The Devil in the Garden

For those of you who know me personally, you will be (well) aware that for last two years or so, Jon and I have been building a house, surrounded by bush, on our very steep block. We are now trying to establish a garden.

From my perspective, a house without a garden is like an unframed painting. Van Gogh is supposed to have said “a picture without a frame is like a soul without a body”. Many people would probably argue that the surrounding bush is the frame of our house, but to me that’s seemed more like the environment in which the ‘painting’ is being displayed.

In The Planthunger, Freya Letana notes that Australian academic and philosopher Damon Young

points to the fact that while a garden certainly can be defined as nature, it differs from the wilderness – from nature left to its own devices – in that it is owned and purposefully moulded by the human hand.                             https://theplanthunter.com.au/culture/past-present-garden/

For Jon and me, there’s a lot of energy being invested in how our garden close to the house proceeds. In truth it’s Jon who does the hard work. I’m inclined to say “it would be good if we planted such and such there” and I often wonder if Jon quietly thinks “That’s the royal ‘we’ I presume.” In my defence, having chosen the plants, I do love and care for them when they are in the soil.

The two most challenging aspects to this garden are related to the very different environment from our previous major gardening experiences.

(I)t is arguable that a garden cannot possibly be exempt from the forces of nostalgia, from a reverence of the gardener’s past – one’s proclivity to garden surely has been informed in some respect by their previous interactions with gardens and their makers. https://theplanthunter.com.au/culture/past-present-garden/

Firstly, the climate here on the east coast is quite dry – and we must rely on tank water. In our previous garden we also had only tank water, but we lived in a more tropical climate – nothing but rain, rain and more rain at times.

Secondly – again unlike our previous garden – the broader environment, the surrounding bush, is home to critters of various names and natures. As a result of our naivety, and much to our chagrin, we’ve discovered that the one thing these various critters have in common is a powerful attraction to anything we plant that they consider edible.

Our previous garden in the more tropical area grew quickly being well-watered and untouched by hungry wildlife. Especially with regard to the latter, in this new space it has come home to us that our kind of garden refer(s) …

to an enclosure, which requires two things: something to be cordoned off (nature), and someone to do the cordoning (humanity) … every garden is a union of this kind: nature separated, bordered, transformed by humans. https://theplanthunter.com.au/culture/past-present-garden/

After considerable heartbreak, therefore, we have taken to putting protective“cages” made of an odd assortment of materials (whatever comes to hand!) around anything we think the wildlife will eat.

Most mornings I do a quick walk around the garden to see how it’s faring. Recently I went outside to discover that something (I wondered if it were a deer) had chomped through all the plants that had been growing quite successfully without any wire protection. Heartbreak again … it may seem extreme to some, but what I felt was truly a form of grief.

I use the tarot as a way of making sense of the world around me. It’s really a form of story-telling – one which uses images to bring greater awareness to what’s going on. Rachel Pollack, probably my most favourite tarot author, recommends a way of ‘reading’ the cards that she calls “loving the images” (https://stevewinick.com/pollack) – and this is the style of interpretation that I tend to use.

I asked the tarot how it represented the grief I felt on seeing the loss of my lovingly cultivated plants. The tarot’s answer: XV The Devil.

This card always makes me ask the question: Is the situation about commitment or bondage?

Our house project has required commitment – and at times it’s also felt like bondage. Once we started, Jon and I could not just stop and go back to our old lives, even though there were definitely times when I (in particular) wished we could.

Following Pollack’s recommendation to “keep going back to the pictures, and not assume that we know what they mean” (https://stevewinick.com/pollack), I looked more closely at the card and noticed something that had never really struck me before – that the character whose tail ends with some kind of flowering or fruiting plant is the female. Although Jon is more capable of “contented” commitment to a project than me, he is definitely less attached to anything than I am. No bits of the old life stick to his tail once he’s made a shift – whether those bits be decks he’s built, or gardens he’s planted or even sandstone courtyards he’s created out of self-quarried rock.

It also struck me as pretty funny that combining the devil’s horns and his batwings produces an image somewhat like antlers. (One of the aspects of consulting the cards that I find really helpful is that I often end up laughing.)Nevetheless, regarding what I presumed was a deer, I was quite shocked at the depth of my desire for revenge. I would have liked to kill the beast – which is a pretty extreme response given the circumstances. The Devil reminds us that we’re all capable of dark thoughts and emotions at times. To be able to cope with such thoughts, the crucial quality is the ability to rise above them – if we don’t I believe it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that they’ll only make matters worse.

The Devil can also be about fear, so I asked myself fear of what? The immediately answer, clearly, was loss. Going deeper, asking loss of what, the answer became loss of control. Relinquishing control of my desire to quickly complete the ‘frame’ of the house is clearly a challenge. A bit of googling about this also helped me to laugh a little:

Change usually requires patience. I remember many years ago doing a reading for a woman who had just started a business and she was, understandably, concerned about its financial viability. The Devil turned up as her challenge and at the time my interpretation was that The Devil signified something that required long-term commitment – in which time it would likely become successful. (It did.)

My memory of this reading seems like an object lesson for me. “Walking one’s talk” comes to mind.

Contemplating commitment in itself is interesting. It can be a very positive quality because it facilitates the achievement of our ideals. But perhaps even commitment is best “enjoyed in moderation”. Jung (another of my favourite writers) is quoted as saying

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or                                idealism.                                           https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/carl_jung_108780

Being committed to a garden like we’ve had in the past is an idealistic goal and not being able to give up on such a goal could reasonably be described as a form of addiction. Realising this certainly helped me make sense of the situation: Is it wise to try to fight reality? What will I achieve by doing so? Hmmm. The answer(s)?  Accept reality. Be patient. Plant things the animals don’t eat.

The other thought that eventually surfaced about “our garden” concerned the use of the pronoun itself. Such ownership! We did, after all, buy a block of land surrounded by bush. And in the early days – when we camped here for just a few weeks at a time each year – I would happily feed the possums, leaving apples out for them at night. How things have changed. Said possums (among other animals) are now my enemy? Perhaps I need to remember that we moved into their environment. It’s only reasonable that they’ll continue to think of “our garden” as part of “their place”.

Every story needs a denouement. The ‘moral’ of this little story of mine would seem to be that gardens, like children, have a way of growing into themselves. Best to let both do so without trying, addictively, to box them into what we consider to be the ideal form or time-frame for growth.

