Conceived Out of Nowhere

Sometimes

if you move carefully

through the forest,

breathing

like the ones

in the old stories,

who could cross

a shimmering bed of leaves

without a sound,

you come

to a place

whose only task

is to trouble you

with tiny

but frightening requests,

conceived out of nowhere

but in a place 

beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what

you are doing right now,

and

to stop what you

are becoming

while you do it,

questions 

that can make

or unmake

a life,

questions 

that have patiently

waited for you,

questions

that have no right

to go away.

David Whyte

The above poem, entitled 'Sometimes', by David Whyte describes this triptych so well I hesitate to write anything...but for my own edification I shall journey through these cards a little to see where I find myself. 

Standstill ~ Alchemist's Oracle

This oracle card is stunning, the colors glorious. I note the almost full moon and though the card is entitled 'Standstill' the tree appears to be a goddess dancing, alive with the vitality of wind and movement and the mystery of the liminal. One or two leaves fall from the branches and the grassy mound beneath it feels palpably supportive. The LWB tells me...

You have reached a standstill. It is of great importance to receive this as a gift and exercise restraint rather than view it as a burden...Your job now is to submit and surrender to the beauty and silence of standstill

As a full-time mom this sounds lovely. And quite do-able despite the presence of such weighty words as 'restraint', 'submit' and 'surrender' tossed in there for good measure. Enjoying the unusual silence of a busy house, watching the way the light falls just so on the roses, sensing the way a strain of music feels in my body, and I am already surrendering, submitting and limiting my focus to the present moment. What is attention, engagement if not surrender? Or as Bev so beautifully put it in a recent comment, "relaxing into reality", which I love for its somatic wisdom.

The Moon ~ Wild Unknown Tarot

And here in the Tarot card I'm presented with the opportunity to stand even further within and reflect. I note immediately the lunar theme in the oracle card now taking center stage here in The Moon. This moon is in a waning crescent phase, the old moon, it is sometimes called, seen in the east before dawn. It is a time of deep intuition, divination and release. It is the moon of the Earth Mothers. And it is the current moon phase where I live. Again only the trees are witness to this quiet unfolding. Trees, the great lungs of our planet, attuned to the three worlds, underworld, everyday world and heaven realm they are potent teachers with their own sense of time. The emphasis on nature here as witness is a profound one as The Moon is very much taken up with mysteries of the natural world, the tides, harvest and planting, the weather, fertility, the female body and much more. Underlying these is the theme of cyclical influence and further the suggestion to look within and attend to those inner cyclical developments. What dreams want a body? What intuitive hunches need a voice, need expression?

In Tarot terms, The Moon is our active imagination that has access to the shadow. It is a doorway through to the unknown in which unconscious, intuitive material may be brought through to work with in the everyday. Feelings, dreams, hunches, the feminine mysteries, all of these are related to The Moon. Combined with the oracle card I'm feeling moved to go out into nature today and sit beneath a tree and allow it to witness whatever feelings, dreams, or shadow energy that comes up. All the while remembering that Nature, as a potent witness, is sharing this with me.

...you come

to a place

whose only task

is to trouble you

with tiny

but frightening requests,

conceived out of nowhere

but in a place 

beginning to lead everywhere.

Justice ~ Wild Unknown Tarot

Another Major to work with today in the Justice card. In many ways this feels the inverse of The Moon with its emphasis on impartiality, on facts and logic, reason and action. The creator of this deck has chosen to use cats to depict this card. Cats, with their haughty impartiality, seem quite an apt choice but I also associate them with the feminine, with mystery and enigma so there's a bit of a disconnect there for me. Although this could point to a larger, less tangible body of Justice at work.

In this card we see two cats, one white, one black seated before a sword that is pointing down towards a black and white diamond shape. The cats are both looking back at us. They want us to be accountable for our actions. All the black and white emphasizes for me the element of balancing polarities, the aspiration towards equilibrium. The crossed tails of the cats suggest the idea of 'holding the tension of opposites'. The lines coming off the center and spreading beyond the card tell me that justice is also interdependent extending far beyond my own experience of it to affect others in ways I might not imagine.

So what am I to make of these three cards together today, let alone as an ongoing theme? What am I to make of standing still, of intuitive and/or shadow lunar energy and being accountable for that energy as I hold the tension of opposites? Well, I'll share how it has played out so far. Earlier I headed out to walk the dog and arrived at the car to find a ticket saucily eyeing me from beneath the windshield wipers to the tune of $106! And here The Moon and Justice met in an embrace that could only be described as...fractious. A series of expletives issued from mouth as I railed against the 'injustice' of greed and boredom on the part of city officials. Meanwhile the ticket flapped implacably in the wind.

Parking in our densely packed city with its dearth of available space is an ongoing issue for the inhabitants. Recently the city has stepped up its efforts to pay its employees through parking fines and my dh and I, normally parking-vigilant, have received between us three tickets in the past month for things that in all the time we've lived here we've not been ticketed for before. And yet, the sign said one thing, my car was doing something else and the ticket was issued whereupon all my irritation and annoyance was suddenly pulled from the shadows into the light.  I paused, took a 'standstill' breath and thought, 'Justice allow me to introduce you to The Moon'.