The Cosmic Tarot

Because I’m embarrassed to be talking about myself so much in this blog, I thought that this time I’d share with you a tarot reading I did two weeks ago. Then you might at least find some interest in that esoteric art, even if not my internal ramblings.

I first learnt about tarot reading 27 years ago from a compelling woman who might or might not have been psychic. But you certainly believed everything she said and she took me under her wing. She made the cards come alive for me in a way that all the learned books (by men) that I’d read hadn’t.

I do believe that magic sometimes happens in tarot-reading – when a certain card brings me out in goosepimples or strange coincidences appear in the fall of the cards – but on the whole I look at it as simply a case of noting the effect that the archetypal images have on me and weaving a story from them. We all know more about each other and ourselves than we realise. We just have to tap into that knowledge.

Sometimes I read for other people but I feel grossly under-qualified to do so and find it a huge responsibility. It is however a good way of opening up subjects for discussion. When reading for myself the results are variable. Sometimes the cards are meaningless, sometimes they’re only wish-fulfilment, and just occasionally they’re extraordinary.

This was one of those times.

The reading

My intention and the random card

I held the cards in my hand and pondered my intention for the reading. I wanted hope, I decided and clarity about something that had been plaguing me for several months. Then as I shuffled the pack this card fell out, and Cheryl, my teacher, always said that you should pay attention to these random cards.

 

It’s a lovely one, isn’t it. At XIX (19) it’s near the end of the cycle of the Major Arcana, the 22 cards that deal with our soul’s journey. I took it to be a good omen because it means happiness, being reborn, seeing the world with the freshness and joy of a child. It doesn’t mean that you’ve finally got the answers to life, the universe and everything. It just means that you’re on the right track at the moment.

Thank god for that, I thought.

The spread

Then I laid the cards out in my favourite ‘spread’ (arrangement) – five cards, with the first two representing the past, the third and centre card the here and now and the final two the future near or far (timing is not a forte of tarot reading, any more than it is of weather forecasting). You can use any spread you like so long as you’re clear in your mind as to what the positions mean.

 

Cards 1 and 2

These were the first two cards.

Oh dear, oh dear. I didn’t have any secrets, did I, from the powers that be (the powers that control the fall of the cards).

‘Anonymous’ commented on my previous post that it must be difficult for me to imagine a new life when I was happy with the old one. Well, sort of. Frog and I knew we wanted to be together but we both had ‘issues’ and they clashed, and for years we had terrible fights. By the time he died we’d reached stalemate and I knew his death was my chance to finally sort myself out – in my own time, in my own way, however messy the process.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last three and a half years – without much reward I was beginning to think. Why didn’t I look for a close male companion, or CMC as I put it in my journal? (Not husband. One was enough. You can only be married once.) Having a CMC might alleviate my grief for Frog and enable me to deal further with my issues. How nice it would be to fall in love again, I thought. I deserved it. Surely it was time.

But it wasn’t happening and I was getting more and more stressed about the whole thing.

And wasn’t this just what the cards were saying? Neither of the couples is actually together. Neither is kissing. There’s a gap between them. There’s indecision, lack of confidence. Well, that’s how they appeared to me anyway.

I was going down a blind alley, the cards said, and I knew they were right.

Card 3

I laid out card number three, the one concerned with the here and now.

How interesting that the card showed a female person. She had to be me, looking rather severe.

The 56 Minor Arcana, like ordinary playing cards, come in four suits with four court cards in each suit – princess, queen, prince, king. The suit of Swords, as here, represents the mind – the intellectual side of life, thoughts.

I was brought up to rely on the mind but it wasn’t working for me any more, if it ever had. It was my soul that had got me through the years since Frog’s death but my mind kept scoffing. It was horrible. It was my mind that had come up with this crazy idea about a CMC and worn me out with it.

My mind needed to know its place, said the card. We also had body, emotions and spirit (as in the other three tarot suits – and according to Jung). I needed to remember that I was only a princess and not yet a queen. I didn’t know everything. How comforting that was. 