A Slew of Swords

Despite what are now many years of experience and generally positive feedback, I always feel some anxiety about doing readings for other people. Perhaps indeed because the tarot is one of the things in life about which I feel most passionate, there’s a strong sense of responsibility about what comes to me as I “read” the cards. It usually takes a leap of faith and/or courage to begin because I believe that it’s better to be cautious than to be breezily confident. I felt somewhat vindicated recently when I read a blog about the 6 of Swords by Mary K Greer. In it she states that as the reader she sometimes considers herself

the ferryman who steers the way through the cards in a spread from one’s familiar anxieties to a different shore. … (I)n a reading I am attempting to steer the course when I don’t always know what is lying in wait for my passenger on the other side or how prepared my passenger might be to meet that. It is a grave responsibility. (https://marykgreer.com/2010/07/21/ferryman-in-the-six-of-swords/)

 

A while ago I did a rather impromptu reading for a friend who wanted to sell her house. Her decision to move had been made some months before, so she was in the uncomfortable limbo phase that exists after that decision to sell but before the sale.

As those of you familiar with my reading style know, I have no interest in fortune telling or prediction in any definitive way. However, as a way of helping the querent to find an energy with which to move forward, I usually end tarot sessions with the querent choosing a card to summarise the reading. This is a good card to use after the reading to contemplate the ideas we’ve discussed.

The reading I mention above was relatively brief. It almost seemed like the tarot knew we only had about half an hour and so gave us a compressed picture. Out of 5 cards altogether, we found ourselves looking at the 3 of Swords, the 5 of Swords and last, but not least, as the summary, the 7 of Swords.

Present:
Challenge:Summary:

 

The 3 of Swords was the simplest card to interpret.

Quite obviously it’s about heartache. Selling the house one has lived in for more than two decades is pretty challenging. Deconstructing everything that’s been built up around the concept of home can be a very painful and stressful time.  Indeed moving has been ranked one of the top five most stressful life events. Our house tends to be symbolic of ourselves, our safe haven from the outside world – a place that for many                                   is hard to leave in order to start all over again.https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/life/relationships/article/2018/01/09/why-moving-house-was-more-difficult-and-stressful-i-ever-imagined

The reality of this is very familiar to me, so I had no trouble at all empathising with my friend’s level of stress. During our 44 years together Jon and I have moved many times. We were inclined to have a house built to what I’ve named the “bare shell” stage, then do the finishing off ourselves, thereby making the bare shell into a home. Once we’d been in a home for a few years, we would sell it and move on to another project. In early 2009 we left what had been our family home (surprisingly, for about 2 decades): a large property in a rural environment in northern New South Wales. We moved to a small apartment in inner city Brisbane. Even though we had moved so I could access my counselling qualifications as an ‘internal’ rather than ‘external’ student, I cried just about every day for the rest of that year.

Back to the card. Usually the best frame of reference I can find for the 3 of Swords is taken from its resonance with the major arcana 3, The Empress. (All cards with the same number have various things in common.)

According to Joan Bunning,

(T)he Empress can refer to any aspect of Motherhood. She can be an individual mother, but as a major arcana card, she also goes beyond the specifics of mothering to its essence – the creation of life and its sustenance through loving care and attention. (http://www.learntarot.com/maj03.htm)

Therefore, from my perspective, even the Swords-suit 3 is about some form of creative growth. I tend to see the sword going through the centre of the heart as the ‘middle path’, chosen after – and perhaps as a result of – the heartache.

 

The 5 of Swords is another card that is often seen as quite negative. (Indeed most of the swords are.)

I remember a friend once interpreting this card as the one in which nobody wins and so, inevitably, everyone loses. My inclination is to view the card through a different lens.

 

Rachel Pollack describes her 5 of Birds in the Shining Tribe Tarot – more or less the equivalent of the 5 of Swords – as “power from confronting a situation”. (p.180 Shining Tribe Tarot).

Regarding this particular reading, my friend has already confronted tough choices of various kinds in life: she is experienced in life matters, has ‘survived’ and therefore, I would argue, earned a degree of personal power.

Inevitably there will have been losses of some kind involved in her choices. What decision doesn’t carry a loss factor within it? There is always a cost-benefit ratio involved. Perhaps power comes from being able to determine the right balance – what to take with you and what to leave behind.

My general sense of the tarot fives is that they represent change that comes as a result of conflict. The tarot fours represent a more stable time – often when a foundation of some kind has been laid (cf IV The Emperor). This is the aspect of our world that is challenged by the fives – sometimes it’s not easy to give up stability and destroy one aspect of our world in favour of a different one.

Sandra A Thomson seems to very clearly describe my friend’s challenge at the time of the reading:

Although we tend to think of crises as negative and undesirable, they do carry the impetus for change or transition from a solid, fixed, rigid past – or from the stagnation/inactivity of the fours – into new possibilities. … Fives can also reflect a situation of ambivalence, or of the anxiety of having to live with the unknown. To end that anxiety, we may be forced to make a choice.” (pp.169,170 Pictures from the Heart, Sandra A Thomson).

The fives resonate with V The Hierophant. From my experience, this can be a very complex card indeed. It can represent all of the nuances mentioned above and indeed many more – so many that I will set aside an entire blog for it sometime soon.

 

 

I must admit that when I saw the 7 of Swords as the “summary card”, I dropped my head into my hands, saying “This is also such a complex card. I’ll have to think carefully about what it may mean in this position.”

Despite its rather bad press, my gut feeling was that in this context the card was not meant to indicate skulduggery, which is one of the ways it is most commonly interpreted.

Instead, my response was to immediately focus on my friend’s ability to achieve her goals by thinking (and therefore working) “smarter, not harder”.

Because all the sevens resonate with The Chariot in the major arcana, I pictured her needing to drive her life’s “vehicle” very carefully in order to stay balanced. (A chariot, after all, is a tricky thing to control). The sphinxes on either side of the chariot represent those things we’re simultaneously drawn towards and repulsed by, looking in this context rather like my friend’s needs and wants, which seemed slightly at odds.

I interpreted the card as indicating that her best course of action would be to carefully consider the values and realities implied in both her needs and her wants. That process would help her to make a strategic decision and allow her to find a balanced path through the challenges involved.

Later that day I did a bit of googling and found this quote:

In the context of a finance-related question, the 7 of Swords advises that ample research must be undertaken before committing to a major purchase or investment. For the time being, finances can be in a state of flux and will continue to remain so until an opportunity arrives.                  (https://shadesofmidnight.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/the-7-of-swords-the-lone-wolf-complex/)

Looking at the card again I recalled an awareness of my friend’s desire to “keep a foot in both camps”. The image of the two swords left in the campsite struck me as her ability to do just that – by visiting her many friends whom she was quite sad about ‘leaving behind’.

When I went to bed that night – as often happens after I’ve worked with the cards – a rather anxious thought wormed its way into my head. Did I warn my friend sufficiently about the negative interpretations of the 7 of Swords? The usual long period of deliberation followed – but I just could not conclude that it is always correct to view the 7 of Swords as a warning against thievery and deception.

