Crane Medicine At Dawn

I woke before four this morning, a semi-regular occurrence thanks to hormonal tides. Some days I mind and other days I welcome the silence, the darkness, the space for practice, for uninterrupted thoughts and dreams before the busyness of the day begins with its duties and roles to inhabit. Today in the diminishing darkness I pulled a Card of the Day on my phone app. I like the apps for this purpose, times when I don't want to have to look through all my decks to find the one I want to use, times when I've not had enough rest but can't go back to sleep and dawn is beginning to unfold itself across the sky. Today's draw speaks directly to recent themes of distraction that feel like pulls on my energy which aren't contributing to a feeling of wholeness or equilibrium.

I used the wonderful Animals Divine Tarot by Lisa Hunt. I was fortunate to acquire this OOP deck from a fellow AT member and I'm so grateful I did as it has become one of my favorites. It combines animal medicine with Tarot wisdom through the lens of Lisa Hunt's gorgeous and evocative artwork. It's loosely based on the RWS system. The Majors and Court cards depict gods or goddesses from various spiritual traditions and the Minors encompass a wide spectrum of the animal, bird, aquatic, insect and reptile world.

Crane ~ Seven of Swords ~ Animals Divine Tarot

On this card a delicate crane stands in the middle of a small eddy of widening rings of water surrounded by a circle of swords, blades pointing downwards, tips submerged in the pool. Stars from the night sky are reflected across the pool's surface and as the crane bends towards them, trying to decipher the messages, her own reflection peers back at her calling her back to the present moment.

Crane medicine speaks to themes of balance, grace, navigating the world of water and air, heart and mind and, because Asian cultures associate the crane with longevity, it also represents drawing on ancestral experiences as a way to anchor oneself in the present. This could be as simple as recognizing my place on the path within the lineage of women who've gone before me. I can imagine them all standing behind me, a long feminine wisdom-stream ribbonning back into the liminal prairies of time.

While the bird below is not a crane but a Great Blue Heron, the body language and landscape it inhabits is similar. I remember the day I snapped this pic on a walk around the lake. This majestic bird stood absolutely still for a long time letting me snap pic after pic as the sun warmed both our backs and the wind ruffled hair and feathers.

The LWB for this card suggests that too many visions and ideas have contributed to mental clutter and clouded the mind and heart from its true north. This feels applicable and particularly so this morning as I lay in bed with the freedom to let my mind roam and wander down various possibilities and paths. The internet does not help and I often find myself dancing between screen time and real time, between the virtual and the embodied. With Crane's wings unfolding my intention I feel encouraged to embrace the opportunity to watch how often my mind feathers wildly away from the still point at the center as it reaches for stars, shells or some variation on a lack of presence.

As a way to bring this medicine into the body I have spent some time working with the Tai Chi move 'White Crane Spreads its Wings'. It's a beautifully slow and deliberate sequence of moves, watery and airy at the same time but rooted in the body's ability to shift and share weight and gravity. Like Crane I can aspire to step into the waters of the moment with deliberation and grace imagining as I do that a great, great, great grandmother might also have found herself pausing to breathe quietly in the middle of a day full of hard, physical work, the wings of her heart opening and closing gratefully around that brief, stolen stillness.

The Gift of Exploration

Today as I was shuffling in preparation to draw my cards my mind roamed through my emotional body gathering various flowers and blooms. The one that presented itself to me with the most brilliance was the flower of freedom. Perhaps it's the date with its theme of what I prefer to call interdependence or perhaps it was last night's unremembered dreams having their way with me this morning or perhaps the widening angels of possibility were breathing me into awareness. Whatever it was I experienced a visceral moment of expansion, the felt sense of a brief trill in my body and the word 'freedom' flashed upon my mind. I stopped shuffling and drew my oracle card...Heron. And like yesterday my heart soared a little bit...

The LWB tells us...I am Heron, the ally of the mystic. I am stable. I am focused and alert. I am at peace. I never miss a ripple in the great pool. I am the gift of concentration. I am stillness that allows greater purpose. Now is the time for rest and meditation...There is purification in acceptance. There is wellness in letting things be as they are. Those last two sentences strike a chord in me and I let them sink in.
 