Card 4

This was card number four, from the suit of Pentacles, representing the body and the physical world – money, houses and security – and this card showed lots of activity in that area.

How apt, I thought. That was also me over the last few years: clearing Frog’s mountains of stuff, having work done to the house in case I wanted to downsize, taking on the myriad practical jobs that Frog did, getting used to the scariness of managing alone, trying to stay healthy while staggering between sleepless nights.

That activity wasn’t finished yet, said the card. There was still more to do. That’s what I needed to focus on – not romantic dreams.

OK, I could cope with that. It was quite a relief, actually.

Card 5

This was the final card.

Put simply, this beautiful card means hope, which was extraordinary given that hope was exactly what I’d asked for before doing the reading. It means following your star. It means that you are a star. At number 17 in the Major Arcana it’s near the end of the spiritual cycle, like The Sun, and both are celestial bodies.

The card told me to write, as that is where I feel most me, where I touch my star.

It gave me permission to believe in a higher world.

It answered everything, as did the whole spread. There was a pattern. We are connected. All is well.

Note
Tarot probably dates back to medieval times but the best-known traditional pack is the Rider-Waite one of 1909. Modern tarot packs, and there are many of them, are easier to read because they rely less on symbols and more on pictures. I use the Cosmic Tarot (of 1988) because that was the one Cheryl used. Thanks to the artist Norbert Lősche and the publisher (of my edition) F X Schmid. There are other later publishers.

Drempelvrees

One of my pleasures is listening to music (CDs) while driving. My choice at the moment is ‘Across The Borderline’, an album by the great Willie Nelson, on which is a gorgeous version of ‘Graceland’ by Paul Simon. Three of the lines always make me cry: 

            Losing love is like a window in your heart.

            Everybody sees you’re blown apart.

            Everybody sees the window.

They move me because when I first lost Frog everyone was so kind to me, even complete strangers like supermarket checkout people. It was as if they sensed what was going on, and Paul Simon has obviously had the same experience.

At least, that’s what I thought the words were. But when I came to check them for this post I discovered that I’d misheard the last one. It's not ‘window’ but ‘wind blow’, and that doesn’t work for me at all. Never mind. It’s still a beautiful version of the song and I can sing my own words loudly over the top of the official ones.

 

In Miriam Margolyes’s scurrilous autobiography ‘This Much is True’, which I’m currently laughing my way through, she mentions a Dutch word ‘drempelvrees’ which means ‘threshold fear’. She says that the Indonesians (who were once colonised by the Dutch, as you probably know) use the word more specifically to mean the moment we gather ourselves up to appear in public. They do consciously, she says, what most of us do unconsciously before going out - putting on a persona, an exaggerated version of ourselves, ourselves as we’d like to be.

I’m doing a lot of that at the moment. Or maybe what I’m doing is pretending to be what I hope I’m becoming. Dawn French, in her memoir ‘Dear Fatty’, first alerted me to this phenomenon. Before becoming a new person, she writes, we have to imagine that new person and play the part for a while. I found that very helpful. It’s such a good way of getting out of a rut and taking the step forward that we need to take.

 
However, both techniques have their drawbacks. They can mean that we’re not being true to our whole self, perhaps hiding or protecting something, and in my case it means that I’m glossing over the vulnerable grief-stricken part of myself, which is still there and may always be there.
 
When Frog first died, I didn’t have a persona. I couldn’t present an idealised version of myself. I couldn’t protect myself. I didn’t have the energy. It was as much as I could do to get up in the morning. And I think that honesty was one of the things people responded to. That was why they were kind to me.
 
Unfortunately that unexpected kindness doesn't happen any more in quite the same way, even though I’m probably just as fragile inside. Yesterday was a case in point, when I tried to engage the woman at the Sainsbury’s till in conversation and she looked at me as if I was mad. It threw me for the whole day.
 