It seems to me it’s a trap to interpret cards on a “one size fits all” basis. How many times have I had cards with very negative reputations come up in readings for myself – and eventually realised that there was a silver lining of insight or hope or experiential learning?I decided it was best that I’d stuck with my instinctive interpretation. Naturally, when something as big as selling one’s home and buying a new one is in process, it always pays to be cautious. It would be unwise to give money to people one doesn’t trust – and foolish, at best, to buy into a deal that looks better than it should.

A Slew of Swords

via A Slew of Swords

Why the tarot?

I was born on a 16^th. My mother always put immense importance on this date – any time she could connect the number 16 to my life she did. In the tarot 16 happens to be The Tower. I think in many ways I was a bit of a Tower energy in my mother’s life and hence, when in default mode, my own.

Jon’s recent response to what I think of as my Sunday Morning Blues was “Is there an everything is shit card?” Hmm. What better card could there be but XVI The Tower? It’s almost funny in a weird kind of way.  The point is that I’d like to be able to just accept those blues – they’ve been there as part of my psyche forever, so why should they not be “real”? – and then just get on with my Sundays.

I’ll begin with Sunday itself – traditionally, in the Christian mode, a ‘day of rest’.  Before I left my childhood home, Sunday was almost inevitably the most difficult day of the week. It meant church and often lunch afterwards with my parents, paternal grandparents and/or the local minister.   Even before my teens, despite somewhat desperately wanting to, I could not connect with Christianity as it was propounded in the church services I attended.  My ‘private dreams’ were not in accord with the ‘public mythology’.

If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you…The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience …  that is the hero’s deed.

(pp 48, 49 The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers)

I have no delusions about my qualities as a public hero, but as a private hero I have had periods where I moved out of the society that would have protected … me… and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience (ibid) where I have had to work my life out for myself.

During those years I had an ‘outer’ life that was fulfilling in many ways – I married and had two beautiful sons;  I went back to part-time work as a teacher;  my husband and I managed to keep our marriage mostly pretty happy and we created a home for ourselves and our children. Finding our way in the outer world, making a career (or at least a living), raising children if we have them – these are all normal parts of early adult life.  On the surface we were the Emperor and Empress of our limited world.

And it is definitely true that I know I have much to be grateful for around these achievements – and quite regularly I am able to acknowledge that.

 

 

Gail Sheehy’s book Passages gives a pretty straightforward account of the inevitable personality and sexual changes we go through in our 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond. (Amazon)  During my 20s and 30s I found this book helpful. It allowed me to feel less alone in my journey and illustrated much about the general principles involved in the life processes experienced by, admittedly, a fairly middle-class subgroup of society.

But then, quite early, came the first blow 0f my personal mid-life crisis: my beloved father died very suddenly – when I was thirty-six . Soon after this I was diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening illness and subsequently had to give up what I had thought might be a successful teaching career.  During this time I realised I had become what I came to call “spiritually bereft”.

I spent quite a few years in that particular dark forest – but this time s0me deeper longing in me understood that, before I could begin to negotiate my way out, I really needed to know “How did this come to pass?

Various books were useful to me, for example The Search for Meaning which contains transcripts from an innovative and successful Australian Broadcasting Commission radio program.  Its guiding light is the respected broadcaster, Caroline Jones, whose searching yet compassionate questioning elicits responses of great honesty from her guests on how they make sense of their lives.(http://www.biblio.com/the-search-for-meaning-by-jones-caroline/work/841552)

Here were people from many different spiritual paths – all working on finding meaningful ways to negotiate life’s inevitable twists and turns.

Rachel Pollack notes that there have always been people who have sought something different from the ordinary world in which they can simply sense spirit moving through their lives.  Such people “wish to know this force in full consciousness” (Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, p. 110). Whether I liked it or not, it became clear to me that I was one of these people.

Again I will quote Joseph Campbell: Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people’s myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts — but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. (The Power of Myth, p.5)

Fortunately for me, it was around this time I discovered the tarot.

The Fool’s journey as described in the tarot is a powerful metaphor for a soul’s journey through life.  I was – and still am – smitten by this metaphor and the myths it has brought to my attention. Eventually the cards gave me a way to begin to make sense of the world as I had experienced it.

In the early days of my study of the tarot I was largely homebound due to illness, but the cards have a tremendous capacity to facilitate delving into the myriad stories with which human beings have illustrated their lives – ie the myths which Campbell exhorts us to read. So I simply read and read – widely and deeply – about each card as it presented itself to me.

So how did the connection with this particular set of cards help?  I came to realise that a “Hallmark card life” was not for me.  There seems to be so much denial if one can only see the “good” – all that romantic mushy stuff about the wonderfulness of life. What about the dark and horrible bits? Don’t they also exist? When we live in a world where war is a constant on our tv screens (if we are lucky enough, that is, for it not to be in our immediate lives), where refugees are left to linger in shocking conditions, where people we love die, where marriages disintegrate and friendships dissolve – how can anyone take seriously the kind of guff that do-gooders peddle?  I sometimes get quite offended by new age psychobabble which purports that “the universe” will always sort things out for us, if only we believe. Does this not sound achingly familiar? If I am “good” things will turn out fine.

Before the tarot became my passion, I’d always been an avid reader of literature (and an English teacher …). In my entire life I haven’t read a decent novel that didn’t involve struggle on the part of the protagonists. My thinking is inclined towards an acceptance of the dark side, the yang that balances out life’s yin, so to speak, for without the darkness I feel like I’m being an unrealistic fool (and that word, of course, is the bridge.)

(http://jillnagle.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83454e6f869e20162feb1af1e970d-popup)

 

As I write this, an anecdote – from way back before I even knew what tarot cards were -comes to me.  A young friend of my mother was learning about the tarot and offered mum a reading. Mum asked about the move from Brisbane that Jon and I, then in our early 20’s, were contemplating.  (I won’t go into the ethics around asking a question about us – that would never have entered mum’s mind and the inexperienced ‘reader’ was probably naive about such matters.) Mum didn’t know anything about the cards, but later she described the Tower in detail – it had come out early in the spread.

Jon and I had decided that getting out of the city was for us. We both had work opportunities in Toowoomba, a couple of hours west of Brisbane, so we’d bought a block of land and had an old house (just a cheap old house, not a grand one) moved onto the block. In the middle of the night, while the re-siting was still in progress, that house burned down. We still don’t know exactly why – we just got the call to say it had burned to the ground.  Up in the smoke from that fire went not only all of our savings but also borrowed money.  As you might imagine, there are quite a few middle chapters in this tale, but long story short: a kind bank manager took pity on us, gave us a housing loan and we had the shell of a new house built.

That’s all about forty years ago now and, oddly enough, over the years I’ve rarely thought about what my mother – during the phase between blackened stumps and new house – told me about seeing that Tower card.  She picked up on its implications, but her friend just brushed over it, saying “Oh that’s nothing.”

