Backbone and Flame

Seven of Wands ~ Wild Unknown Tarot

My card for this month from my year ahead spread is the Seven of Wands. A lone flame shines brightly in the darkness creating a halo of brilliance around it lighting up the sky nearest to it. The flame is the one area of color on the card. It looks human, the flame, with its fiery head and dark body, arm out to the side, shining its light. It stands out, black and manifest, the other Wands just outlines, intimations, retreating from it through the strength of its sheer brilliance. 

As I looked further at it the flame figure began to take on a runic quality to it. I knew I'd seen that runic shape before but the runes in the Elder Furthark alphabet didn't line up. So I pulled out my Haindl Rune Oracle and there it was, top left corner, Kan as he calls it, the sixth rune, more commonly known as Kenaz in the Norse system.

Rune Kan/Kenaz ~ Haindl Rune Oracle

As it turns out Kan/Kenaz is the rune of illumination, strength and power through knowledge. It brings light to us in the darkness. It allows us to see what is really there, what has long been hidden and by seeing transformation can occur. There is an alchemical quality to this rune, a kind of base metals into gold, ignorance to awareness, shadow to light. When I look at this depiction of the Seven of Wands I feel that, the flame rising out of the blackness at the bottom of the card to shine fully on everything that surrounds it. And in the depiction below, too, the figure holding his own against the unknown.

Seven of Wands ~ Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot

Traditionally it is the card of standing one’s ground as we see in this depiction by Pamela Coleman Smith from the Rider-Waite deck but there is more to it than that. It has to do with showing up for your life with conviction and the strength to uphold those convictions when your own inner critic or outer influences try to unseat you. The Seven of Wands says now is not the time for rhetoric or verbal sparring, now is the time to shine without apology, shine without disclaimer. It’s about inner vision and the courage to forge your own path, go against the current from that inner knowing. 

The Thoth deck speaks to this courage calling the card, Valor. Valor, another name for audacity, boldness, strength in the face of adversity. Backbone is another word for valor and I like the somatic quality this brings to the card. Sitting straight I can allow my breath to run up and down my spine, my body a beacon of stillness while my light shines, illuminates every cell, bone, ligament, muscle. If I imagine my breath as a slender torch, brilliant and beautiful, forging a path up and down my central channel I can access more of this Seven of Wands energy, it expands my lungs, creates space, opens and centers at the same time, my backbone as inner wand supporting me.

Seven of Wands - Valor ~ Hermetic Tarot & Thoth Tarot

Since this is the suit of Wands we’re looking at the areas of ambition, creativity, ambition, drive, desire. As an Aries I’ve got loads of that…and also as an Aries it tends to peter out quickly as I get bored and want the challenge of something new. I might look at the Seven of Wands as guidance to stay the course with some of that ambition and drive, to resist the impulse to give in to all the other ideas and creativity brimming over in my psyche and instead stick to one thing only and see it through, bring all my creative power and focus to that. This card is suggesting that I bring the strength of my will into the picture and allow it to work with me, to support me, to defend the part of me that wants a less scattered creative life.

Starchild Tarot ~ Seven of Wands

As this is a seven it also correlates to the major arcana card, The Chariot. It is interesting to note that it's called The Chariot and not The Charioteer. The emphasis is on the vehicle not the personality and when I get this card in a reading I sense I'm being asked to find the place where my will and the divine will are one, the place where they are yoked. Looking at the Seven of Wands there is a similar feeling of finding balance, of knowing what kind of movement and stillness is required to maintain equilibrium  I like the version above. It gives that feeling of partnership, of harnessing strength and instinct with skill and wisdom to move forwards, to shine, to create, to grow and expand. 

Becoming the Question

 

New Year's Day Sunrise over the Bay ~ Angels and Elementals Abound

The coming to consciousness is not a discovery of some new thing; it is a long and painful return to that which has always been. These words by Helen Luke open the entry for January 3rd, entitled Unlearning Back to God, of Mark Nepo's The Book of Awakening'. I'm writing this post from deep within hundreds of acres of rolling hills on the edge of the country where my family is participating in an annual week-long sufi retreat co-led by my dh. It is indeed a time for folks to unravel back to God, a time to cultivate the space to touch the tender umbilicus, mystery of our separate lives, echo and intimation of our interdependence.

There are many names for this Source...Atman, Inwardness, Ishq, Soul...for every lineage and lens there is a naming of this, a need to say...I am part of this...for to name is to claim. Our journey is to refind this luminous flower of Grace not by the external markers of identity, work, clothing, body size, socio-economic status, family role and so on but by feeling into our relationship with Mystery, with the Boundless and embodying it, by becoming the question, by living in service to the unknown.

I captured this poem last night...this tree with her stories of transience and vulnerability, and the profound gift of bearing witness to both light and to shadow and the compelling place where those two merge as a visceral and widening truth. More and more I'm being shown, not without difficulty, that beauty and pain and love share an ongoing and clandestine relationship, one always holding hands with the other at any given moment, each necessary to complete the other. And I'm coming to feel this relationship as an integral detail of God, fraught and tender and replete with Grace all in the same breath. The veil that obscures this realization is any number of filaments...culture, trauma, religious training, sophistication, sarcasm...and what dance will allow it to fall from your body? I drew a card...

Two of Crystals ~ Starchild Tarot

I'm struck by how similar it looks to the first photograph...the seeing of patterns is part of our innate desire to belong to something larger than ourselves, to feel ourselves as woven into the expansive tapestry of Love. And this card, traditionally the Two of Pentacles, often represents The Dance for me, a way of being the balancing point within any number of foci.

Here the large crystal at the top speaks to me of Source, of Grace, the womb of generosity, with the two smaller crystals being iterations of that abundance, that life force...no less magnificent, no less beautiful. Embrace it all, this card tells me, become the dance of inclusion in the midst of overwhelm.

The Sufis have a practice called zikr...which translates roughly as the perfection of remembrance and the remembrance of perfection. It is a returning, again and again, to the Source...in the same way each breath is a return. Conscious or not, we are always being carried on a wave of Grace...Mark Nepo calls it unlearning, I call it unfurling...either way we are a cellular longing bound up in remembrance, perfection is inside the seeking of itself. We want it because we've tasted it already. Here is his brief and lovely exercise for this day's theme...

Close your eyes and breathe your way beneath your troubles the way a diver slips beneath the waves. Now consider two things you love doing. Feel into what it is in each of these that makes you feel alive. Hold what they have in common before you and breathe into them feeling the grace spot that these dear things mirror within you.

Wishing you all good things, each of us holding a mirror up to God.