of this card.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">This is a very
watery card, but when I look at it I think of air.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve been thinking about this card all month
when I meditate in the mornings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve
got a few button-pushing things going on, and when I get out of bed, find my slippers,
go to the bathroom, feed my cats, I feel a bit of heaviness, a little bit of
anxiety roiling around in my solar plexus, like the remnants of an uneasy
dream.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then I go upstairs and sit in the
green brocade chair in the corner of my attic study, close my eyes, and
meditate for twenty minutes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
meditating I focus on the moment and the world as it comes wafting through the
open-because-it’s-May, east-facing windows on my right: the many-layered
tapestry of bird songs, the green-smelling spring air, some background sound
which is probably distant traffic on Route 80 but which seems like the happy
humming or breathing of the world itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And I start to feel lighter, happier, more expansive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My upper self starts to match my lower self;
the part of me above the water line, in the world, gets more like the light
airy place of the unconscious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">It’s kind of the
opposite of what Angeles Arrien says when she talks about the as-above-so-below
aspect of the Queen of Cups in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Tarot
Handbook</i>:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to her, the
double reflection of the water in the Queen of Cups “is representative of the
Queen’s constant choice to reflect her feelings accurately.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words, as I read what she’s saying,
the Queen lets the dark feelings, the pain and anxiety and other bad feelings
left over in the unconscious from earlier traumas, come to the surface instead
of pushing them down and keeping them hidden from herself. I can go with that
too; I’m all for accepting and admitting those feelings without “blame or judgment,”
as Angeles Arrien says.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Last month I did
some more accepting and admitting, letting rise to the surface of those old
dark feelings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I visited the deepest
regions of my inner self through a therapy called EMDR and broke off a chunk of
the old frozen emotions—shame, terror—that I felt around my mentally ill mother
when I was a kid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those feelings are
still stubbornly stuck inside me, or have been until I’ve located them, every
single one of those remnants of trauma, years and years worth of them, and
broken them up with EMDR.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve been
doing EMDR therapy for longer than I care to say and I’ve yet to come to a
place where I don’t feel any of that nameless roiling anxiety, that unspecified
dread, at least some of the time—maybe there is no such place—but I feel that
dread and anxiety less and less.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve
gotten lighter and lighter, happier and happier, more and more peaceful—I can
feel it in my solar plexus—as a result of all that finding and releasing of
childhood trauma.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Many years ago I
pictured myself like some kind glass of liquid, clear on the top half, inky on
the bottom—I knew I was suppressing a lot of stuff.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It wasn’t a good way to live, and I thought
if I could just find some way to shake up the glass, the liquid of myself would
get all mixed up and become pink and beautiful and healthy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is to say, my upper consciousness would
match my lower consciousness, my interior world would be lighter and more
permeable, more able to breathe, to hear and see and mingle with the beautiful
outside world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And now, in this May,
2016, I think that I can honestly say that my glass of liquid is pretty much
the same color all the way through, that as above so below is true in my
personal universe.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">But that isn’t
really what interests me most, I realize, when I look at the Queen of Cups
today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What interests me is the
unconscious itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the tarot cards
water is a symbol for the unconscious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>With the Thoth-deck Queen of Cups the water takes up half the card, it’s
all that water below the line.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the
Rider-Waite deck the Queen of Cups is sitting on a throne with a pool of water
at her feet; she’s wearing a kind of cape made of water too. Maybe it’s seeing
her sitting on that throne that makes me think again of sitting in my own chair
in the mornings trying to access the water of my own unconscious as I
meditate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How you get to that water,
that unconscious place, and what you find there is what really interests
me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Every day it’s
different for me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It takes longer on
some days than on others to get my thoughts to shut up to the point where I can
make contact, even briefly, with that place of the unconscious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I try to listen to the sounds but I keep
getting distracted, I find myself rehearsing what I’m going to do that day or
what I’m going to say somebody or blah blah blah.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This morning I could kind of feel the two
worlds, the two states of consciousness, one superimposed on top of the other,
the thinking, the incessant blah-blah-blah-ing, on top and the unconscious,
that beautiful light airy place of water, showing through underneath.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then I was there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can always tell when I arrive there:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Suddenly I feel my body relax and sink more
deeply into the chair, and at the same time some part of me—my spirit,
maybe—expands a little, like a flock of birds rising into the air.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It truly is like visiting some other place
inside myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes when I arrive
there I get a deep feeling of what I can only call being at home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t have a real home when I was a kid,
my relationship with home was extremely broken, and I’ve always thought I had
no early experiences of feeling <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">at home</i>.