On my hikes over the years I often see these glorious and graceful creatures standing in the water, regents of stillness and silence. Often I don't realize they're there until suddenly the moment stirs in a flare of grey wings and grace rising into the air. They seem equally at home in both elements and their equilibrium is something to marvel at, balancing as they are able on such tiny, narrow supports. I snapped this magical pic a year or so ago on one of my hikes.

  

You are meditation.

You are beauty and balance.

You are the calm center of your own universe.

You are Heron.

With this meditative atmosphere in mind I shuffle my Tarot deck holding the question of what I need to bring the qualities of focus, of absorption and equilibrium to today...and I can't help but feel the bird of my own heart rise into the air on an updraft of joy upon seeing the cards...

Gaia, The World and Bast, The High Priestess. Two Majors, both women, both Goddesses. I note first off how each is using her hands to weave energy, how one is of the Earth, the other is of the Sky, how much blue and green plays a part in each card, how the theme of the crescent moon is subtly referred to in both images. Already it feels like a natural dialogue has sprung up between these two cards, overseen by Heron's mystic presence, these three feel like a kind of sacred triumvirate.

Looking first at Gaia, the World, I note the feeling of symmetry, of balance that Gaia reflects as she accommodates all manner of creatures and living things. She is the pulsing and radiant point in the center of all that life, the anima mundi as is so artistically depicted here. Her myth is potent and here we see her as Mother of the World, known to the Greeks as "the deep-breasted one". Any nursing mother knows the power of breasts to nurture, to support and nourish her child. It is this quality of sustenance, of life-giving energy that allows the circle to continue to flow that she embodies. There are all manner of creatures and symbols in this card...snakes, representing rebirth and renewal, roots growing from Gaia's fingers, the tree itself, connection between the underworld, the earth and the upperworld. My eye is drawn to the hint of a luminous crescent moon made by the roots and light and stars flowing from Gaia's fingers and Gaia herself is part tree.


Whenever I receive a Major in a reading I'm not always sure how to interpret its presence in my life since it often seems to point to energies that are less accessible because they are so much a part of the structure of the psyche, the collective awareness. Sometimes I think of the Majors as deities and the Minors as spiritual community. The Buddhists have a word for my definition of the Minors, kalyanametta, friends along the path who support our development. As such court cards become the teachers and gurus. In this way today I've been asked to spend some time meditating on two deities. I think of The World card as the Dance, a recognition of the turning of the wheel of dharma, an awareness of the cyclical. Traditionally we see a woman clothed with a scarf dancing in a mandorla made of a wreath, holding two staves and surrounded by the heads of four archetypal figures. To square a circle, in Jungian and alchemical terms, means to become fully realized and transformed as a human being. We don't see that imagery here overtly but there is clearly the sense of circular energy, of renewal and accommodation, of bridging worlds. And Heron has asked nothing less of me than to meditate on this today, to bring some stillness and focus to the central hub of my being, the place where as Eliot says, "at the still point of the turning world there the dance is."

With this feeling of motion, of cyclical energy I turn to Bast, the High Priestess. The Egyptian goddess of protection and of cats Bast was the daughter of Ra, the sun god. In this card we have many symbols that point to the intuitive world, the jewels across the third eye, the starry night sky, the lunar glow held at the heart, Bast Herself, of course, and the subtle presence of her familiars on either side of her, echoes of the two pillars seen in the traditional version of this card as well as behind her. Bast's ears are aglow and they form the suggestion of a crescent moon crowning her head. Her gaze is both direct and veiled and she is rising out of the cosmos itself dressed in robes of gold and green. The spiral between one hand glows with luminous mystery and sits above a lion-headed cloth in her other hand which sits at her solar plexus uniting these two realms. Bast herself feels like a doorway into the cosmos behind her, into the vast expanse of intuition and Spirit.


I often feel a bit stymied when writing about the High Priestess as her very nature seems to resist interpretation, at least a linear interpretation. Her number is two which is the number of duality, suggesting a kind of binary consciousness, the ability to navigate two worlds.

In the RWS deck, the pomegranates in the background suggest a descent but in the myth Persephone is taken against her wishes into the underworld which would suggest strong subconscious, potentially transformative forces at work. The ability to navigate this collective unconscious wisdom energy would depend on my level of self-awareness as Seeker.

