The Tarot Lovers

In which I sound like some kind of professional intuitive instead of the Sassy Sibyl you all know and love… This was written last year for Flock. I’m sharing here now, since I’m no longer there. I’ve updated the post with some photos of different Lovers cards from my collection. I purposely chose some lesser known and strange ones. What is the oddest Lovers card you’ve ever seen?

February is the month of Lovers. Well, it’s the month of Valentine’s Day, and for a tarot reader, that means being inundated with questions about couplings. Does he love me? Will she marry me? Will we end up together? What kind of love will I find? What kind of love do I need? How do I attract a lover? I don’t mind answering these kinds of questions; the desire to find and maintain fulfilling love-relationships is one of the human experiences that we all share in common. It’s so big in our lives, that the Major Arcana of the tarot has a card devoted specifically to it.

The Lovers card from the Victoria Regina Tarot

The Lovers card in a tarot deck is the sixth card in the Major Arcana. In the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, which is arguably the most common tarot in the Western world, the card is illustrated with the archangel Raphael bestowing a blessing of prosperity over a nude couple (presumably Adam and Eve). Behind the woman is the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil and the snake – which persuades the female to choose her own destiny. Behind the male is the Tree of Life, set aflame with twelve leaves, which represent the signs of the Zodiac – which he uses to make informed decisions. The woman looks to the angel for divine inspiration, while the man looks to the woman. They are partners, two halves of a whole, but they play very different roles in their relationship. The card is commonly illustrated with two or more figures, embracing or reaching out to each other. Some decks include the third figure (or snake) to introduce the aspect of choice in union – that is to say, the innovators of the tarot understood that the relationships that we enter into are by choice, and that our choices have the power to hurt others.

The Lovers from The Prairie Tarot and the Bohemian Gothic Tarot

When the Lovers card comes up in a reading, it can be interpreted as an external relationship – one that is either romantic or platonic, depending on the context of the card in the reading – or it can refer to dualities within the sitter (the person whose cards are being read). Often the card refers to two opposing forces at work operating within our lives and the card directly speaks to our interactions with other people.

The Lovers from the Deviant Moon Tarot and the Paulina Tarot

I have been long fascinated with the masculine/feminine duality/opposites aspects of The Lovers card. In the tarot, “masculine” cards tends to exert outward influence on their environments. They deal in the conscious, practical, the mundane, and the theoretical. While “feminine” cards in a tarot focus on the unconscious, internal, intuitive, emotional, whimsical or dream realm and the possible. Both of these forces are present on this one card.

The take away lesson of The Lovers card though, is that balance is needed in order to achieve harmony. For example, we fall in love based on feelings, but we enter into relationships consciously. Relationships can be messy, hurtful, or divinely blissful – but if they’re going to be successful, they come with the understanding that there’s compromises and choices to be made and maintain. We can embrace the differences between us and be lovers, or we can ignore or fight about it. And everyone knows that in order to love fully and in a way that will satisfy the emotional needs of any other person, we must first learn to love ourselves.

The Lovers card from the Fantastic Menagerie Tarot

Let’s spend some time examining the dualities we find within ourselves and in our interactions with others. Try these exercises:

1. Ask yourself: if I were a pack of tarot cards, which aspects of me would be “masculine” cards? Which aspects of me would be “feminine” cards? For example, I tend to dominate in personal relationships, but I have a very deep, strong, intuitive well that I draw from when I need to make important decisions.

2. What is your intuitive sense about what kind of energy you will need to invite into your life in order to bring balance to your life right now? Look through a tarot deck and find a card that you feel is representative of that energy and use it as a jumping off point for journaling or meditation.

3. Imagine yourself if your perfect relationship. What do you bring to the table? What does your ideal partner bring to the table? How do you two balance each other out? What compromises does the balance require? What choices do you need to consciously make in order for the relationship to work? Try this five-card spread when working with the tarot to discern the nature of personal relationships:

1. the signifier (choose this card intentionally to describe the nature of the relationship)
2. Person A – what is conscious | 3. Person B – what is conscious
4. Person A – what is unconscious | 5. Person B – what is unconscious

Love should be cultivated in all corners of our lives – romantically, platonically and within ourselves. While love may be based in what we cannot understand (the unconscious), true, lasting and satisfying relationships are formed when we carefully cultivate an understanding and acceptance of the true nature of ourselves and others. Using the tarot is one way to arrive at that kind of understanding.

If you have questions or get stuck with your interpretations, feel free to leave a comment here, on facebook or send me an email!

Your ever humble (but sassy!) sibyl,

On Intuition & Coincidences

The Intuitive nudges us toward the Divine. Always. They are both parts of the whole, after all. And this is how you know you can trust it. Ask yourself, would I be closer to divinity? If the answer is yes, rest assured you’ve tapped that deep knowing well.

