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| Dad ~ Central Park ~ 1996 |
Yesterday marked 18 years since my father passed. He was a good, kind, sensitive man with an artist's sensibility and a deeply spiritual nature. In the early years following his death I was very aware of this anniversary. Then gradually it became less pronounced. Some years the day came and went and I was barely aware of it. Once or twice it has passed me by completely and I didn't remember till a few days later. This year however, for the first time in a good while, not only was I aware of it but I was anticipating it. And I was curious about this shift. What within me was wanting a voice here?
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| Ghost Tarot ~ David Corsi |
My curiosity prompted me to do a little reading around this theme with the very ethereal
Ghost Tarot illustrated by David Corsi and produced by Lo Scarabeo. I am really loving this deck, it's not dark so much as melancholic. Refined, atmospheric, peaceful, otherworldy. It felt perfect for using with this focus. My question wasn't a question so much as it was a conversation with a memory that I like to think has a subtle body somewhere in the way my father inhabited this world through the books he loved to read, the trails he liked to walk, the people he cherished
, the animals he enjoyed, the beauty he so appreciated
and his relationship with the Divine.
In this way I understand
ghost to mean the emotional body and memory-body I associate with someone who is no longer living in this world. As such I addressed the deck in this way...
Hello Dad. I hope your soul is at ease. Feel my arms around my memory of you.
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| Four of Swords ~ Ghost Tarot |
The first card I drew was the Four of Swords. An outbreath, a gentle way of saying that my father's soul was at rest, had come to a place of equilibrium, of sanctuary. The worldly concerns have been put aside. The muted colors and the figure's position sing of an obvious peace and equanimity.
My reaction to this card told me a lot. I felt a sense of relief upon seeing it which suggests to me that somewhere I have some concern about...what exactly I'm not sure. The idea of a soul's journey through the realms is too much of a mystery to limit with language and concepts and views personal to my interface with the vastness of consciousness. And yet my emotional body, through its outbreathing of relief suggested there was something to work with here. Here. Now. Rooted not in an imagined, future realm but in the present moment. My inquiry was clearly about me and not my father. The next card I drew confirmed this.
The Tower. I have to say that I love this depiction of The Tower. It's
both ethereal and earth-shattering. And yet upon seeing it my heart
lurched a little and the next breath was, how do I make this into
something positive?
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| The Tower ~ Ghost Taro |
And therein lay the unconscious subtext I brought to this reading. My father is long gone, I am the one who wants some closure and peace around his passing. After all these years in which I thought that had already occurred. His death was not particularly peaceful, not violent or anything but it was filled with fear and complicated by the conviction of his religious beliefs which prevented him from accepting medical intervention. As a result the weeks leading up to his passing were fraught with ambiguity and we all felt the weight of this.
Those impressions have lingered though the passing of years has mitigated them significantly. Seeing that Tower card come up I'm reminded of how my world crumbled substantially for a while with his death. The LWB offers some interesting words...
The Tower :: The Empty Shell. Even the largest palace in the world is nothing but an empty shell if it does not contain the flame of life. Only the dead can remain and inhabit a dead place.
As I looked at the card my eyes were drawn to the spiral of light encircling the Tower. The way the Tower itself is teetering on the edge of two realms, earth and sky. It slowly began to dawn on me that the light was leaving the Tower the way the Soul might leave the body at death. It was spiraling around the Tower, traveling upwards towards a larger source of light which the top of the Tower is illuminated with. I was struck by how similar it is at birth, the baby's head doing a final 90 degree rotation before emerging into the cathedral of light beyond the cervix. They aren't much different. Except that they are. One is a source of joy, the other most often a source of sorrow.
Still I felt a measure of comfort looking at these two cards for the simple fact that looking at them in their unadorned truth was like hearing plainsong--that body of chants used in the liturgies of Western churches consisting of a single, unaccompanied melodic line. There was a beauty in their starkness. Yes, it was a difficult death, yes I wished it could have been more peaceful. Yes, I have sorrow about that. And yes, there is room for all of that in the container that inclines itself towards listening. It doesn't need to be different as long as the temenos that witnesses the spectrum of human experience is rooted in the expanse of the heart. As I realize that I still have some integration to do around it I also wonder if perhaps closure is actually an ongoing breath. That it's not a shutting of a door, or a completion but instead an opening into the reality of a mutability that is continually shaping and widening our understanding of ourselves and others until the veil between the world of self and the world of other thins to nothing.