The High Priestess's relationship to The Moon card is pronounced for me and in this version of the card it is strong with all that starry imagery and night sky and the crescent moon on Bast's head. But whereas The Moon card suggests the mysteries of the natural or physical world the High Priestess suggests the mysteries of a more personal nature.

There is a feeling of concealment and secrecy in this card but not for nefarious reasons rather for the purposes of containing that which is precious and potent. It suggests tending to the inner cosmos, keeping things sheltered from the brighter light of the Sun, the manifest until they are truly ready to seen. She is a tremendous, yielding force. So bringing the three cards together...

I notice that in all three cards the figures are holding potent energy in their hands. Heron holds a ball of light similar to that of Bast. She is looking in her direction, offering it to her, leaning towards her as if to say we are of the same lineage. Gaia, the World holds space for it all, all of it streaming from her fingers in a potent exhalation of form meeting name. This is a tall order for today! Rilke, help me out here...and he does beautifully with one of his uncollected poems which seems to synthesize all three cards...

 The Gift of Exploration

Dove that stayed in the open outside the dovecote,
brought back and housed again
where neither night nor day poses danger--
she knows what protection is...

The other doves not exposed to peril
do not know this tenderness.
The heart that has been fetched back
can feel most at home.
Vitality is freed through what it has renounced.

Over Nothingness the universe bends.
Ah, the ball we dared to throw
fills the hands differently on its return:
it brings back the reality of its journey.

One Sufficient Word

It's grey and cool here as our day begins. No oversleeping today and things have started off on a more even keel. I drew my cards in the candlelit womb of the dawning day accompanied by my little canine companion. She watches with the passion of disinterest, her little snout being its own divinatory tool, seeking out trash or treasures, the designation of which is not something I can claim to know much about. Her system is her own.

Asking for what wings my heart needs feathering with today I drew Hummingbird...

 A beautiful swirl of color and vibrancy, my heart lightened when I saw this feathered totem appear for the day. We have hummingbirds come to feed at our Abutilon tree regularly. They pause, a furious and whirring moment of stillness, their ruby throats catching the light and sending up a flare of beauty on the retina. They drink deeply of the amrit and then, they're gone like a quick flame. They speak of fleeting beauty and joy, of seizing sweetness when you find it and they also speak of the majesty of the small. All these thoughts and feelings flashed by me, as though the hummingbirds themselves had alighted briefly in my mind, as I gazed at the card. The LWB tells us...

I am Hummingbird. I am creator shaman. I am the burst of light in the darkness. Whirling and weaving through the pattern of time, I create the nectars of life. I am the fragility of time and the strength of passion. I am the beauty of nature in motion...the fleeing brilliance of the moment. 

There is a tremendous sense of dance and fluidity here and the colors are glorious. I've not ever looked to hummingbirds as teachers other than instructors of beauty but as I feel into their motion and winged selves something more substantial begins to take shape. And I draw my two Tarot cards...

Vulture, Three of Swords and Tiger, Three of Pentacles. I notice immediately that I've drawn two threes and muse on the ramifications of this for my day. Threes speak of creativity and fruition, associated as they are with The Empress. They complete events and activities allowing us to see the way through to a new and different vista. But they also represent the conflict between the higher ideal and the more immediate concerns of the world, the two plus the one and what are we going to do with that? They herald the arrival of a transformational opportunity and ask us to respond accordingly. Hmm, seeing two of these powerful numerological representations on my altar I wonder...

Vulture, totem for the Three of Swords, and I feel the weight of yesterday's emotional baggage sitting on my shoulders. My thoughts about mothering and all the places I fall down again and again. I notice the tree is shaped, ever so subtly, into a heart upon which Vulture sits gazing down at three gold swords that hang on gnarled branches carved with spirals. The spirals and the heart-shaped branch provide some expansion for me as I breathe into the grey, dismal scene. And yet it's not without an austere beauty and symmetry. Vulture seems particularly entranced by the swords and is unable to avert her gaze. Traditionally the Three of Swords is the card of heartbreak as a result of focusing on past hurts and yet it also speaks to getting to the 'heart of the matter'. Here there is also a sense of isolation though the tree provides some shelter and support and my mind latches on to the idea of allowing my body to support me during rough, emotional terrain through dance, authentic movement, hiking or even the solidity of sitting practice. With this idea of kinetic prayer in place I move on to my second card.