What I do remember – and have often used when telling people the story of our house fire – is what my father said about a year after we’d moved into the ‘new’ house. The four of us were sitting at the table after lunch one day when my dad suddenly said,  “Well, I’m sorry you lost all that money – but I’m really glad the old bugger burnt down.”

My father didn’t like the original house – he thought it was ugly and spooky (there were in fact some internal walls painted completely black).  The new house was designed to suit the block and incorporated a beautiful view from the living areas.  Sure, we had a bigger mortgage, but we were young enough to cope with that and things did turn out OK “in the end” of that particular phase of our lives – which proved to be only about three years.  Had the original house not burnt down I doubt very much we would have finished the renovations on it by the time we needed to sell.

And thereby hangs a tale.  The Tower card exists along with 21 other major arcana cards and 56 minor arcana cards.  Life is variable.

It’s here that I suppose the ‘fortune telling’ aspect of the tarot should be mentioned. If we had known what that Tower card implied, what would or should we have done? Would it have been better for us if that house hadn’t burnt down?  Perhaps a better question would be “Do I regret that the old house burnt down?” The answer, in realistic terms, is “No”.  It was a difficult time, but people were kind to us and we actually came out ahead financially when we sold the property with its newly-built house.

The tarot tends to be feared a great deal by those who know little about it. Like most things, it is easier to have a black and white rather than a nuanced perspective.  Here I am drawn back to the idea of being able to simply accept my Sunday blues.  Difficult things do happen – they are truly a part of life. But they do pass.

Finding ways to support ourselves during the difficult times is important. For that support each of us must find our own medium – and indeed I believe that each of us has the right to find our own.  This alters the prism through which we create our interactions – taking away the need to find the one true way (the ‘facts’ mentioned by Campbell) which both history and the current state of the world show us can only inevitably lead to conflict.

For me, tarot cards themselves are like myths and do not, strictly speaking, have meanings;  they provide contexts in which meaning occurs (Wendy Doniger O’Faherty: Other People’s Myths, p. 35).  The meaning I take from XVI The Tower is one of a ‘maturing’ lesson in humility.  Despite our best efforts, sometimes things can and do go wrong. Next must come the development of resilience – a learning to live with the fact of ‘destruction’ while still being able to go on without embracing bitterness as our way of being.

The key to this is probably hope – interestingly that is the one quality that was left in the box when Pandora opened it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_box).

 

And, yes, there are some “Tower” days when everything is just shit.  But those days pass and inevitably we move on to another day and another card – quite likely

XVII The Star

• and with it all the hope it brings back into our lives.(from The Mythic Tarot,  Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene)

 

Featured image at the top of the blog from:

(http://wallpaperfolder.com/tarot-deck-tuhin-kumar-dutta-hdw4926623)

 

 

 

 

 

A tarot blog about Reiki

I’ll just start out with these three images.  The one on the left is The Pilgrim (Page of Scrolls/Swords) from the Chrysalis Tarot by Holly Sierra and Toney Brookes.

(http://www.tarot-thrones.com/2013/07/page-of-swords-holly-sierra-chrysalis.html)

The two below are of me, taken recently while on a journey in Japan.

I use the word journey advisedly.   I hadn’t been to Japan before, even though my husband Jon had been twice for work-related activities and I had the opportunity (and tickets!) to go with him in 2009.  That was the year we moved back to Brisbane from the countryside in northern New South Wales and I was for most of that year, put bluntly, a basket-case due to pain – both physical and emotional.

So I was somewhat determined to make the journey this time when the opportunity arose again through Jon’s work.  I had it in my mind that I would like to visit the mountain where Dr Mikao Usui received his enlightenment about the Reiki energy.  I was truly going there on “faith”, but a kind of calm faith, something quite unusual for me.  I knew nothing about the city of Kyoto or about Mt Kurama itself. I just had the vague idea that I would like to “do a kind of pilgrimage” to honour the value of Reiki in my life. Perhaps I also wanted to find out a little more about Dr Usui, whose face, right from my first attendance at a Reiki seminar in 1995, fascinated me.

Since returning to Brisbane and while contemplating what to write for this blog, I chose two cards from the Morgan-Greer deck, the second tarot deck I bought (in 2000, I think) about the trip to Japan.

1.  How does the tarot represent the significance of this trip for me?

 

 

Page of Swords

 

2.  How does the tarot represent the longer term significance for me of this first trip to Japan?

 

 

Knight of Swords

 

These two cards have never resonated with my sense of  ‘me’ – in fact they are two cards that I can’t even recall turning up in readings for myself.  Clearly there’s something new happening here.  To try to understand what, I turned to the book that accompanies the Chrysalis Tarot. In this deck the court cards are transformed into what the creators have cast as “the Troupe” and the Page of Swords is the final member of the Troupe, called the Messenger of Scrolls, The Pilgrim.

I read Holly Sierra’s commentary on the Pilgrim and these sentences stood out for me:

It’s not easy to leave home with little other than a fixed itinerary and a romantic ideal and allow intuition to be your guide.  In fact, it’s impractical for most people.  (p.211)

I have to admit that I was lucky in this – for Jon, not me, is the happy planner. I didn’t have to deal with the practicalities at all. I just left home with a ‘fixed itinerary’ and a ‘romantic ideal’, knowing that somewhere in the plans Jon had drawn up there would a visit to Dr Usui’s mountain (I didn’t even know its name before I arrived at its base).

And visit it I did, travelling first by subway and then by a dinky two-carriage train out through the suburbs of Kyoto. This was June, so the rainy season in Japan; the day was cool and overcast (and my walking boots, bought especially for the trip, had fallen apart the day before).  But we pressed on, walking up from the train station and paying our small fee to step through the temple gate.  Once inside I realised the path further up was going to be very steep – and I wasn’t sure I could tackle that, so felt rather bewildered. What should I do now?

Then I noticed there was a cable car!  

When the cable car reached its zenith, I decided that I could take the further steps – still pretty steep – up the damp path to the highest temple if I made use of the ‘old’ technology – ie a pilgrim’s wooden staff.  The latter was provided free of charge when we stepped out of the cable car. (The middle photo at the beginning is taken about half way to the top.)

My pilgrimage was coming into being.  And as Holly Sierra so aptly describes the situation once again, “pilgrim spirituality is … experienced by the psyche when you’re in a meditative state of consciousness”.  This whole day for me was like a dream – but a calm, peaceful, soothing one, so unlike many of my (remembered) dreams in daily life.

At the top is the main temple.  By this stage it had started to drizzle and a few heavy showers fell while I was under the cover of the temple, where I stood and bowed my head, murmuring my thanks to Dr Usui for all the work he did – and all the good his work continues to do.

According to The Japan National Tourism Organisation (http://www.jnto.go.jp/eng/indepth/cultural/feeljapanesque/tengu.html):

On the northern outskirts of Kyoto lies Mt. Kurama, which is Kyoto’s number one “power spot.” Little wonder, because worshipped here is a god named Sonten, who is nothing less than “the cosmic energy that gives life to every living thing.”