Intuition presents itself in different ways. Sometimes those bits of flying-about Universe that catch in our dreams, visions, mind eyes and hearts, are messy to process. Sometimes it’s painful to hear. Sometimes it’s the obvious you were avoiding. Sometimes it’s the inspiration you were waiting for.

And sometimes it’s the tears at the grocery store. Pushing us toward flour, salt and water.

Sometimes it’s the bleakness of midwinter.

That if we can look past, would unveil, through the spitting snow and biting cold, a kind of life still in the trees.

Sometimes it’s sweetness in an indulgence. A sacred moment that we can prolong for hours through ingenuity.

And sometimes it’s a skill we have to invoke, by creating a space and waiting for the light — which is easy to find if we stand very still, and are willing to get very, very close.

I have an intuitive sense for magic-making and for seeing patterns that unfold into the future, like an origami chain building in one direction, one mountain or valley at a time. But it’s not something I can do on auto-pilot (at least, not yet). I have to slow down, listen carefully and get present to make it work. My coincidences start to pile up when I choose instead to bury my head as though  it doesn’t exist. Being intuitive isn’t always fun. Mostly it’s not fun at all. And I would like to pretend I could live in ignorant bliss of the future, of my path, of your path; of the pain I know we will both experience. But then I read cards for someone who is desperately clinging to that ignorance, and I realize that it’s not blissful at all.

What is most important for you to remember is that you are NOT CRAZY for listening to the voice of your inner self. Your intuitive sense is perhaps the most important sense you can develop. Like our other senses, it is how we navigate our lives. How we make decisions. How we experience the sacred (or mundane) of our everydays.

How do you experience yours?

How to Do It All : pt. 1

The Moon is a lady. Her face, slipping through veils of wisp-tailed clouds. It was as it was meant to be. Her, in her fullness. Me, arched back in bed. The cool swell of her light, right where I might best spy, lying there comfortably in my tangle of blankets.

I always, when I plan magic like this, assume that the right ritual will somehow spill from head. I trust The Universe. We have this thing, you know. What I need will come to me. So that night, under Her full roundness, I found myself lying in bed, whispering a love spell… can you believe it?! I hardly can myself.

***

I am a handy lady, let’s just say. So when the sheetrock bathroom ceiling began to crumble and fall down, I did not take the advice of friends (“Here’s the number of a guy I know...”), but instead went to the home improvement store. I always, when I plan magic like this, assume the solution will just fall into my lap. So I milled about the aisles for a bit when I came upon the 1′x1′ ceiling tiles. Ah ha! This has got to be a billion times easier than hanging drywall overhead! I have installed tongue and groove flooring before, so the concept was similar. I was sassy with satisfaction of my brilliance. Who needs a guy!? I can do it all. 

Fast forward to Saturday. I’ve got a few of those babies hanging on the ceiling. It looks… like it’s all coming together. I take a break and drink coffee. I think, why does anyone need anyone? I snap a picture of my progress, so I can file it away in my scrapbook for later. I am a goddess. After this, I’m planning to bake a loaf of bread, change the oil in my car and crochet a fucking doily.

Halfway through my project the ceiling gets… wonky, let’s just say. I realize I should have made sure I was working on a level surface. I was unprepared for how crooked the corners of the room were. I start to wonder if it’s actually a two-person job, holding the end pieces up, which seem hell-bent on pulling all my work down. Everything, suddenly, is getting really metaphorical.

And that’s of course when it hits me. A message from The Universe. A peek into my future. And it’s super inconvenient because I can’t leave to go write it down, I have to hold these damn tiles up till the glue cures. So I’m standing on this ladder. In my bathroom. Holding up the ceiling. My kids are fighting over Goldfish crackers in the other room. And I’m having a stroke of brilliance.

Along with this, though, a growing awareness that my ceiling project is going to fail. For whatever reason, the corners are now starting to sag. I hear the glue creaking and moaning. I don’t have enough arms to save the work. I whisper a little prayer, release my grip, step down off the ladder and cover my neck as the ceiling falls down on me.

Sometimes all you can do is all you can do.

***

After I cleaned up the mess in the bathroom and showered, I told the kids we were going to a restaurant for dinner. This is a treat, if only because it can be harrowing to take both my wee babes to dinner by myself. Mama needs a margarita was encoded in “How about Mexican?” They were thrilled by the idea, so we went.

After a lovely dinner, which they both ate like people even, the waitress stopped at my table to compliment me on how beautiful and well behaved my kids were (they really were inordinately good). “You’re so blessed. SO BLESSED.” She repeated as if I needed the emphasis.