But it turns out I did, I must have, because I find those feelings, memories of
those feelings, when I get to that place when I meditate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This morning, as well as those feelings, I
felt a longing for home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I felt, in
some deep way I can’t possibly articulate, that the place inside me I found by
listening to the sounds around me and getting my thoughts to shut up, if only for
a few seconds, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i> home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve come across a lot more in there too, in
that vast deep airy watery place inside myself, during other very short windows
that open while I meditate, and for slightly longer periods while I’m doing
EMDR, and a few times in the 1980s when I got there with the help of a
hypnotherapist. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">As I look at the
Queen of Cups now, the cup she holds in the Rider-Waite deck seems like a magic
lantern containing an entryway to that magical place, and the watery blur of
blue and green in the Thoth deck seems like a promise that we can all find that
magical place inside of us and all around us if we just get still enough.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">May 2016: The Ten of Disks by Tania
Pryputniewicz<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I was delighted the
Ten of Disks fell as my card of the month! In the Thoth deck, the disks are thick
as cut rounds of wood or foil coins full of chocolate you might get in your
goody bag at a Pirate Party. Behind the ten main coins positioned in the pattern
of the Tree of Life we see the pale green coins of spring, and beyond them,
dusky violet coins rimmed in red.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Having sold our
home, we are poised here at a respite during which we can afford to fill the
family cupboard and portion funds to keep us above the poverty line. The blessing
of the card extends to my many jobs I am grateful to, for the way they
contribute financial and spiritual dividends: teaching, writing, and stewardship
of others, including writing mothers, while raising my family.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">In the Rider Waite
Smith version of the Ten of Disks, we see a curtain of falling disks obscuring
our view of a family: seated grandfather, several dogs, husband with back to us,
wife facing us, child clutching mother’s skirt. Rachel Pollack, in <i>Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom</i>, suggests the
card in part refers to, “hidden experience in ordinary things” and suggests the
family might fail to “notice the magic all around them.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Coming out of six
months of financial strain, I am acutely aware of the magic all around us
again. And the practice of regularly reflecting on one’s life in journal entries or
photos or blogs fosters the currency of precisely such an awareness of “the
hidden experience in ordinary things.” I have found it to be true of the domestic
monastery, but it applies to any life in which one stops to reflect in writing day
by day (a hands on form of meditation). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I don’t know if
my children and husband see the magic all around us, but I feel it in the
Sundays we rise and hop in the van to drive along Route 75 parallel to the sea.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A four-minute spin delivers us to Katy’s
Café where its surfboard sign, hung by a pair of chains, greets us with image
of a mermaid resting on her side. In we go past the paintings of surfers
emerging from sunlit-backed barrels and tables adorned with glass goblet worlds
holding cacti and succulents anchored in multicolored pebbles, miniatuure clay
surfboards at the ready. A life-sized Neptune covers the supply closet door;
even inside the bathroom we’re met by undersea imagery of kelp and fish lit by lone
strobing urchin lamp. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">“Welcome to
Katy’s,” the barrista beams, pushing menus at us down the counter though we
already know we want Davos, acai fruit bowls, Hammerheads, apple-shaped apple juice for the
littlest, the middle son sporting his first ox-blood
leather jacket and white t-shirt. Katy herself--if we are lucky--with her long
blonde braid down her back reminds us to sign the kids up for her summer surf
contest. We corral my husband from the inevitiable two or three former students
or current trainees he’ll run into and snake a couple tables out back. Over the
