Slowly Evening

After events yesterday I felt moved this morning to focus on how I might embody more fully and more subtly the flower of gratitude today. What might that look like on an actual, practical basis for me?

Slowly evening takes on the garments
held for it by a line of ancient trees.
You look, and the world recedes from you.
Part of it moves heavenward, the rest falls away.

Rilke's stately, measured pace in his poem, Evening, from The Book of Images, reminds me that gratitude has rhythm built right into it, has a sense of place and timing about it that is wholly its own. And yet it touches and transforms both subject and object, both worshiper and deity. For I am no less God's meditation and mantra than She is mine...I feel my body being silently and secretly spoken between the lips of wonder and draw an oracle card...

You are exactly where you need to be ~ The Alchemist's Oracle

And here the lovely flower of Gratitude Herself appears, swimming into vision with all the grace and beauty befitting such humble regency. My reaction upon seeing this card was delight, which was telling as the LWB describes the card...

Sometimes these are welcomed words, and at other times they are the last thing you wish to hear.  Acknowledging where you are right now is tremendously beautiful, powerful and responsible. The areas of your life are either flourishing or wilting in direct proportion to the level of love and attention you are giving to them.

I find the use of the word 'responsible' here to be such a skillful one, containing as it does such a spectrum of meaning and yet at its most basic it refers to the ability to respond, to heed the call and say something in reply. I could express that 'something' with speech or attention, with my breath or a glance. It could be danced or sung, cried or raged. It might be graceful or clumsy. And I wonder if I might move through my day noticing my actions and words and framing them through the lens of 'right place'. A simple reaching for a coffee cup becomes a gesture of thanks for coffee, for the mug, for the maker of the mug, for the intricacy of bones, the poetry of skin and sinew that so easily knows just how to reach. It is a bold almost revolutionary thought to bring gratitude down to the level of simple presence, of an acknowledgement of "I am exactly where I need to be". I want to complicate it with my perimeters and intricate qualifiers--this, not that--but perhaps it comes down to the breath by breath expansiveness of presence. Rilke names the sense of disorientation of such a heady possibility as his poem continues...

And you are left, belonging to neither fully,
not quite so dark as the silent house,
not quite so sure of eternity
as that shining now in the night sky, a point of light.

With this sense of gratitude as an ongoing and perhaps not wholly known breath I shuffle and draw two Tarot cards holding this idea in mind. Before turning them over I spend a moment looking at them with their cardbacks facing me and drink in the lovely symmetry before me...

Turning them over I am faced with some potent male energy flanking that lovely, feminine flower of gratitude and presence.

The Emperor ~ You are exactly where you need to be ~ The Devil

My first thought looking at all three together is how balanced this triptych is. If I am the flower of gratitude today I am also the still point between the breath of control and the breath of appetite.

The Emperor ~ Wild Unknown Tarot

A large, stately and very solid tree rises high into the white sky. The earth beneath it is dark and firm. The sun looks to be in eclipse, dark with a fiery halo around it. I think of the crown chakra when I look at this, placed so close to the top of the tree, crowned by the sun. The card is a four, the number of natural order, logic and reasoning as well as internal organizing abilities. Four arises out of the creativity of three transforming it into the practical, the earthed. Fours suggest both boundaries and restraint or control, sometimes to a fault.

There is much more that can be said about Four with its seasons, directions, winds and elements and so forth but for me today, the presiding theme is structure and boundary, control and symmetry all of which are apparent in subtle and not so subtle ways here in this Emperor card.

The branches spread out so evenly moving towards an apex at the top, the concentrated and contained solar energy of the eclipsed sun, the unembellished branches and landscape, the rising form of the trunk, its stolid strength all of these feel quite masculine to me which befits an Emperor. Traditionally The Emperor appears to teach us about applying reason to our problems, to demonstrate discipline and self-sufficiency as well as to 'rule' with respect and an awareness of the community. That is less obvious with this card but there is clearly a feeling of control and structure, order and limit here in the shape of the branches, the choice of evergreen for the tree and the controlled solar imagery. I move on to The Devil

The Devil ~ Wild Unknown Tarot

A very shaggy goat or ram appears suspended in a crosshatch of black space. He is looking at me slyly, only his right eye visible. His horns are full of impressive, vital energy and his ears mirror that somewhat. On his third eye he wears a reversed Pentacle suggesting his aspirations are not towards the higher self but the lower one. His body is covered in long, shaggy fur and his hooves and lower legs are encircled with halos of fiery orange-red. Despite how much I revere feet and their service to the body I would view this imagery as an intentional consecrating of the profane. So where do I find myself in this card?

 You are left, for reasons you can't explain,
with a life that is anxious and huge,
so that, at times confined, at times expanding,
it becomes in you now stone, now star.

The dilemma of stone and star feels very present for me in this card. And that it has come up in relation to The Emperor underscores this polarity further. If The Emperor is law and order The Devil is a disregard for those laws, for restraint, convention and a moral imperative. He is the shadow to the Emperor's controlled sun. His number adds up to 6, a kind of inverse Lovers card. And he appears after Temperance, the card of healing, of art and alchemy as if the Temperate Angel has paved the way for us to really see our shadow, the hidden caves where creatures fly and crawl and lurk.

And what am I to make of this placement? That as that flower I'm right where I need to be, poised between these two strong, masculine poles of energy, learning how to hold not one or the other but both with equal presence. I feel I'm being asked to bring a sense of limit and boundary and light to the shadow energy that is asking for an audience. And to do so knowing my place on this good, green earth is a rightful one, is not mere but rather an acknowledgement of both stone and star and the span of light and space between them.

Rilke has given me a way to synthesize these three cards in a piece he wrote in, Letters to a Young Poet...

We have no reason to distrust our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors. If it has an abyss, it is ours...Let us not forget the the ancient myths at the outset of humanity's journey, the myths about dragons and princesses. Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act just once with beauty and courage. Perhaps every terror is, in its deepest essence, something that needs our recognition or help.