We all walked hand in hand to the car. The Universe was prodding me again. A purpose tucked away in mind, the blessings of two small hands in my hands. I oriented myself, searching for the Moon in the night. Give me the love I need, I implored her full face a week ago. There she was, a waning grin in the sky.

Tomorrow I’ll call a guy about the ceiling.

In consideration of three coincidences

I have two Kalanchoes in my houseplant collection. One I have had for almost two years in February. Another I bought in November. It did not occur strange to me that both were in bloom when I obtained them. I also don’t recall the process my first Kalanchoe went through after it stopped blooming, but the plant looks very different now than it did when I first got it (I assumed it was an off year for the dear plant). My second Kalanchoe stopped blooming when I returned from my holiday travels. The flowers were brown and shriveled. Sullivan mentioned that it had died. I took it to the sink and began pinching them off. Then I realized I didn’t know anything about these plants, so I did some research on the internet.

It turns out Kalanchoe’s are forced into blooming out of season through artificial stimulation by the commercial growers. Apparently the process is “difficult” though I couldn’t find a description of exactly what was involved (closely controlled climate, I imagine). And the result is that the plant will flower once, but is unlikely to flower again. The plants are therefore considered “throwaway” houseplants. However some of the articles say it’s possible, since a Kalanchoe will naturally flower in the spring if left to it’s own devices, for it to bloom again. I trimmed the heads off my plant and made a spot on the table for it to rest during the winter.

What struck me about this experience, is that even when it’s not in bloom, my Kalanchoes are lovely little green living things, and I wonder how many of them are chucked out into the cold once their flowers begin to fall.

At the grocery.

Freyja was climbing out of the cart, Sullivan was running circles around me. The aisles were crammed full of people doing their shopping. I stood in the bread aisle, trying to decide which bread to buy.

I did not know which bread to buy.

There were perhaps a hundred different varieties. Multiple brands, “name brand” and generic, of the same type of bread. White. Wheat. Some mixture. Whole grain white. Whole grain wheat. Some combination. Rye. Raisin. Sourdough. All packaged in colorful plastic bags. Why are there so many types of bread in the store? Who buys all these different breads? Who buys the same bread in different colorful plastic bags? Why are all of these breads made and brought here?

I did not know which to buy.

The kids were asking me to let them ride the moving plastic horse in the front of the store. Many people were moving close to me with their carts full of boxes of things and jars of stuff.

The breads were all bagged in different colorful bags.

A man was stocking the shelves. An older man was asking the bread stocker about the bread. He was complaining that the brand on sale did not freeze well. That he suspected that it was more than a day old.

The bread stocker laughed, “Well I know it’s more than a day old. That’s why it’s all so cheap!”

All of the loaves of bread became Leggo blocks. Everything was plastic and multicolored. The man stocking the bread was a Leggo man. The old man was a Leggo man.

Tears came to my eyes. A Leggo woman with a full cart of Leggo blocks next to me whispered, “Are you okay?”

I said, “I don’t know which bread to buy.”

“Don’t stress out about it. Just pick one. They’re all the same, really.”

“Thank you, no.” I whispered. A pit grew in my stomach. I couldn’t feed my children plastic. I didn’t buy any bread.

The picture above is not mine.

I set an alarm for 2:20 a.m. A time I figured would give me some minutes to dress, find my coat and camera and head outside to watch the Quadrantid meteor shower. Of course, five minutes before my cell alarm went off, Sullivan ran into my room frightened from a nightmare. A few minutes later, the curious alarm woke him up completely. I told him we were going to go outside to look at meteors, a topic he has some interest in (as a dinosaur aficionado - have I mentioned he’s 4?). We bundled up and went out into the back yard with our little dog.

The sky was cloudy and the city lights sent a haze over the moon, but I could see some stars and I could see Mars and what I suspected was Venus. I pointed these out to him (he was unimpressed). After fifteen or so minutes, the dog started whining to go inside. Sullivan started asking me questions like “Are you sure meteors are real?” in the same tone of voice he asks me about fairies, trolls, magic, Santa and the Greek gods I tell him stories about. With the same skepticism that he asks, “Are you sure this plant is still alive?” With that same look he gives me when I am wiping my eyes in the grocery store because everything is made of plastic; his fruitbat, card-throwing, gypsy mama, who has no answers, this time, but a string of questions and coincidences that feel connected through the ether, asking him to watch some endless sky in the frigid cold for some mystical phenomena that may not even exist in his world.

We did not see a single meteor after twenty minutes, so we came inside, the dog, the boy and I. I put him to bed, but it was perhaps too late. He had trouble sleeping the rest of the night. I sat at the table, gnawing on my decisions, some pit growing in my stomach, retelling the entire story to a tired and spent houseplant.