Tiger, Three of Pentacles. Ah, this feels grounding and directional and I sink into the feeling of my own paw as it steps into the pond and creates widening ripples across the surface of the water. Tiger here is majestic and walks fearlessly though intentionally towards the pond. Her power is evident simply by her bearing. There is no wasted energy here and her effect is far-reaching if the ripples on the pond are any indication. 

My usual keywords for this card are along the lines of 'master craftsman' 'creative integrity' 'sacred artistic vision and skill'. The RWS version depicts a craftsman working with the support of patrons. Here that element is less obvious but there is clearly the sense that moving with intention and grace through the world has far-reaching ramifications. I have an image of the self as a pebble tossed into the waters of Spirit and Spirit sensing itself being received through the widening rings of experience. Perhaps all that tension in the Three of Swords might be offered up to this pond, to Spirit and be allowed to widen into something much larger than the tightly held self with its circular thought processes around grief, hurts and the like.

Hummingbird encourages me to soak up the beauty of each ruby-throated moment, even the 'un-beautiful' moments of the Three of Swords. If they can be looked at through this lens then perhaps they can be put to use to create something of value. Perhaps simply revisioning them through that lens is the key that opens the door of the self. Rilke again comes to my rescue as guide with a poem, Les Roses, from his collected french poems...

One Sufficient Word

A rose by itself is every rose.

And this one is irreplaceable,

perfect, one sufficient word

in the context of all things.

Without what we see in her,

how can we speak our hopes

or endure a tender moment

in the winds of departure. 

Sky Within Us

Two thirds of the family woke up on the wrong side of the bed today, dogs and bird excluded. I slept in, unusual for me, which, as captain of this good mothership, meant the day got off to a slower start than usual for everyone. As I was feeling into the thin-skinned emotional body of the nascent day, I drew my cards asking first what wings my heart needed today. I had to laugh when I saw Rooster in all his dawning, dynamic glory. Does this mean we get to start the day over lol?

Rooster presents me with a bold and passionate picture of how I might move through the world. Being a fire sign myself I feel a resonance with all that fiery, creative energy that is feathering off him like so many dancing flames. The LWB tells us...

I am Rooster, the rising sun and break of day. I am vitality. I am sexuality. I am the eternal matrix of fertility. While the feminine nurtures all things created, I am the force that shapes the created. I am creator god, wielding the power of seed and continuity. I am the domain of reproductive potency.

An interesting mix here of fertility and procreative impulse viewed through the lens of the masculine. With this very masculine energy swirling off my altar I settle in a moment to see where I might locate it in my body...there it is, in my hara center and my throat center and I spend a few breaths sensing into the dialogue of what feels like a tremendous potency and power. With this dance actively flowing in my body I draw my two Tarot cards for the day holding the question of where I need to bring this dynamic energy to. I receive Poseidon and Bat, the King of Cups and Five of Swords respectively. It's turning out to be a very masculine day today...

Looking at Poseidon, King of Cups, with his swirls of watery energy and his creatures circling around him I'm reminded of a starry nebula with infinite points of light and life arising out of the constellation. Contrast that with what feels like a 'black hole', an enormous gravitational pull-force depicted in Bat, the Five of Swords. How might these two open up a dialogue together?

 Here we see Poseidon, undisputable god of the Sea, holding a chalice and meditating on the myriad forms of oceanic life. Some of that life arises around him as if out of his meditations, swirling in an active and ongoing mandalic flow. There is a dolphin swimming in the upper portion of the card perhaps representing the awakened psyche, there is an octopus in the lower portion of the card clinging to the rocks reminding me of my own tendency to cling to emotional experiences, there are many fish swimming through the waters suggesting the diversity of collective consciousness, there is a seahorse perhaps representing swiftness and another nod to a masculine-feminine embodiment as it's the father who carries the babies and births them, and there is a seal swimming near the bottom of the card. Seals inspire thoughts of change and mastery with images of selkies and their powers. This king holds and allows them all in his atmosphere and his beard which forms into a swirl at his heart center suggests the integration of all these different aspects of the psyche have a home in the heart if received with equanimity.