sound of the surf, the ocean breeze chills while the coffee warms our palms. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I’m grateful for
these Ten of Disks mornings with gift of breakfast the
five of us gather to share before the scatter: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>youngest
to skateboard practice, the middle (James Dean boy) to work out at the gym with three
buddies, the daughter to lifeguard-aide training, and the husband to tackle the
Obstacle course on base…which leaves me free, free to breathe, and best of all,
free to harvest the bounty in words.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-24489900460018905462016-04-21T13:35:00.000-07:002016-04-22T11:50:00.304-07:00The Hierophant and Art, or Temperance<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">April 2016: The Hierophant by Tania
Pryputniewicz</span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">In the Aquarian
deck, the Hierophant’s gloved hands remind me of falconry and I step right into
the world of Robert Duncan’s poem “<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/53073" target="_blank">My Mother Would be a Falconress</a>.” When I
first read the poem in the heartland, I recognized that form of psychic
connection bordering on bondage that Duncan captures, though it is a fertile way
of relating I associate more with my father than my mother. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">In the
Hierophant’s red scepter I see the telephone poles and redwing blackbirds of my
Illinois childhood. Two keys sit in the left hand corner of the card. Which
door does the Hierophant guard or welcome me to unlock? His pale pink and
pewter complexion makes him appear invincible. Intellectually I know he often
represents formal religion, as in the Pope and other more rigid traditions of
spirituality as defined by large groups that appoint a leader to embody their
teachings. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">As I write new
poems about the Illinois commune I lived on as a child, I’m thinking about
borrowed religions and ideas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Raised as
they were by Christian and Catholic parents and struggling under the duress of
a breakdown my father suffered, my parents opted to start over on the commune after reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ultimate
Frontier</i> (a book written by our leader detailing his spiritual journey and
the lessons of many prior civilizations). We moved from upstate New York to
Illinois to join the Stelle community. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Our leader, we
were taught, incarnated as King David and further back in time, as the
Pharaoh Akhenaton. We drew on diverse traditions to shape our daily ways—out of
yarn we made Eyes of God; on Easter we walked a spiral bordered by lit candles.
The literature of those commune days still fills my imagination from The
Education of Oversoul Seven by Jane Roberts to The Sun Rises (a book written by
Dr. Stelle about cavemen Rhu and Hut and the White Brotherhood our leader
claimed carved an insignia on his hip). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Knowing there
were multiple incarnations made this one seem optional, mundane. Traipsing
around on our various field trips, I wondered: Why learn about fertilizer for
seed crops or butchering methods at the slaughterhouse or chemical mixtures for
sewage? Why would we, the chosen children, need to know these things, if we
were once Lemurians or Atlanteans? Why did we fall from grace? How was it
possible to skin a knee? To lose a cat to a car on a hot tar road in summer?
And how am I to know which past incarnation’s work I need to complete in this
incarnation?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I’m using poetry
to call a Truce against the pressure of the commune’s unconscious, absorbed,
and borrowed beliefs. I begin to make peace with my parents’ pilgrimage in the
corn when I look through not only their eyes, but those of the other adults operating at that time in
my circumference: the practical, simple, daily “teachers” acting as collective
counterbalance to the Hierophant, our leader, at the helm. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">When the leader
was exiled for alleged inappropriate relations with the mothers of Stelle, our
family left the group. The door swung open and out we went into the free bright air,
traveling in a Maroon 57 Chevy with wooden camper my father built for hand by
us. In California where we landed, I spent years mistrusting the Hierophant.