And according to the information provided on the ticket for the cable car, all those who come into contact with Mt Kurama receive that life energy emanating from the mountain.

I felt a sense of calm here that was extremely powerful. It did feel like I had come to a sacred place with which I felt a strong connection.

Both Jon and I lingered around the temple area and stared off into the view before walking down the steps with their beautiful lamps.

Prior to this visit I had no expectations about receiving further life energy (which is the commonly held meaning of the word “Reiki”), but I do think that I came away with something “extra” – a kind of confirmation that I had taken the right path all those years ago.

With me in something of a daze, Jon and I headed back to our tiny apartment hotel in Kyoto. Later that evening I drew a card to represent the significance of undertaking the first Reiki seminar and what that had meant in my life.  I have often said that doing Reiki was a very significant turning point in my life, so I suppose it was hardly surprising when the major card number 10 – The Wheel of Fortune – presented itself.

I find it interesting that, yet again, this is not a card with which I’ve had a particularly close relationship since I started on my tarot journey.  To my eye it’s a rather odd looking card, with its mixed symbols, the meanings of which I’ve never been certain.  (Attempts to research the symbols hasn’t changed that uncertainty – it seems that every book I read has a different opinion.)

Eventually I decided not to worry about the specific meanings of the individual images on the card, but instead to see it as a whole, implying simply the inevitability of change and need for acceptance of that.

When I look at the card now as I write this blog almost all I can focus on is the dot in the centre of the wheel.  I have to force my eyes to move beyond that dot and then the card looks like a mandala which could go on endlessly out into space.

The mandala is a symbol and an instrument of natural energy within you that both gives you stability and pulls you beyond yourself to become more whole, more completely who you really are.

(http://creatingmandalas.com/psychology-of-the-mandala)

So going back to the second card I drew concerning the significance of this trip to Japan, I recall an interpretation I read many years ago of the Knight of Swords.  It was not in relation to me, but to Jon, when we were in the middle of a difficult decision about borrowing money.  The interpretation was simply “someone who moves forward fearlessly into the future”.  In reality, I consider this card much more nuanced than that, but being a person who has often been in touch with fear, I’m quite happy to take on the idea that at times I can also be fearless in my approach to life.  My first Reiki seminar allowed me to believe I could get well again and move beyond fear after a period of illness, depression and extreme ‘stuckness’.

I am currently reading Lucinda Holdforth’s book True Pleasures:  A Memoir of Women in Paris.  In it she writes :

It’s a captivating idea – that you can transcend your past, your genealogy, your childhood experiences, or even the heavy weight of your own culture. (p. 13).

When I attended Barbara McGregor’s Reiki I seminar in 1995, those words probably summed up what I wanted to do, even though I could never have articulated it.  Twenty years later I can say that, to some extent, that’s exactly what I’ve done.  The process has been slow and incremental – three steps forward, two steps back, as the saying goes – and of course, there’s still more to do.

 

Perhaps even another trip to Japan – and another top-up of energy at Mt Kurama to support me in my continuing quest to move fearlessly into the future…

The High Priestess and Betrayal

The High Priestess & Betrayal

 

Recently a friend shared with me a sense of feeling “betrayed” by a long-term friend. Betrayal is a powerful thing. And it interested me that I began writing this blog a few days before Easter. During the years spent living with my parents, Easter was largely a time of deep mourning. Even as a child the commonly held belief in Christ’s literal resurrection from the dead never resonated with me. Easter, for me, was about grief. And I imagine that a surefire way to connect with grief is to feel betrayed. (More about grief in my next blog.)

I should note here that in this blog I am not concerned with a betrayal as profound as that of Judas’ betrayal of Christ. I just thought the timing was interesting and that grief in some form is likely a normal consequence of feeling betrayed – no matter at what level.

So I asked what the cards could tell me about betrayal. I must admit that the (recovering) control freak in me usually desires the card I’m looking for to be my own conscious choice. Therefore I sometimes find it irritating when a card jumps out while I’m shuffling – and the tarot seems to be making the choice for me, as happened on this occasion.

Card II of the major arcana, The High Priestess, not only jumped, but indeed almost flew out. I figured I’d better go with that, even though I was bemused – as is also sometimes the case when a card seems determined to present itself. The High Priestess – one of my most-loved cards – can represent betrayal?

I turned to the author whom I often think of as my tarot Obi-Wan Kenobi: “Help me Rachel” and she answered with

This is the genius of genuine symbols, that they can signify several things at once and the possibilities of their applications never really end. (p.43)
(I)f images have trapped us, then images can free us. We can try to keep down the archetypal world by arguing with it, saying “This isn’t rational, this doesn’t make sense.” Or we can deal with it on its own terms and hope to travel through the experience. (pp.44,45)

So I soldiered on in my quest to understand the message.

The myth of Persphone – regularly associated with the High Priestess – helped me understand how this card relates to betrayal.

Persephone, originally known as Kore (which means daughter), lived with her mother, Demeter, the goddess of Nature. One day they were out in the flowering fields when Hades arrived in his chariot and carried Kore off to his kingdom (below ground, obviously, it being hell). I feel pretty sure that Demeter would have felt very betrayed.   She was certainly angry – she cursed the land so that the natural world died. Meanwhile Kore ate two or three pomegranate seeds (like most myths, the details vary).

Pomegranates are regarded as symbolic of female reproductive organs because of their shape and blood-red inner qualities. By this method (and of course her relationship with Hades) she thus became a mature woman and took on her true name, Persephone, Queen of the Underworld.

Reading this myth, I am never sure about Kore’s unwillingness to go with Hades, for I wonder whether hanging around with Demeter might have been just a tiny bit boring and that Kore was actually quite keen to take herself off to that other ‘country’. This is just a story, after all, to help us make sense of the world. Kore, known in her mature stage as Persephone, eventually came back to the upper world for half of each year – thus allowing Demeter to change the curse she’d placed on the land, giving us mere mortals winter (when the natural world “dies”) and summer (when the natural world returns to life).

The sad truth seems to me that it can sometimes be necessary to ‘betray’ others -in the sense of choosing an aspect of life and/or expressing an opinion of which the other might disapprove – in order to become our true selves.

I know for sure when I first chose my husband Jon (who, interestingly, has sometimes shown up in many tarot readings I’ve done for us as XIV The Devil) my mother didn’t like him one bit. As time went by, though, she realised what a suitable match he was for me. And even though all that’s another story, it does seem relevant, given how the life I chose with Jon was very different from the one my mother would have liked me to choose. I don’t doubt she felt I’d betrayed a lot of what she’d tried to teach me.