Kings are the archetypal masculine principle and symbolize such outward qualities as social responsibility and external accomplishment. They take charge, establish laws, organize and build empires, make decisions and enact them. They are the apotheosis of their suit. As such Poseidon, King of Cups, the suit of emotions, of feeling, presents an interesting marriage of masculine and feminine wisdom much like Rooster seems to. I'm being asked not only to embody a sense of mastery on the feeling level but to carry it out, to actively move from that place. My empire, my home, needs that today, as my son struggles with 'wrong side of the bed' blues and I shall need to be extra skillful in supporting and drawing out his sunnier side if our day is to flow in a harmonious way. Which I, as King of Cups, decree!

With this sense of inner authority in place I look to the black hole offering itself up for my contemplation, Bat, Five of Swords...traditionally the card of bullying, of deceit and trickery. Here we see many bats flying back from their night sojourn into the mouth of their cave away from the rising sun. Such a striking image, to be desperate to fly away from the source of light and quite in line with the feeling of Five of Swords with its themes of shadow energy at work. There are five swords hanging above the entrance to the cave and the cave itself is filled with stalagmites and stalagtites symbols perhaps of memories or emotional patterns that have been allowed to take root and flourish unexamined and unseen by the light of day. The sun is a dramatic presence in this card, piercing through that cave, symbol of our unconscious mind and the bats have no recourse but to enter it. I'm reminded also of the birth canal, the light at the end of the tunnel and descriptions of near death experiences where folks have shared their visions of a tunnel of light. All of these inform my experience of this card.

Bringing the three cards together...

I feel like I'm being asked to embody a distinctly manifest approach to shadow energy today. Those bats appear to be flying right into the mandala that Poseidon is creating with his heart and that feels just about right for today, creating a sacred container for my family's emotional body with our rocky start to the day which Rooster reminds me can begin anew with each creative breath, conception as the ongoing awareness of this. Says Rilke so beautifully in his uncollected poems...

Sky Within Us

Oh, not to be separated,

shut off from the starry dimensions

by so thin a wall.

What is within us

if not intensified sky

traversed with birds

and deep 

with winds of homecoming?

Plus Little Fingers of Light

The day is unfolding quickly already with breakfast finished and my son practicing his tabla in the next room, the rhythmic pattern of skin-shaped sounds a steady backdrop to my own beating heart. I'm in one of those slow-to-get-started moods. A mug of coffee sits beside me, its stained rim already telling stories of gradations of pleasure swallowed. Earlier before anyone else was up I drew my cards for the day accompanied by my little canine familiar who sat witness to the imagery unfolding on my altar. From the Winged Enchantment Oracle I have drawn Finch as the wings needed for my heart today...

 

I spent some time listening to these little winged angels singing their hearts out. Here and here. Their sound is quick and pretty much like they are. The LWB tells us...

I am Finch, the diversity of experience. I am a million facets of reality. I am an eternal spectrum of color. I exist in myriad ways and bring the magic of alternatives. 

Of course the same could be said for any of us which I thank Finch for reminding me of. The description goes on and ends with this little poem...

                                                 You are abundant in curiosity.
                                                      You are active change.
                                                 You are blending experience.
                                                             You are Finch.

So with the themes of curiosity and change in mind I draw my two Tarot cards for the day, Condor and Dolphin, the Eight of Swords and Seven of Cups respectively...

 Another interesting polarity offering itself to my contemplation today, the dance between restrictive stasis and expansive stasis might be one possible a way to describe it. In Condor, the Eight of Swords, we see three condors surveying a scene with swords and rocks. Two condors hover above as though searching for something and another one perches atop a large rock inscribed with various sigils and a single sword stuck into the stone. In the distance seven other swords stand in the ground presumably abandoned and left to rust indefinitely. The sky is hazy and there is a mountain in the distance suggesting a possible move to higher ground, to clearer thinking if perhaps the sigils could be understood, if the sword could be removed from the stone (arthurian intimations arise here).