Neither traditional nor wildly creative forms of religion seemed real though memories
of the past both haunted and inspired.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">When I look at
the Thoth Hierophant, I see the comforting earth-tone browns of a robed man and
in front of him, in his path, a barefoot Egyptian woman in Blue. Who wouldn’t
want to be that agile, graceful, poised Egyptian queen, crescent moon in one
hand with downbent sword at the ready?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And yet in this image, I see nothing real or of this world I live in at
present. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">But maybe that
is the point, we are to feel outside of the card, eager and wanting the state
of grace the Hierophant and female in front of him seem to possess. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trust in me</i>, they seem to say—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I know the way</i>. I don’t think we are
meant to revere symbols, Hierophants, our parents, or other human beings so
much as we are meant to revere the process of searching, looking, and listening
to our responses to them. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">And maybe the
Truce is realizing we can learn just as much, if not more, from a derailed
Hierophant as a pure, perfect Hierophant.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">April 7, 2016: Art, or Temperance by Mary
Allen<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">My card of the
month was Art, or Temperance, as it’s sometimes called.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s the fourteenth major arcana card, the
one that follows Death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I love this card
and was overjoyed to see it come up when I picked it. In the Thoth deck it
shows a woman with what I can only call a two-sided face—one side dark, the
other side light—mixing fire and water together over a cauldron. There’s a
bluish-white lion standing on one side of the cauldron and an orange eagle on
the other side, both of them with their feet in the pointy orange flames that
are heating up whatever’s up in the pot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is a beautiful card with many strange and arresting images:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a circle in the woman’s chest holding a
clutch of celestial blue balls, a large oval of pale yellow light behind the
woman, with writing in it (what does that writing mean? I don’t even know what
language it’s in), the woman’s green dress decorated with bees. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">When this card
comes up I think it’s talking, not so much about art as we think about it but
about the art of life, the alchemy of mixing things together—a little of this,
a little of that, sorrow, happiness, darkness, light, and what you do with all
of that—to create a life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Living a life
is the ultimate creative act, I read somewhere, and to me this card is talking
about that. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I guess it’s an apt card
for my month that just passed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Angeles Arrien
says that every symbol on the Art card “represents the union of opposition
which creates something new.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Something
really great happened to me last month, and something not so great, or actually
a few not-so-great things, happened too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The nice thing was huge and the not-so-nice things were all kind of
small, but on balance, in some metaphorical weighing scale of suffering versus
pleasure, the not-great things probably at least equaled the nice ones if they
weren’t heavier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They didn’t cancel them
out though; all those things were just mixed together, creating a month. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The wonderful
thing was:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was on vacation in the
desert for two weeks, writing and hiking, resting and thinking and laughing and
talking with my friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The not-so-great
involved being sick for two weeks before I left, losing a bunch of sleep and
feeling sort of sick again after I got back, and, in the middle of the vacation,
like a drop of black ink falling into a glass of clear liquid, a rejection
letter that arrived in my inbox, for a memoir I’d spent the last two years
rewriting after spending at least fifteen years writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just one little rejection letter, I know—everybody
knows you have to get thousands of no’s before you get a yes, and blah blah
blah.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, for various reasons,
psychological and otherwise, I found it discouraging, disheartening,
dispiriting, faith-in-my-writing-diminishing, and a whole bunch of other
things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, later on in the day it
came, my friend and I went out and hiked through the desert, baking in the sun,
buffeted by the wind, and I started the work of digesting that letter, making
sense of it in the context of my story, scrounging up the courage to try again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the end of the day I was ready to go back
to the cauldron of life, to keep mixing in new ingredients, creating more
faith.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><b>Related Link:</b></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">A discussion the formative influences of the Stelle commune on Tania's writing life, poetry, and a bit about the beauty of Tarot writing:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><a href="https://soundcloud.com/thischoicepodcast/this-choice-tania-pryputniewicz-fin" target="_blank">Podcast, This Choice</a>, hosted by poet Ren Powell</span></span></span></div>
Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-6033264098762857772016-01-22T09:17:00.002-08:002016-01-22T09:23:36.445-08:00The Prince of Disks, The High Priestess, and The Fool<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;">January 15, 2016: The
Prince of Disks and The High Priestess by Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then a few days after the New Year arrived
they suddenly said something.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">My friend JoAnn and I decided to write about the previous
year and what we wanted in the year to come.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A long time ago, back in the early 1990s, we made lists of what we
wanted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But by the time
I found the list nine years later, I had them all:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(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.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And when we did the writing I did
write about some things that I kind of want now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of that
is what I thought about when I looked at the Prince of Disks lying on my coffee
table.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Then I looked again at the High Priestess.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Was all of the above just what she was
talking to me about too?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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<sup>rd</sup>, 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?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least, I guess I would.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;">January 15, 2016: The
Fool by Tania Pryputniewicz<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In the <a href="http://www.ishalerner.com/inner-child-cards-c97" target="_blank">Inner Child deck</a>, 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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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 style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I respect the nature of who
