The Two of Wands and The Wheel of Fortune

June 2, 2017: The Two of Wands by Mary Allen

My card this month was the two of wands.  Power brought down to earth and made personal, I’ve read this card means.  The Thoth deck two of wands shows two crossed red dorjes, an ancient traditional Tibetan weapon.  The dorjes on the card have cartoonish little angry-looking faces at one end, and although Angeles Arrien says that this card is about coming into your own power from deep within in a balanced way, I can’t avoid thinking it’s about those little faces.  So when this card falls I’ve always thought that it was talking, at least a little bit, about power struggles.  The two of wands in the Rider Waite tells a very different story, and that’s the story that speaks to me about this card and my month last month.  The Rider Waite two of wands shows a man in a red cape and hat standing between two tall brown wands, holding a model of the earth, staring out at a landscape of mountains and trees and water. 

I guess I can say that my month was about power brought down to the earth and made personal.  The way I do that is by writing, which as I see it involves connecting to some universal creative power floating in the air sort of like electricity, connecting to it and bringing it to earth and making it personal, through writing. For me this involves seeing and noticing and doing something with what I’ve seen and noticed, capturing it as precisely as I can, with all of its detail and meaning, and mirroring it back to the universe as I write about it. 

I read recently that Saint Leontius, a sixth-century Greek Orthodox priest, said that creation can’t worship God directly but only through us, that the role of humans in this world is to make God’s creations visible.  I love that idea—that’s what I’m talking about.  To make God’s creations visible you have to see them, and to write you have to see too, see the precise room or landscape or whatever else inhabits your memories or your fictional characters are inhabiting in the story.   You can’t be vague about it, and in that way you hold the globe in your hand examining it while you bring power down to earth and make it personal, it’s the very examining that brings power to earth and makes it personal.           

And that’s what I was trying to do all month.  I spent a lot of the month working on an essay about my desert vacation in March with my friend JoAnn.  The whole time I was writing I was sitting there at my desk trying to focus the language to capture the details and the meaning, to let the meaning arise from the details, and when I was on the vacation I spent the whole time walking around trying to notice the details, trying to capture them in my mind so I could capture them and make something out of them, mirror them back to the universe, through a piece of writing. 

And ever since then I’ve been doing that with other things too.  Now that my desert vacation is over and I’m back in real life I’ve been walking around looking, noticing, trying to be present, to see whatever there is to see.   I’ve kind of gotten into the habit of it, noticing the world so I can write about it, and it is a kind of power brought down to earth and made personal.

June 2, 2017: The Wheel of Fortune by Tania Pryputniewicz

All month long I glance at the Thoth Wheel of Fortune card on my desk. Behind the pale green wheel in the center of the card, I see lightning bolts, their top jags ending in stars. “The stars exploding into lightning bolts represent the experience of awakening to the possibilities that can turn our lives in more positive and expansive directions,” writes Angeles Arrien in relation to the Wheel of Fortune. The quote accurately reflects what I’m experiencing as I take scenes from my childhood that I first described in poetry and develop them in prose for a new writing project of mine.

Last week my memoir teacher asked us to make memory maps—to look down at the river of our lives and look for the places where the river turned, tracking pivot points or places we turned in a new direction. I spent a day going through old boxes in the garage, pulling out college syllabi and high school versions of poems, delighted to find I’m still obsessed with the same imagery (poems then, poems now, and the new prose). I can’t believe how much emotion and insight the same set of core images continues to offer.

And the other surprise is to discover, through writing about various poverties, the currency I didn't realize I gained. For example, last week I wrote a scene based on the time we were living in a campground in the wooden camper my father built for us. We’d left the Illinois commune and arrived on the Russian River in the summer. By fall we were still house hunting, so I started public school in the fifth grade while living in the campground.

It all came back vividly: the sound of the rain dripping off the redwood leaves onto the roof, the smell of campfires, the intermittent sleep I’d get in the loft with my brother and sister, waking to rain wet socks when the wood seams of the camper warped and parted. Christmas neared, and with it, the obligation to play Secret Santa for a classmate. Making the best of our situation, I made a cardboard elephant puzzle. I watched as unobtrusively as possible as my classmate opened her cardboard puzzle. She turned the pieces over a few times, rummaged beneath the tissue, and then pushed the gift back into her desk and ran to see what her friends unwrapped. I wished I’d been able to give her something store bought, a Santa hat, glitter socks, a bow.

