Flying along the California coast from San Diego to Oakland, I am already paying the price mothers pay when they go off on a weekend writing retreat. Sitting on the runway, in concert with the stewardess’s final request for us to turn off cell phones, I see a voicemail from the school nurse scoot across my screen. I listen long enough to hear that my son slipped and fell, long enough to rush off a text for my husband to call the school.
I can’t exactly turn around and go back home, so I succumb to the mildly anesthetizing force of take-off and close my eyes. I “listen” with my mother’s intuition for news regarding my son; I sense that he’s not in serious trouble and a peace settles over me as I look at the symmetrical patterns in the land so far below: the dendritic tributaries of rain sluiced waterways, the muted Camelot greens of foothills, the swaths of dull leathery brown un-peopled fields and dragon-back ridges of mountain ranges. I won’t know until we land that I’m right, he’s OK, he’s just suffered a bit of whiplash. One of my Tarot teachers told me if you persist with the study of the Tarot, and persist with the study of your inner symbol world, eventually you won’t need the cards to read. You take your pattern-trained eye with you out into the world and the world talks back.
Once, heartbroken, I walked along the sea. The cumulous clouds seemed to converge on the horizon directly in front of me. As I watched, wind roiled through the middle tier of clouds and formed a bordered chamber, one downy velvet wisp extending towards the water, so familiar, prompting a memory of the dream I had the night prior involving angels. Picture Abbot Handerson Thayer’s brown-eyed winged girl with arms outstretched, only in my dream she appeared inside a room above my heart with five sisters, all equally beautiful and equally devoted to wicking a portion of the grief I couldn’t bear to carry. Here, in the waking world, sitting in the chilled sand with arms across my folded knees, I felt incandescent, hopeful, as the clouds mirrored back that image of a nest of loving wings.
Another image that gives me that same feeling of incandescence is The Star card in the Tarot, particularly Lady Frieda Harris’s depiction in the Thoth deck. It captures my devotional love for the Tarot. I love the serpentine “s” of the central figure’s body and the way she bridges the heavens to Earth in such a lithe embodiment of self as oracle, gathering celestial light in one cup only to step it down and pour it forth below. Isn’t the humbling and consternating beauty of the human condition the yearning we have to reach star-ward at the same time that we find ourselves gravity-anchored in a physical body? And every day, until we learn ways to soothe ourselves and accept our challenges, the often jarring disparity between dream and reality of what actually crosses our path?
Into 2016’s year of Tarot devotions and explorations here, I hope you’ll join me to bring to the conversation:
the curiosity of a child
the pattern-gleaning scrutiny of a seeker
the symbol hungry eye of an artist and poet
and the voracious mother-fierce compassion of loving witness to the questions circling beneath the questions regarding the dreams we come into this life craving to fulfill…
…as we look at ways to use the Tarot to deepen our relationship to ourselves and to our writing and art.
I’d love to know, in comments:
Which card in your Tarot deck do you love the most and why?
Photo at the top of this post is by Robyn Beattie.