I am; there is nothing to fear </i>(<a href="https://www.google.com/?client=safari&channel=iphone_bm#channel=iphone_bm&q=angeles+arrien+tarot+handbook" target="_blank">The Tarot Handbook: Practical Applications of Ancient Visual Symbols</a>).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Behind me stretches a rich December in which, like a Fool, I
committed to blogging three days a week to prompts on </span><a href="http://trackingwonder.com/quest-2016/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">Quest 2016</span></a><span style="font-size: large;">. 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<a href="http://www.taniapryputniewicz.com/?p=2895" target="_blank"> pulled Tarot cards to help me answer blog prompts</a> and doodled in colored pencil when words failed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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, <i>What are you
doing now?</i> 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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And yet, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yes</i>, the
Fool says to me, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;">Yes; here we go again. </span><o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Related link:</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.taniapryputniewicz.com/?p=3023" target="_blank">Taking the Slow Express: Tarot Visioning with the Nine of Wands on Quest 2016</a></span></div>
Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-51680782916768475142015-12-18T08:44:00.003-08:002015-12-18T08:47:50.517-08:00The Princess of Cups and Lust<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><b><span style="font-size: large;">December 12,
2015: The Princess of Cups by Tania Pryputniewicz</span></b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">“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” ("<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Way-Tarot-Spiritual-Teacher/dp/1594772630" target="_blank">Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards</a>").<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">I’ve been
thinking a lot about the heart also in relation to </span><a href="http://trackingwonder.com/quest-2016/" style="font-family: 'times new roman';" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">Quest 2016</span></a><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;"> (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, </span><a href="http://www.taniapryputniewicz.com/?p=2760" style="font-family: 'times new roman';" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">sketching a synthesis image</span></a><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;"> in colored pencil. The
heart and the eye often figure. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I went to a
wedding this month with my husband. </span></span><span style="font-family: "\22 times new roman\22 "; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Everywhere:
evidence of the bride’s love of light and jewels from arbor to chandelier to
table to her own beaded gown.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My husband I knew best; we came to know the
rest by dancing, dancing, dancing.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">E</i>
forcing one more stop between storm and hearth.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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. </span></span><span style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: large;">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. </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: large;">Since children come </span><span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">after</i><span style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: large;">the marriage, they serve to deepen it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>December 12,
2105: Lust by Mary Allen</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">My
card last month was Lust, or Strength as it’s called in other tarot decks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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 (“<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Tarot-Handbook-Practical-Applications/dp/0874778956" target="_blank">The Tarot Handbook: Practical Applications of Ancient VisualSymbols</a>”) 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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The literal meaning of the card, if a Tarot
card can have a literal meaning, is related to Beauty and the Beast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in the Tarot cards, of course, the beast
is the beast within.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Lust card is
all about working with our negative thoughts, bringing light, more light, to
the dark places inside ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
woman on the card, according to Angeles Arrien, has “overcome old fears tied
with the past.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think of how interior stuff is never
so simple.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But a few days ago the sun came out and I went for a walk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">also</i> electrons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The
heads on the beasts look like faces you’d see in a dream or maybe a nightmare. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">What
all of this is telling me there’s no way to know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The meaning is just as mysterious and
impossible to translate as the card and the dreams themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Once
in a zoo in Chicago I saw a glassed-in exhibit of long-dead garter snake with
two heads.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both heads had a brain, it
said on a card under the snake, but only one of the brains was capable of
intelligence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-49810443630505608332015-11-02T18:27:00.000-08:002019-02-27T12:28:05.024-08:00The Ace of Wands, Wheel of Fortune, and the Knight of Disks<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">October 6, 2015: The Ace of Wands and
Wheel of Fortune by Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But if that was happening all month is was so
subtle I barely noticed it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe the
cards are just telling me that’s going to happen, or the wheels have been set
in motion or something.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">alarming</i> as
a fire truck siren, in the hallway just outside my bedroom door.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t know what to do or
even how to get it off the ceiling. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
could barely reach it, even standing on a chair, and I just decided to go back
to bed and hope for the best.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">beep beep
beeping</i> me awake into a sudden state of terror and alarm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I put it on the counter, then
looked the brand up on my laptop and found all kinds of negative
testimonials:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Then I sent a
few emails, got that inspiration about a book of essays, and then I went back
to bed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">October 6, 2015: The Knight of Disks by
Tania Pryputniewicz<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">See?</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> I say, </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Success! They