When this card comes up for me I can usually point to a few areas in my life where I feel it at play. Although eights can be a number of balance, and renewal of energy they can also be about choice. What are my priorities, where do I need to deepen? Traditionally in the RWS version we see a woman blindfolded and bound from waist up surrounded by a circle of swords. There is the very clear suggestion that she can leave of her own choosing but she has yet to recognize that. She's been hood-winked by her own self-deceptions. That element is less obvious here but the circling condors do convey a sense of endless repetition, of thoughts spinning around and around keeping everything in place. The antidote for that kind of circular trajectory is action. And as I look at my day I decide to tackle a few things on my to-do list that are outstanding.

With this feeling of action in my mind I look to the second card, Dolphin, the Seven of Cups. I drew this last week and wrote about it here. The same feelings seem to apply here. We see two dolphins  diving down to the ocean's floor which is covered in rocks. Behind them stream a flow of luminous bubbles that look like stars and around them seven cups float. None of the cups are being investigated which is odd for such curious creatures, do they feel overwhelmed by the number of cups, unsure of what to do with them? There is a fair bit of movement in this card as indicated by the ripples surrounding the cups and the dolphins themselves but the movement seems to lack focus. Pulling these three cards together...

 I feel a sense of three rivers arriving at the mouth of an ocean. We've got the feathered winds of change, we've got restrictive stasis and restrictive expansion. I sense that perhaps with the imperative set by Finch with her themes of diversity and curiosity I'm being asked to bring the expansion of the Seven to the restriction of Eight and conversely to bring some of the limit and boundary in Condor to Dolphin. A dance of opposites. Feeling into how I might do this and what it might look like I think over my day...mothering duties involve more driving to music classes, partnering duties involve a birthday party tonight with various musical and poetic offerings. Asking for direction on how best to implement the gifts given me above I pull a card from my Spirit Messages oracle...

Cleanse! Aah, this feels like a concrete and do-able approach. The cleansing of conscious breathing, of allowing joy to flow, of feeling the river of the body moving along in the direction of interest, of passion, of gratitude. Mary Oliver sums the cards up beatuifully...

Goldfinches

In the fields
we let them have--
in the fields
we don’t want yet-

where thistles rise
out of the marshlands of spring, and spring open-
each bud
a settlement of riches-

a coin of reddish fire-
the finches
wait for midsummer,
for the long days,

for the brass heat,
for the seeds to begin to form in the hardening thistles,
dazzling as the teeth of mice,
but black,

filling the face of every flower.
Then they drop from the sky.
A buttery gold,
they swing on the thistles, they gather

the silvery down, they carry it
in their finchy beaks
to the edges of the fields,
to the trees,

as though their minds were on fire
with the flower of one perfect idea-
and there they build their nests
and lay their pale-blue eggs,

every year,
and every year
the hatchlings wake in the swaying branches,
in the silver baskets,

and love the world.
Is it necessary to say any more?
Have you heard them singing in the wind, above the final fields?
Have you ever been so happy in your life?

In Search of the Warm, the Wild, the Instinctual

 To Learn from Animal Being

Nearer to the earth's heart,
Deeper within its silence:
Animals know this world
In a way we never will.

We who are ever
Distanced and distracted

By the parade of bright
Windows thought opens:
Their seamless presence
Is not fractured thus.

Stranded between time
Gone and time emerging,
We manage seldom
To be where we are:
Looking out from
The here and now...

The above excerpt from a poem by John O'Donohue sets the tone this week for as the week begins anew so do I with a new Tarot/Oracle combination. After my week with the Angels and with classical imagery I was feeling the need for the earth, for some animal wisdom and the embrace of the warm, the wild and the instinctual. This week I'll be using the Winged Enchantment Oracle by Lisa Hunt and the Animals Divine Tarot also by Lisa Hunt.

As if in response to my need for the instinctual my Oracle draw for the day is Swallow...

 There is so much beauty and movement in this card. A woman who seems part Swallow herself is gazing up at the golden sky in which a mandala of swallows circles emanating from her hara center, center of power. A swallow head appears as part of her own and her body appears to be rising out of the waters, Buddha-like, in a swirl of feathers, droplets and swirls of energy. The LWB tells us...

I am Swallow the direction changer. I am the swiftness of every great move. I am the exploration of new angles, the bold agility to catch what is yours. I am the right place at the right time, the most efficient use of skill. I am the spontaneity of a single, fleeting moment when everything can change.

