Every Idea is a Seed

Medicine Cards ~ Medicine Woman Tarot

It's hot here today, uncharacteristically so. We're all laboring under the humidity and high temps that characterize more southern climes but I have to say, I actually like it. This is the heat of my childhood though with less humidity. We used to only get a few groupings of several days like this over the course of the summer but now these mini heatwaves are becoming more consistent as global warming makes its presence felt, as Mother Nature yields and dances to maintain the balance of power. Which is pretty much how these two cards feel. I drew them in the cool(ish) of the earlier morning.

Horse and Bounty

Horse ~ Medicine Cards ~ Sams & Carson

Horse medicine speaks to power and its skillful use. Both my guys here at home are Horses in the Chinese astrological paradigm so I'm familiar with this somewhat boisterous, dynamic energy. The LWB speaks to the idea that understanding the power of Horse allows us to strive for balance. It goes on to say "True power is wisdom found in remembering your total journey. Wisdom comes from remembering pathways you have walked in another person's moccasins. Compassion, caring, teaching, loving, and sharing your gifts, talents and abilities are the gateways to power." 

When I reflect on my relationship with these magnificent creatures I feel a depth of muscular speed and grace, a keen emotional intelligence and sentience and the potential for a tremendous gathering energy when needed. They are bold and refined in the same breath. It's interesting to meditate on these qualities in relation to the medicine of power, perhaps inferences I wouldn't so readily draw if I were focusing on power in isolation, as a concept not bodied by Horse. Secretariat comes to mind as I look at the list of qualities I associate with Horse. He was an astonishing creature who seemed to be poised between the human and animal realm, moving back and forth between the two as needed, surely an example of magic/power if there ever was one.

Bounty ~ Medicine Woman Tarot

 My heart always lifts a little when this card comes up. Traditionally The Empress in the RWS system here it's entitled Bounty. The creator focuses primarily on the Mother Earth/Nature aspect of this card. I loved what she has to say about this card and felt my perspective was enlarged by the lens she views it through.

I like the way this Cosmic Mother is seated upon the Earth as her throne. Her back rests against the trunk of a great tree, her feet are large and bare and they straddle both earth and water. She has a nursling at her breast whom she nourishes with an ease that I recognize from my own days as a nursing mom when that was so woven into the day it was as natural as breathing.

Her basket is full, crops ripen and encircling it all is a rainbow and manifest sun. It's a lovely depiction of spirit in nature. Says the LWB...

"I recognize the laws of nature and work with them. This is my power. I live in the garden of delights. I choose my concepts wisely like the flowers I choose to plant. Every idea is a seed. I water what is beautiful. I am the womb of creation, through which the fullness of life flows into every thought I dwell upon, giving it life.  bear the children who are the arts of myself needing to be expressed. As the Cosmic Mother, I have given you life in order that you may blossom into your fullness."

The Empress as Immanence, a bounty that is articulate. The author includes visualizations and exercises to go with the various Majors and here she suggests, 'Think of your mind as a garden. What grows there?" What mental concepts am I watering, what visions am I tending to? What fears am I feeding? What dreams need light? I actually did most of the meditations for this card, something I normally skip, and found them helpful in accessing its different strata.

Epona

Together these make for a dynamic pair. The power of mother nature is the obvious inference to draw but reading along in the LWB I began to have a different sense of The Cosmic Mother/Empress in relation to power. Power as Her Immanence, the indwelling sentience that animates the living world, that quivers interdependently through all life, a numinous current. Her seat of power is her presence, undifferentiated. And of course one can't help but think of Epona, the Gallic-Roman horse goddess, protector of grain, goddess of fertility and leader of souls in the afterlife. In her we see Horse and Bounty merge seamlessly...