like to be here. </i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">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. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">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. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">However his face is exposed—he risks being seen. What comes next? Maybe--<i>keep some things just for you</i>--he will place that sun gold pentacle against his chest
to warm himself before he gives it away. </span></div>
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Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-72615104873359066802015-09-07T12:21:00.000-07:002015-09-07T12:21:09.777-07:00The Death Card and The Death Card<span style="font-size: large;"><b>August 28, 2015: The Death Card by Tania Pryputniewicz</b></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Way of Tarot: The
Spiritual Teacher in the Cards</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In the card’s background, I love the blues of the serpent
and catfish with glum gold cat’s eyes behind our “blueeyed boy /<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Rachel Pollack, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">78
Degrees of Wisdom</i>, 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">So I go down the path I tell querents to go down: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what in my life is dying metaphorically? <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My Daughter, My Bluebeard </i>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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">physically </i>during our inquiry with master
teacher <a href="http://www.gwarlingo.com/2013/the-sunday-poem-diane-gilliam-explores-the-mine-wars-of-west-virginia/" target="_blank">Diane Gilliam</a>. She reminds us to go the distance in our work. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">If you take the easy way out</i>, she says,
her gentle voice filling the timeless dream space of our morning class, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you’ll find waiting behind the door, the red
shoes</i>. Yes, those shoes, the ones in which you can dance yourself and your
pretty little red feet to death. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">…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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Related information:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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 </span><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.storycircleonlineclasses.org/classes/pryputniewicz.fall2015.php" target="_blank">Wheel of Archetypal Selves: Moon to Universe</a>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>August 28, 2015: The Death Card by
Mary Allen</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Last month we both pulled the same card and it was a funny
card to both pull:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“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!” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I was wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve never had a card of the month that
talked to me as much as Death did this past month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The whole month was like one big
ending/cleansing/cleaning up of the past and there was some real death in it
too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">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.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">That felt like a little death on top of the
big death of Rudy’s father.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">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.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">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.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">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.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">So there we have the dead coming back to us.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">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.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">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.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;">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.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">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</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">-- 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.”</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">He barely cracked a smile but I laughed at my
own joke.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">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.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">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.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-50644983539967710062015-07-31T16:10:00.000-07:002015-07-31T16:10:55.648-07:00The Chariot and The Knight of Swords<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;">July 21, 2015: The
Chariot by Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">My card this month was the Chariot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The only thing I can think of is this talk I gave in the
middle of the month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was not going to be easy, to say the
least.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The victory of the Chariot may
involve triumph over some struggle.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was present in
the room instead of nervous and they were present too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was excited about it too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I could practically feel myself being pulled along in my
Chariot – on to who knows what future triumphs and speeches and publications.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;">July 21, 2015: The
Knight of Swords by Tania Pryputniewicz<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mom, Mom, good night</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">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. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-66215853298188403972015-07-01T18:32:00.000-07:002015-07-01T18:50:29.836-07:00The Moon and The Devil<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">June 27, 2015: The Moon
Card by Tania Pryputniewicz<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">“What
did <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you</i> 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 <a href="http://tarotfortwo.blogspot.com/p/marys-favorites.html" target="_blank">the Moon card</a> prevailed
through the grief of losing her sister. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I
love this idea that our life force is sun driven. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I
think of Frida Kahlo’s bathtub portrait (<i>What I Saw in the Water</i>, also known by
the title, <i>What the Water Gave Me</i>) 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I
could take this to mean I’ve squandered my time on projects that were twenty
obsessive years in the making, such as <a href="http://www.taniapryputniewicz.com/?p=336" target="_blank">November Butterfly</a><a href="http://www.taniapryputniewicz.com/?p=336" target="_blank"> </a>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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, <a href="http://blazinglight.net/2015/06/13/the-accomplishment-of-kwan-yin/" target="_blank">The accomplishment of Kwan Yin</a>, 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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>down to sand and
beyond to the wan blue bay water receding towards the Blue Bridge…<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">…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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">June 27, 2015: The Devil
Card by Mary Allen<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">My