While I am writing my blogs, I tend to stop and start and allow various connections to be made in my brain.  While writing this, I kept thinking of one of my favourite authors – Janette Turner Hospital

who explore(s) recurring themes: dispossession and fragmentation; the isolation of the individual; and the borders – whether thin and definite, thick or fuzzy – between people, cultures and language.

 http://readingaustralia.com.au/essays/collected-stories/

I believe these themes are also to be found in friendships. Friendships ebb and flow in our lives: people come and they also go, sometimes permanently sometimes not. Friendship is like life – full of paradox. And afloat amidst that paradox, we try to find a balance for ourselves. The High Priestess sits between the two ‘sides’ of life – the yin and the yang, the black and the white, the positive and the negative, even perhaps betrayal and loyalty. Somehow she manages to sit, cool and calm in the point of balance.

In the Colman-Smith image, the number of the card and the paradox implied therein can be seen as represented by two columns – one on either side of the woman. According to many tarot scholars, these pillars reference the ancient Hebrew temple in Jerusalem. Within the black column on the left is embedded a white letter B (for Boaz); within the white column on the right is embedded a black letter J (for Jachin).

Rachel Pollack notes

Like the dots in the Tao symbol the letters signify that duality is an illusion, and each extreme carries the other embedded inside it. (p39, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom)

In this image there is also a curtain on which the pomegranates from the Persephone myth are illustrated. I find it fascinating that, upon looking closely in order to discover what lies behind the ‘veil’, only a glimpse of a very natural scene with a “pool of water, a line of hills, and the sky” is visible.   But as Rachel Pollack points out (t)he pool signifies the unconscious and the truth hidden there. (p. 39 78 Degrees)

 

This may have seemed a somewhat convoluted process (and indeed it was slow and slightly challenging) but what I came to understand was this:

The tarot threw out the High Priestess card as a representation of betrayal because, simply put, betrayal is one of those necessary shadow aspects of life. I suspect that the High Priestess knows this truth intimately. She is well aware that we cannot embrace the “light” without simultaneously embracing the “dark” and indeed that to accept the existence of the full range of human capacities is the only way to find balance within ourselves.

As Jung wrote:

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. – C.G. Jung

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 of Pentacles

10 of Pentacles

 

While working with a tarot spread recently the 10 of Pentacles symbolised what made the querant happy.

In this case, the querant (we’ll call him Peter) was feeling the loss of family life after a separation. It seemed that the card allowed Peter to engage with the nostalgic appeal of a previous time in his life, one in which he felt comfortable as the provider for his loved ones

While contemplating what I’d write about this blog I was reading a book called The Biographer (2008) by Virginia Duigan. I came across this paragraph:

You could influence the present, and through it the future, but you could do nothing about the past. Alone of the three the past was irrecoverable. It could not be changed and it was potentially merciless. (p. 190)

At first glance I agreed with the idea presented here, but later it occurred to me that the past is only truly “merciless” if we never change our perception of it.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception#/media/File:Multistability.svg)

The 10 of Pentacles is a complex card. Coming at the end of our progress through one cycle of the earth suit, the card clearly indicates that a considerable level of progress and development has been made. Perhaps in the Colman Smith images it is the details of this progress that often make me want to push those pentacles out of the way so I can see what’s going on further in (ie at a deeper level than just the “material”).

In order to understand the card in that deeper way, let’s ask which person in the card we would like to symbolise our own character. I suspect Peter would have preferred to be the man inside the wall, but because of his current circumstances, he is really more likely to feel like the pensive elder sitting outside the wall, looking in.

Rachel Pollack writes of the symbolism of this older man, deep in thought:

When the hero Odysseus arrived home from his wanderings in the wild, monster-ridden world outside civilized Greece, he came disguised as a beggar. Only his dog recognized him.   Though he wore rags, they were glorious rags (much like the visitor’s patchwork coat) for the goddess Athena had given them to him. Odysseus returned to the domestic world from the wild; … yet first he had to experience what lay beyond. The 10 of Pentacles takes us there as well.

(p. 242 Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom.)

http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/jar-pelike-with-odysseus-and-elpenor-in-the-underworld-153840

I love the fact that this card can take us to “the wild, monster-ridden world outside civilized Greece” because that, despite its challenges, provides balance in our lives. We learn from our adventures, be they literal or imagined.

 

One of my favourite quotes from TS Elliott is:

 We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Inevitably when we come to the 10 of a suit, we are also at the place where we begin again.   (10 = 1 + 0 = 1). (Although there isn’t necessarily any rush.)

The complexity of the 10 of Pentacles can help rather than hinder, if we are prepared to accept that everything goes in cycles.

(http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/educators/lessons/xray_spectra/background-lifecycles.html)

Even when we are not personally the one to initiate a new cycle in our lives, we have no choice but to respond – within our own lives – to whatever stimulus prompts the new cycle.

The alternative is to allow ourselves to be seduced into a locked form of thinking. Doing so achieves nothing except to create a past that is indeed “merciless” -because it continually dominates the present. Interestingly, the past can dominate whether we see it through rose-coloured glasses – so that everything in the past seems better than the present – or if we see the past as only painful, filled with sad or hurtful experiences.

           

It seems to me that if we have survived major change in our lives we are in a somewhat luxurious position. We can look back with the benefit of experience and utilise distance from the intensity of our experiences to help reassess them.

Pausing to reflect on our lives can be a challenge – especially in what seems to be a rather ‘driven’ modern western world. However, if we imagine ourselves more in alignment with the rhythm of nature’s cycles, it is possible to perceive such a pause as a period of lying fallow.

(http://spiritualityhealth.com/blog/jc-peters/fallow-field-virtue-doing-nothing)

Then, rather than being a time in which we feel paralysed by doubts, our pause can be transformative and productive. We can consider past situations in the light of new or different factors, all of which encourages viewing our lives and the world more creatively and allows fresh ideas to be nurtured.

In his writings about runes, Ralph Blume commented:

“Nothing is predestined. The obstacles of your past can become the gateways that lead to new beginnings.”

And even though it can be difficult to take the next step in life it is always, eventually, what we need to do. Stephen R Covey wrote:

“Live out of your imagination, not your history.”

(http://thelastdegree.com/10-tips-to-make-your-happy-brain-chemicals-surge-today/)

 

 

 

 

 

“Sisterhood”

Recently, a friend and I were telling each other the current story of our lives – during one of those spontaneous discussions that sometimes arise in facebook’s ‘private messaging’ feature. Over the years we have developed a way of communicating in this medium that is open, honest and truly enriching.  One of Kathie’s responses was:

We are the same person (woman) really.  

We just act it out in different ways in different environments.

This comment resonated at many levels and became the stimulus for a tarot question – as ideas that seem significant often do. This time I simply asked “So, how would the tarot represent Kathie’s statement?”

I chose the Dali Universal Tarot, a deck which fascinates me. (I must admit there are few decks that don’t. Nevertheless, I am usually drawn to a specific deck when working on a particular question.  I can’t say why, except to claim some intuitive connection to the images and themes.)