Once written out, down on paper, the energy trapped inside the memory released and the wheel of how I saw myself shifted, but this time, I was not just a witnessing child, but a child who grew up to become a mother. I get to bring motherhood’s lens of empathy and love back into the memories now. For me, empathy for other human beings is the un-measureable bounty and gift of poverty. The Wheel of Fortune goes up, the wheel goes down; sometimes you "have," sometimes you "have not."  But skimming the Ferris wheel of the past allows me to rise to the top where the sun warms both past self and current witness.

The Motherpeace Tarot (round cards) version of the Wheel of Fortune depicts a blue sky and the planets of the solar system crossing the midline of the card in a row. The card’s edge is ringed by the astrological sign of the zodiac as if to say, our fortune is our birth sign, each one of us bearing our unique mask, coming into incarnation with a specific set of circumstances and parents, each one of us equally valuable. The fortune is learning to recognize the value in who we are and what we have to contribute.

Under my roof, these final school days of June, it is hard to feel like a contributing member, hard to feel successful: one child oversleeps, a second needs hair color for crazy hair day and tells me at 6:30 a.m., our last-minute shopping trip putting the middle child in prime position for a tardy. The wash out spray-in colors, only stocked at Halloween, are nowhere to be found. So instead we apply clouds of the big sister’s hairspray and 12 packets of shades of glitter from blue to gold to deep crimson (all for just $2.47—thank you Wal-Mart).

I put my youngest son in front of the flowering hedge and snap his photo. It is the way he’ll rain gold and iridescent Tinkerbelle Blue all over his desk and teacher’s floor that makes me smile. I take the middle son in late, stand there with him during the attendance lady’s lecture, vow to get a red marker to mark the days of absence and vow to write out a new contract for the kids so I can stop being the heavy in a life abundant: Twelve shades of glitter to choose from on crazy hair day, and a mother who loves her kids as much as my father loved me and my siblings (so much so that he built that wooden camper for us to live in by hand).

Additional link:

Tarot for Two's latest podcast is live today; Mary and I take up the question of whether or not the Tarot deck is just a deck of cards or not:

Tarot for Two podcast 3: Is it just a deck of cards?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Four of Cups and The Eight of Cups

April 22, 2015: The Four of Cups by Mary Allen

My card this month was the four of cups.  The four of cups in the Thoth deck depicts four cups with water pouring out of a lotus fixture at the top, and is, according to Angeles Arrien, supposed to represent emotional luxury and fulfillment -- both internal and external fulfillment. 

At first I couldn’t figure out what in my month had anything to say about me having both internal and external emotional fulfillment.  Maybe the card was just wrong this time? 

Then I remembered that I did have a big moment sometime during the month when I felt a deep sense of satisfaction in the life I’ve made for myself.  I was at a twelve-step meeting with someone who was talking about moving to another part of the country to take a new job and I realized how absolutely unappealing that was to me. 

And in that moment it came to me how truly happy and satisfied I am with the life I’ve got, the life I’ve built for myself with the help of Life over the years – a life that is truly both internally and externally satisfying.  A life with writing -- which is a deeply internally emotionally fulfilling thing -- squarely in the middle of it, a life in which I write faithfully at least two days a week every single week, and in which I get to help others write, and even get paid for doing that.  A life in which I get to live inside my own house and my own self-made life, feeling both internally and externally fulfilled. 

I felt incredibly grateful when I thought of that and the feeling stayed with me for days.  And now writing about this card has reminded me of it and brought that gratitude back.

April 22, 2015: Eight of Cups by Tania Pryputniewicz

… get it right girls! After all we went through, the least you can do is thrive! …

I initially disliked this month’s card, the Thoth Eight of Cups, balking at the one word caption, Indolence, with its hues of purposeful laziness, petulance and excessive wealth, fearing it meant I was doomed to squander my month stewing in unhealthy emotion.

In the Thoth image we see even rows of storm clouds bordered by moody mossy Neptunian hems of green that gradually subside to a lighter blue, with one brief lemon ray to indicate sky before the plunge into a green you could mistake for the sea or a desert out of which sprout peach cups.

A cluster of five cups seem to float in tiny pools sprung up in the desert, but when you look closer, you see a wan peach lily-like plant supporting two down bent blossoms dripping water into the middle row of cups. The very center cup, perhaps the severed root of the flower itself, is empty as are three cups in the sky floating on lily pad leaves.

Angeles Arrien says the card depicts a state of feeling depleted, which feels accurate for me. I’ve been in an exhausting rut, reacting to my 14 year old daughter’s life, fearing the power struggles might go on forever. I keep forgetting that I have a choice about how stressed out I become. Wanting some relief, I turned to the Rider Waite Eight of Cups, called by some “Success Abandoned.” Here, a figure in red cape turns away from eight full cups to go after an elusive new goal.