card of the month was the Devil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
depictions of the Devil goes this one is pretty benign even if it’s a little
embarrassing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What could all these images possibly be telling me during the last
month?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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):<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Devil represents the need to face
whatever we might consider our bedevilments or problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I
think I can honestly say I did that during the last month or so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(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.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I
also typed out a prayer listing six alternative thoughts I’d rather think:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thank you for helping me know deep inside
that it’s safe and good to feel safe and good, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And every day since then I’ve been reading
that prayer a couple of times a day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> safe and good to
feel safe and good. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-55092005359687699942015-05-13T09:40:00.004-07:002015-05-13T11:00:41.230-07:00The Four of Cups and The Eight of Cups<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>April 22, 2015:
The Four of Cups by Mary Allen</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">My card this
month was the four of cups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">At first I
couldn’t figure out what in my month had anything to say about me having both
internal and external emotional fulfillment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Maybe the card was just wrong this time?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A life in which I get to live inside my own
house and my own self-made life, feeling both internally and externally
fulfilled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I felt
incredibly grateful when I thought of that and the feeling stayed with me for
days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And now writing about this card
has reminded me of it and brought that gratitude back.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>April 22, 2015:
Eight of Cups by Tania Pryputniewicz</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">…<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> get it right girls!</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">After all we went through, the least you can
do is thrive!</i> …<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">I initially disliked
this month’s card, the Thoth <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Eight of
Cups</b>, balking at the one word caption<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Indolence</i></b>, with its hues of purposeful
laziness, petulance and excessive wealth, fearing it meant I was doomed to squander
my month stewing in unhealthy emotion. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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 “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Success
Abandoned</b>.” Here, a figure in red cape turns away from eight full cups to
go after an elusive new goal. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">In
synchronicity, working with my Tarot writing students this month, I come across
the <a href="http://twosylviaspress.com/the-poet-tarot.html" target="_blank">Poet Tarot Deck’s</a> Wheel of Fortune card featuring Edna St. Vincent Millay.
When I look for example poems by Millay, I discover <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=dYy4_q8au40C&pg=PA163&lpg=PA163&dq=edna+st.+vincent+millay+tarot&source=bl&ots=Glmo6xoQ3K&sig=45jCBnMuf8q2IeR86HLPscsetD4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=AXAtVbe_EYmvoQSqlYDIBg&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=edna%20st.%20vincent%20millay%20tarot&f=false" target="_blank">a selection on google books</a> discussing her natal
chart and birth placement as a Pisces Eight, which connects her to the Eight of
Cups. <a href="http://www.taniapryputniewicz.com/?p=1211" target="_blank">The Poet Tarot</a> 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…. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">But just as I
question <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Indolence</i>, I’m wondering
about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Success Abandoned</i>. 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?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Sleep: our yellow ring.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Dawn: our green. True magician:<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Love’s concentric rings.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">The woods between: you’re<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Digory, I’m Polly, with vague<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Shared past, still willing.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">Not for thrill of new<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">or fear of witch. But that you<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">came to retrieve me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dance!</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> One friend says… <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shake
out the anger! Walk away!<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Read "Gift from the Sea</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">," 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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Read Sharon Olds!</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">This month and
last, then, I’ve had two of the Eights that correspond to the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Major VIII, Strength</b>. These minor
Eights—chosen blindness (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Eight of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Swords</b>), and chosen exhaustion (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Eight of Cups</b>) are meant to remind me
to call on the best of Arcanum VIII, Strength, to heal. When I look at the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Rider Waite Strength card</b>, 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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">In this case, I
prefer the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Thoth Strength card</b>: 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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">get it right girls!</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">After all
we went through, the least you can do is thrive!</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;">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.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Related link:</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: large;">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 <a href="http://www.taniapryputniewicz.com/?p=2359" target="_blank">visit her website</a>.</span></div>
Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-66863864264128348332015-04-02T12:07:00.001-07:002015-04-03T23:23:18.972-07:00The Eight of Swords and The Prince of Wands<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;"><b>March
24, 2015: The Eight of Swords: The Blood Fold by Tania Pryputniewicz<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">“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, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Do we want to write? No. Will we write? Yes. </i>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I’m
raising my voice, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">But I am on your side</i>.