The Dali tarot’s ‘answer’ was the Three of Cups.

I am often impressed and intrigued when what seems like the perfect card presents itself – and over the years I’ve spent a lot of time pondering how this happens.  These days, however, I mostly accept that I simply don’t know how the tarot works – and it doesn’t matter.  I just move on to contemplate the insights and inspiration that are available to me.

Often when I am considering the meaning of a card I compare it to other images and the stories they tell.

Dali’s 3 of Cups brought to mind the three Fates and the three Graces of ancient Roman and Greek myth, as well as the Christian saints and virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity (including their resonances with the Holy Trinity).  I could look for more images that resonate and no doubt find many, but I hope these will serve to illustrate the point.

 

“The Moerae: Atropus, Clotho and Lachesis”. Frescoes (135-140 BC). Italy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moirai

The Three Graces, Canova’s first version, now in the Hermitage Museum

Saints Faith, Hope, and Charity with their mother Sophia the Martyr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith,_Hope_and_Charity

http://artofmourning.com/2014/12/25/faith-hope-and-charity/

Last but not least the 3 of Cups resonates with the tarot’s major arcana three, The Empress,  to which – in nuance – all the minor arcana threes are connected. The Empress is the ‘mother’ figure – considered by many tarot enthusiasts to symbolise all such figures from the Great Goddesses of ancient times to the anima archetype of Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious.  A sweeping definition of The Empress card would likely incorporate ideas about living a fruitful and flourishing life. My own ‘key concept’ for all the tarot threes is that they represent creative growth. Although our lives are complex and at times jagged in their paths, there is  growth of some sort going on until we die.  (Indeed some would say that death is the ultimate form of growth – in which we move into another realm.)

When I looked again at the 3 of Cups in relation to Kathie’s statement, I saw the women supporting each other, celebrating each other’s joys and lamenting each other’s pain – something Kathie and I have done for many years.  There is something very motherly about this kind of interaction – which is likely why I often send Mother’s Day greetings to my friends.

I also researched interpretations that others have published. Two that spoke to me in this context were:

Dali’s decision to have the women be interlaced in a traditional bellydance formation, and the stark luminosity of their nakedness, both underscore the complete absence of men in this picture. Bellydance was once a ladies-only practice and men were strictly forbidden from watching or participating. The women would interlace their arms and “churn” the blood inside their uteruses to increase their fertility.

(http://thetarotnook.com/2013/02/07/tarot-card-of-the-week-3-of-cups/)

The Three of Cups, often called “consent” or simply “yes,” this card implies a spirit of agreement, mutual support, encouragement, and teamwork. Regularly pictured as three women celebrating their connectedness in a dance with lifted cups, it can be called “sisterhood,” a mutual admiration society. It represents all the benefits of harmonious relationships.

(http://www.tarot.com/tarot/christine-payne-towler/cups)

The 3 of Cups also relates to how I see the tarot itself, ie communication that is open and helpful.  I am happy to have researched a lot of the scholarship that exists about the cards, but I have no desire to determine their absolute meanings or proffer any unreserved advice based on my interpretations.

I asked Kathie for some feedback on this blog and her response was:

The thing I was trying to say was that ‘ ‘when you talk about YOU, you talk about ME’. Many women are in the same headspace. That’s what I and others like about your writing . It resonates.

I’ll conclude with the Three of Vessels image image from The Wild Wood Tarot, a deck recently given to me by another friend with whom I also have meaningful ‘private messaging’ conversations. (I have just opened it and started exploring its beauty, thank you Teri.)

One of the meanings given for the card is

The successful return after migration or travel by a tribe or grouping.

Is it too much to ask that this blog in some small way brings a tribe or grouping together?  I hope not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Princess of Disks

I have finally allowed facebook to inform me of what’s happening, daily, on this page about my “tarot-life”. My relationship with facebook is double-edged: I’m sometimes unsure as to whether I love or hate it. (I suppose it’s possible to do both simultaneously …)

Anyway, the question posed by facebook is:  “What have you been up to?”

I purposely chose a card from the Thoth deck, about which I am also ambivalent. In my early years of studying the tarot I couldn’t even bear to have a copy of it in my house. Looking back I think this was due to Alistair Crowley’s dark reputation, which I foisted upon the cards drawn by Lady Frieda Harris. I much preferred to use the deck that Pamela Colman Smith drew in response to the writings of Arthur Edward Waite.

These days however, I can look at the Thoth Princess and the more or less equivalent Colman-Smith Page and appreciate their similarities, rather than be struck by their differences.

So what do they indicate that I’ve been up to?

Of course there are all sorts of esoteric ideas that could be thrown around here. But for me the tarot has always been a metaphysical means to a well- grounded end. I am not particularly interested in the past, except as it informs the present. And as for the future, that is just one possibility that may be countenanced by the present.

So perhaps the best précis about what I’ve been up to is that I’ve been learning there are always options. It’s good to have goals that one wishes to ‘birth’. However, achieving those goals can be a convoluted process in which various options will be considered and some, inevitably, disregarded. Other options – that one might previously have thought unnavigable – will suddenly prove to be the most functional.

The last couple of months have been challenging in various ways for me and I have been frustrated by my inability to find time, space and energy for writing. My goal when I arrived back in Brisbane was to write a blog entitled “Queen of the Unexpected” in line with some correspondence I had during April with Jamie Morris:

Home

and specifically

http://www.voiceheartvision.com/queen-courtyard/

I have looked at the Princess many times since she presented herself to me in answer to the question about what I’ve been up to. To my eye she looks surrounded by strong energies and she bows to what she must but will not be cowed. Instead she intuitively draws energy up from the earth through a golden crystal in her right hand and focuses that energy through her left hand onto the disk in her left hand.  This disk, on closer inspection, contains at its centre a yin-yang symbol.  From out of that symbol energy seems to flow in concentric circles.  This flower-like disk could easily be about to burst open with new creative force.

Was the Queen of the Unexpected actually the Princess of Disks in disguise?  I suppose it’s quite likely.  The Princess was certainly a surprise to me.  This is the first Thoth card I have engaged with in any deep way – and indeed I see beauty and encouragement in it, rather than darkness and a sense of gloom.

In thinking about this small piece of writing, I referred to Angeles Arrien’s definitive “Tarot Handbook. Practical Applications of Ancient Visual Symbols”. About the Princess of Disks I read: “(s)he “is a woman who has been over the volcano and through the briar patch. She bears new life that has been gestating and incubating within her for sometime. She is fertile and abundant with either a new identity, life style, creative project, or human being.” (p.143)

There is much in these few lines that resonates with me – and also much in it that teaches me humility. Had I not ‘given in’ to facebook’s somewhat insistent annotations such as “130 people who like Laura Fitzgerald Tarot haven’t heard from you in a while”, I may never have discovered the beauty of the Thoth Princess of Disks. It is she, in turn, who has encouraged me to keep on with my creative practice – and let those 130 people hear my voice again, even if what I write isn’t giving voice to my original goal.