You are pure instinct.

You are Swallow.

With this expansive and charged feeling of movement I asked what areas of my life today needed the blessing of Swallow's energy. I drew Tortoise and Octopus, the Ten of Wands and the Eight of Cups respectively. The image I have here is of an older person trying to make the sidewalk before the light turns red, a kind of slow, hurried walk, Saturn combined with Mercury. 

Traditionally the Ten of Wands is the card of heavy burden, of responsibility and overload. Here we see a tortoise struggling to continue with its heavy load crawling slowly between two rows of wands. They are both aglow and askew reminding me of the phrase 'the Great Way is easy for those with no preferences'. This tortoise has come far, judging from the path behind her but her destination is not in sight in this card suggesting she'll have to seek her own inner counsel with regards to rest and self-care. 

As tens are about both beginnings and endings there is the sense with this card of a transition to a deeper wisdom, a glimpse of something more. Though there is no structural goal in view in this card, as there is in the RWS version, there is nevertheless a sense of directional wisdom here. And that sense of having something worthy to work towards is often a key in lightening the load. The Wands here are all illuminated suggesting that Tortoise is working towards something that will serve Spirit, that is more than just about the small-shelled self. I feel a sense of expansion when I tune in to this aspect of the card and with this feeling of lightness move on to Octopus, the Eight of Cups.

Octopus swims beneath a moonlit ocean. In each of its tentacles it holds a cup. The cups are being held any which way, some upside down, some sideways.  There is a feeling of chaos here, of not being able to maintain equilibrium. Octopus is trying to receive the moon's radiance but is struggling to do so as a result of trying to manage all the cups. Fish swim through Octopus's tentacles and up to the moon, starlight bathes Octopus at different points below.

This is a variation on the traditional depiction of a figure leaving behind eight upright cups as s/he walks towards a mountain range beneath a moon-lit sky. And yet I can see, in Octopus's attempts to grasp all the cups and being unable to do so, the theme of needing to release old emotional patterns in search of a new way of manifesting. That this is done by the light of the moon suggests the way will be blessed by the unknown, by tuning in to intuition and a more receptive, inward gesture. There is a feeling of needing to consciously detach. Octopus must actively release all those cups to re-find equilibrium and a more resonant way of being. 

 

Together these two cards are presenting me with a dynamic theme of polarity. I'm being asked to hold a tension that doesn't come easily. One the one hand there is the suggestion to stay the course and rather than putting down my load, to look at in relation to the goal of serving Spirit. At the same time I'm being asked to look at how I'm holding on to old emotional patterns that might want release so as to free up the inner landscape for further exploration. And all of this overseen by Swallow, by the impulse to instinctual action, to spontaneity and a sudden change in direction.

How might this look on a sunny, summer Monday? My duties today include a long commute in rush traffic later in the day as I drive my son to dance classes and music rehearsal. My initial response is to feel this as a burden, a chore but having drawn these cards I might now be free to embrace the larger picture, to feel how my mothering is serving the Goddess by choosing to support my son's musical and dance dharma and making sure to pack a good dinner and some books and music to nourish me. Inner explorations of new landscapes might ensue from the release of habitual patterns of a self that identifies with passively doing its duties. As I was musing on how I might embrace this polarity I turned to one of the faces of the Goddess, Mother Mary, for guidance. Apparently not one to beat around the bush she simply says, "Be Strong". Leaving me to ponder the nature of what it means to be strong I arrive back where I began, with the soft animal body that loves what it loves and knows what it knows without complication. That kind of intimate knowledge is where my strength is to be found. The poem I quoted at the beginning of my post finishes up in a gracious and affirming way reminding us of our natural and blessed yearning for the wild, warm, the instinctual.

May we learn to return
And rest in the beauty
Of animal being,
Learn to lean low,
Leave our locked minds,
And with freed senses
Feel the earth
Breathing with us.

May we enter
Into lightness of spirit,
And slip frequently into
The feel of the wild.

Let the clear silence 
Of our animal being
Cleanse our hearts
Of corrosive words.

May we learn to walk
Upon the earth
With all their confidence
And clear-eyed stillness
So that our minds 
Might be baptized

In the name of the wind
And the light and the rain.