In synchronicity, working with my Tarot writing students this month, I come across the Poet Tarot Deck’s Wheel of Fortune card featuring Edna St. Vincent Millay. When I look for example poems by Millay, I discover a selection on google books discussing her natal chart and birth placement as a Pisces Eight, which connects her to the Eight of Cups. The Poet Tarot handbook assigns Millay to the Wheel of Fortune Arcanum due to the ups and downs she experienced during periods of wildly vacillating public support. Still, she wrote. Regardless. Maybe the Eight of Cups “elusive new goal” is simply to write that next poem….

But just as I question Indolence, I’m wondering about Success Abandoned. I prefer the Rider Waite’s red cape to signify the figure’s vitality and warmth, an inner confidence. And prefer to think the figure is drawn to new pools, stopping to look into each new mirror, as writers are apt to do, much like the children in C.S. Lewis’s "The Magician’s Nephew," remember them? Polly and Digory?  The two kids steal a couple of magic rings, which have the power to transport them (yellow: go, green: return) to a strange forest pocked with pools that are portals to other worlds.  They end up on the run from a powerful witch named Jadis, a tall and terrible stone queen they wake from enchantment who manages to trail them back into our world.

Last year when I was reading the Chronicles of Narnia to my own children and writing daily Haiku, I wrote three for my husband based on The Magician’s Nephew:

Sleep: our yellow ring.

Dawn: our green. True magician:

Love’s concentric rings.

The woods between: you’re

Digory, I’m Polly, with vague

Shared past, still willing.

Not for thrill of new

or fear of witch. But that you

came to retrieve me.

On the run, hiding in the garage from the kids, leaning up against the washing machine, my husband listens to me, calms me, when things get too intense. Though I’m grateful he’s so present, can take over here and there, I am most of the time the first body absorbing the emotions circling our home at any given moment. Only after reaching out to my friends to say how down I felt do I realize how much I’ve gotten used to a perpetual state of Eight of Cups exhaustion.

Dance! One friend says… Shake out the anger! Walk away!

Read "Gift from the Sea," another says, and it pulls me up short, puts my struggles in perspective, to discover the grief of Anne Morrow Lindbergh (she lost an infant to a kidnapper). And yet, Lindbergh writes. Seashell by seashell (her chapters named after shells), Lindbergh considers her family of five, displays for us her ledger of joys and challenges with equanimity.

Read Sharon Olds! Another says. And I do…and I see everywhere around me women not giving in to their exhaustion but finding a way to make a path, word by word, to wholeness.

This month and last, then, I’ve had two of the Eights that correspond to the Major VIII, Strength. These minor Eights—chosen blindness (Eight of  Swords), and chosen exhaustion (Eight of Cups) are meant to remind me to call on the best of Arcanum VIII, Strength, to heal. When I look at the Rider Waite Strength card, girl bending gently at waist to restrain lion’s jaw, I’m initially angry to see such a harmonious rendering of what I perceive as a far bloodier internal battle to gain equilibrium.

In this case, I prefer the Thoth Strength card: a naked woman astride the many-headed lion, cauldron of her uteral blood raised to sky and worms either coming to feed or scattering away from her chalice of self. This woman is thoroughly underground—only her blood breaks the horizon line—blood she discards monthly, blood of childbirth, blood that goes into the bloodline of her future children.

The kind of wrangling to right a teenage daughter and oneself means wrangling with one’s own matrilineal lines of power and pain. It means respecting the trials of my ancestors—my two grandmothers—one withstanding the shock frequencies of EST passing through her brain, the other waiting up all night for her husband to come home from the bar, and further back to distant Polish and Italian and Irish foremothers walking barefoot in their gardens or the gardens of others they tended.

Perhaps the storm clouds in this month’s Eight of Cups are ancestral, a backdrop of the crush of emotions that pour in to the charged, lemon bright air of the now between my daughter and I, a sort of mixed blessing and challenge: get it right girls! After all we went through, the least you can do is thrive!

What I can do for now is give thanks for the strength of my grandmothers, for the lens of the Tarot, for Mary’s friendship, and for this lifelong affliction/blessing of writing that allows me to breathe and try again tomorrow.

Related link:

Tania's next Tarot Writing class, Wheel of Archetypal Selves: Stasis to Radiance, Hanged One to Star is forming online. To read a course description and to sign up visit her website.

The Two of Wands and The Universe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 26, 2015: The Universe by Mary Allen

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

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

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

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

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

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