Pondering the Princess of Disks has helped me to realise that manifesting one’s original goal as it is first conceived can sometimes become irrelevant. What matters more is to be as true to one’s own creative energy as possible, given the constraints that are an inevitable part of life.

A Relationship Spread

I have written quite a lot about my own relationship with the tarot and how it helps me to navigate my way through life.  So I thought this time I’d write about an issue that someone else might bring to a reading – and that we would then work on together.

Quite often the issue that brings people to a reading concerns a relationship.  On the surface there would seem to be many different relationships and many different issues – and to a certain extent that is true.  However, one regular theme, especially when people have been together for quite a while, is:

“How can we stay together when there seems to be so much that is drawing us apart?”

The following is  a sample reading about this question.

I’ve chose a simple three card spread – adapted from one to be found at Aeclectic Tarot (www.aecletic.net).

The three questions posed by the spread are:

1.  What are you dealing with right now?

2.  What do you need to leave behind?

3.  What do you need to embrace so you can look forward again?

As happens so often in real life, the three cards turned into more – this time into five.   A second card wanted to come out with the first one – and I never refuse to take a card that jumps out in a spread.   Then the second card seemed to require clarification, so I consciously chose a second card for this purpose.

As you can probably tell by now I tend to go with the flow of a reading, rather than stick to the infrastructure of a particular spread.  The way I read tarot feels a bit like “almost” following a recipe or improvising on a melody.

So the cards which came out were as follows:

1.   What you are dealing with right now:

The first card that presents itself is XVI The Tower – things falling apart in a dramatic fashion for sure – and one of the cards that querants usually hate to see.  XVI The Tower, along with XIII Death and XV The Devil, are often viewed as the really scary cards.  But if the tarot is to tell the truth, and if things are falling apart in a fiery, perhaps fear-inducing way within the relationship, then what better card to depict that situation?  Some may interpret this card as a sign that things are bound to fall apart and stay apart.  This is not how I see The Tower.  Whether or not the relationship can survive depends on the strength of its foundations – and that is not something I would presume to know.  I may have an inkling, but only the people involved can know the truth about that.  That’s where I suspect I differ from some readers.

What I would do is talk to the querant in a way which aims to help them clarify their own thoughts about the relationship’s foundations.  The Tower’s message is that things certainly won’t continue as they were – and some questions to consider would be whether the relationship was based on real commitment, whether one of the partners was, for example, ‘using’ the other for his/her own purposes, whether one was being deceitful, perhaps involved with a third person, but scared of hurting others’ feelings – or simply afraid of being alone.

So, after all these thoughts came to me about the Tower, I drew another card for some more ‘insight’.  Hmmn.  The 10 of Cups.  It would almost seem that there’s hardly a more antithetical card in a spread such as this.  Many simpler books on tarot call this the ‘happy families’ card – one which augurs dreams coming true and happy endings.  I don’t subscribe to the concept of perfection – either in people or relationships.

My take on this card is that the rainbow is the most significant symbol because it provides such a strong lesson in perspective.

 A rainbow is an optical illusion—it does not actually exist in a specific spot in the sky. The appearance of a rainbow depends on where you’re standing and where the sun (or other source of light) is shining.

(http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/encyclopedia/rainbow/?ar_a=1)

In the same way that it’s impossible to find the end of the rainbow – and therefore that elusive pot of gold, it’s also impossible to find perfection in individuals or relationships.  However, it is possible to be ‘happy’ within the imperfection.  So again, I would aim to discuss what this concept might mean to the querant and  whether the possibility of being happy within an imperfect situation resonated in any way.

I think it is no coincidence that this card is the 10 of its suit.  Tens indicate the end of a cycle – at this point we must be ready to face moving into a new way of being, usually within the same suit.  So this indicates being prepared to take a courageous leap into a somewhat ‘unknown’ emotional or spiritual state, given that Cups often represent the heart and its energies.

2.  What you need to leave behind:

I was puzzled when the Ace of Swords came out as something that needs to be left behind.    Many people dislike the Swords suit, thinking it indicates conflict.  I usually see the Ace as being a sign of needing or manifesting strength in adversity.  (I also call it the “cutting through the crap” card.)  But here I imagine it probably does mean conflict – and perhaps conflict that stops and starts.  We think the issue has settled down and then it flares up again.

So I asked for a card to guide me in my interpretation and received VIII Strength.  What came to me immediately – given the dance that the woman and the lion seem to be doing – was the old saying “It takes two to tango”.  Maybe both people in the relationship are strong – and may even have strong arguments on their respective “sides”.  But if that needs to be left behind the only thing that makes sense to me is that they both have to give up the need to be “right” and find some way to come to terms with the situation, allowing the other to have an opinion that is undoubtedly different, but not necessarily “wrong”.

Clearly this is not an easy situation to work with – and this is why I like to ask for some kind of guidance from the cards about where to from here.  If the cards can reflect the truth of a current situation, then surely they can provide some insight into ways to work positively with life’s issues.

3.  What you need to embrace so you can look forward again:

                                             

The King of Wands is essentially the king of ‘passion’. Wands represent unformed energy, the ‘spark’ of life, the force that makes us want to get up in the morning.  Perhaps the querant is feeling depressed and even struggling on a day-to-day basis with the need we all have to feel wanted and to belong.  I’d posit that the couple needs to get in touch with what brought them together in the first place.

Of course, this relates to the cards from the previous position.  It’s not going to be easy to reconnect on that level if the two people are still fighting in the manner represented by the Tower. They need to have moved out of that phase and become willing to respect each other’s position – more the dance of love as represented in Strength.

Rachel Pollack, in her Shining Tribe deck, gives the tarot Kings the title of Speakers.

(Trees is the suit in the Shining Tribe that corresponds to Wands.)

I would probably show this card to the querant and discuss the symbolism.  The concept of a family tree seems clear to me – and might help in working with the idea of what needs to be embraced.

To my mind, all the Kings and Queens in the tarot represent figures of equal authority, the difference being only in their style – yin or yang.  With authority comes power and with power comes responsibility.  A King doesn’t have to represent a man, just a yang style of energy – and I think in this reading the King of Wands symbolises  a need to acknowledge one’s responsibility within the situation. Moving through the Wands suit to the level of King would indicate many opportunities to evolve. Where has the original attraction led and why?

I suggest that it would be beneficial if the querant (and – if willing to do so – his/her partner) could draw upon the wisdom they have gained, not only for the benefit of themselves, but also for others to whom they owe some responsibility. This means they need to speak and act in a way that reflects stability and sincerity, while allowing for new possibilities, negotiations and agreements.