She persists, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">No, you’re not. You don’t
understand</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">So
destructive, this interference of the mind, the pain families cause one another with
the things we say. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You don’t understand.
I’m on your side.</i> I negate my daughter's words: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I <b>do</b> understand.</i> She negates mine: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You’re <b>not
</b>on my side</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You are the only person in this
house with your own room</i>, I still can’t help blurting. It isn’t helpful. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 19px;">My daughter remains anchored and I muster the strength to go, abandoning us both to our separate truths. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 19px;">My
husband retreats to our bedroom, boys blinking sleepily behind him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Or
maybe the card shows how our daughters see us as we grapple with how to deal
with them. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">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. <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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 style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I’m learning Mother, still
learning, how to withstand my own unmet cravings. Help me to teach my daughter
to withstand hers.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><b>March
24, 2015: The Prince of Wands by Mary Allen</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 19px;">My card this month was the Prince of Wands:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">This was the perfect card for me this
month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The colors
of this card are the colors of the desert and the sunburst around the prince’s
head looks vaguely Southwestern.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 19px;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 19px;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">run</i>, 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">running</i>
up the path toward my friend, who was at least a half mile up ahead of me on
the trail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those bees gave me pause, to
say the least.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in the end they
didn’t stop me from going back out on the trail the next day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;">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. <b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<!--EndFragment--><br />
<!--EndFragment-->Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-27167428795007910862015-03-05T18:37:00.000-08:002015-03-05T18:44:59.106-08:00The Ace of Disks and The Princess of Swords<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><b>February
2, 2015: The Ace of Disks by Mary Allen</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I kind of cheated when I pulled my card of the
month last time:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I turned it over thinking I would put it back
if I didn’t like it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I did like it –
it was the Ace of Disks, one my favorite cards in the deck – so I kept it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I kept that card too, but all
month long I’ve kind of felt like my card/s of the month weren’t exactly…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t know … legitimate, as if there could
be such a thing with a tarot card. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>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:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That card always
reminds me of a dream I had during an earlier era of our lives and our
tarot-card reading together. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had some money
I inherited from my sister (there’s the Ace of Disks) and I used it to change
my kitchen:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><b>February
17: 2015 The Princess of Swords by Tania Pryputniewicz</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is </i>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">In a month during which I’m feeling internally
alarmed by the external alarm comprised of my <a href="http://laundrylinedivine.com/9229/radiating-color-mirror-daughters-tarot-archetypes-web-mothers/" target="_blank">14 year old daughter trying to maintain equilibrium</a>, 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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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
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">“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,
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Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1289552437883928895.post-22612673753459682372015-01-29T18:39:00.002-08:002015-01-29T18:45:05.283-08:00The Two of Wands and The Universe<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">January
26, 2015: The Two of Wands, Message in a Bottle, by Tania Pryputniewicz</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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. <i>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?</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Metaphorically
this feels like an accurate depiction of how I felt in December joining
Tracking Wonder’s <span style="color: #420178;"><a href="http://trackingwonder.com/quest-2015/" target="_blank">#Quest2015</a></span>, a group of business artists looking
to collaborate and grow under the stewardship of a man named <a href="http://trackingwonder.com/our-story/jeffrey-davis/" target="_blank">Jeffrey Davis</a> (now
leading us on a <span style="color: #420178;"><a href="http://trackingwonder.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ef99e4e97c8c7aadeaa8bcf25&id=02aebf4091" target="_blank">#LivetheQuest</a></span> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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 <i>Tarot for Two</i>, 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.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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<a href="http://www.taniapryputniewicz.com/?p=2248" target="_blank"> at the mercy of wounds</a> that just won’t heal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Then
I look again to the Rider Waite figure, so gently poised. And realize that <i>both</i>
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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">January
26, 2015: The Universe by Mary Allen</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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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.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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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 <i>The Rooms of
Heaven</i>, 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt;">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.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Tania Pryputniewiczhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12177520317393803035noreply@blogger.com0