I've been exploring Mark Nepo's, The Book of Awakening, with a view to how it might interface with the Tarot. His book contains an entry for each day of the year exploring themes that bind us to our own humanity in ways painful, powerful, beautiful, and unanswerable. Each day he offers a question or observation to work with and as a way for my fire-ether self to earth some of the offerings I'm considering adding a daily card draw to the mix as a way to meet the teachings with more immediacy, to try and articulate the intangible. The theme for December 27th is, The Beauty of It.
If all I have is Now,
where will I look for Joy?
These two short phrases bring up a wealth of impressions...the assumption that we only have Now, the implication that Joy is something to be looked for, that it requires effort and action, and the delight in seeing Now and Joy capitalized for the deities they are. Traveling a little with this I sense that Now embraces both the past and the future within the womb of the arising moment. Mark opens the day with this...
Without hope for the future, without hope that things will change, with no hope of finding what's been lost, and no hope of restoring the past, with only the risk to crack open all that has been hardened about me, what will I do with what I have?
Several weeks ago in response to issues that were arising for me I turned to one of my Oracle decks for solace and pulled a beautiful card entitled, Hope. My immediate, unbidden response was, 'hope is for children'. An unfamiliar voice from I know not where. I was stunned at the starkness of this, its unadorned harshness...and soberly, what to me feels to me like, its truth. It did not come with bitterness or anger, nor cynicism, it simply came as a statement and because it came quietly with little emotion I've had to sit with it, to breathe with it, to allow it to inform me. I sense it's asking for my presence rather than my understanding. It has disturbed me deeply and is lodged in my body-heart like an undigested meal.
Seeing Mark's words above feel like small, green shoots branching off that thunderous message of several weeks ago. I shared with one of my Crone guides, a woman of tremendous wisdom and heart, my experience and her wonderful response set up a flare or two through my being...she said, "I think of hope as a state...or you might say a mood or a tendency of spirit...It has nothing to do with ordinary reality. One could call it childish but since it is familiar to me and makes me optimistic which is slightly cheerful I encourage it...but I understand your view...I guess this puts me more towards the pragmatic than you.
To that last phrase I must add, infinitely so lol. So holding the phrase in my heart, If all I have is Now, where will I look for Joy, I drew a Tarot card into this atmosphere of ambivalence, confusion and curiosity...
 |
| Five of Cups ~ Aquarian Tarot |
What does the Tarot give me as an answer? One I cannot reject...myself. Look for joy in your fear of disappointment, is the contradictory phrase that comes to mind. Fives are a tricky number, in the Tarot all the fives have to do with upset of some kind, either physical or emotional. They test us but they also have the capacity to bring out untapped strength...if we allow it. Like the wind blowing the reeds in this card, and the black birds, divine messengers, soaring high above the contracted figure, there is movement to be found in even the most static of states.
Rather than the traditional 'look beyond the shadow and see the possibility for other joys', what rings more true here is to look directly into the places we least expect to find it, to look for it in the liminal, in the somatic shadows themselves, in those places in the body that hold disappointment, the armoring, the depressed breath, the slouch, the crossed arms, the Stance, the turned back. In this case looking for joy becomes synonymous with looking for space, for expansion, for moments of light. This is not the response I was expecting...and thus it rings out with a truth I can't ignore.
What does it mean to do this? Is it possible? The moment the crossed arms loosen just the slightest, the point where the breath releases, the slouch that opens up ever so slightly...for me at this point in my journey, these are all moments of authentic joy, joy that is rooted in the small, in the detail, in the house of the body, joy that I can come home to again and again because it is cellular. There is a quiet, sober beauty in this. Which is to say there is a quiet sober beauty within me, the way there is within every one of us when we choose to stop, and listen to the voice that is continually articulating itself with each authentic question asked and lived out to the best of our humanity.