I’ve a lot to learn still about this ‘being myself’ business, about how to face the world as me - new or otherwise, how to combine strength and vulnerability. Frog was much better than me at it. He never pretended. All his failings and weaknesses were on show. He knew he was an idiot (as we all are really). And I loved him for that.

 

Endings and beginnings

Last week I stayed with family in Kent.

I was brought up in that county on a farm on the edge of a village with my two brothers and two sisters. My sisters have returned to live in the village, and the rest of us visit as often as we can.
 
Kent is known as the Garden of England because of its fruit orchards and I have vivid memories of my mother buying us lucky children a crate of cherries from a local grower and us working our way through them, having spitting competitions with the stones.
 
On Friday however when I went for a walk it looked more like the Mediterranean. I believe it has the hottest (in summer), driest climate in the country. My sister’s lawn was too parched and prickly to walk on with bare feet

My sister's lawn

and the view from the hill was more brown than green.
 

The view from the hill

 
The village lies in the North Downs, a chalk ridge designated a National Landscape (as I read on the internet). I think that means it’s special. Well, I’ve always thought so, anyway. There are footpaths everywhere, lots of trees and loveliness round every corner.

Looking towards the hills and their beechwoods

Our farm – which I remember as being mostly grazed by cows whom we dodged in order to climb the trees that dotted the fields and who ate the underneath of the giant horse chestnut visible from the house and kept it neat - is now a vineyard.
 

Rows and rows of vines

 
The vineyard is open to the public and has a shop and restaurant – a vast glass edifice built over the concrete yard where I used to play hopscotch with a friend. The whole place, I'm told, is an extremely popular day out for people from nearby London. Fields have been turned into carparks, and neighbouring landowners put up boards explaining the farming business. (So much better than fences and 'keep out' signs.)
 

An overflow carpark

An information board

A stream flows through the village and I remember spending hours with my siblings and friends trying (and failing) to catch fish with twigs and string, paddling in it, falling in it and crawling through it under the road.
 
Chalk streams (I read) are globally rare, and important because they support so many species. They are fed by underground water which percolates up through the chalk. This is full of minerals, very pure and clear, and of a consistent temperature (cold!).
 
In a wood I pass some tributaries of the main river, a welcome feature on a broiling day and somewhere my sister’s spaniel spends as much time as she is allowed.
 

Welcome streams and shade

I skirt the cricket pitch where a brother and I used to take charge of the scoreboard, and I helped the ladies making the teas in the hope that I would be able to eat some of the delicious food. They were so deft with their knives, whipping up squishy butter from a large plastic tub and sweeping it over sliced white bread. I still think of them every time I make a sandwich.
 
From the cricket pitch there is a view of a cross cut into the chalk. This commemorates those killed in the First World War.
 

The cricket pitch and the cross

 
Finally, I make my way through the graveyard next to the church, where I pause at the newly filled grave of a sister-in-law’s brother, whose funeral was the reason for my visit to Kent. He was the same age as me and had lived in the village all his life.
 

This morning on my second day back at home, I realise that I need to commit to my life in Devon. I feel divided between Kent and Devon but I don’t want to go and live in Kent. I love it in Kent and I love it here, but I have a very big family and at times they overwhelm me. Here, on my own without Frog, is where I am at last finding myself.

A good day

Yesterday morning I saw this beautiful wild plant for the first time.

Flowering Rush

My Book says it’s Flowering Rush, rather uncommon, flowering from July – and there we were, Ellie and I, on our nearby canal in June, and it was dotted all along the bank.

Well, My Book is over 60 years old and it gets a lot of things wrong because so much of both countryside and climate has changed, but I love it because it was given to me by my parents on my eleventh birthday and it’s full of my annotations and observations over the years.

Needless to say, it’s falling apart now, and if you know of a good bookbinder who could repair it for me, do tell.

My ancient and  battered Oxford Book of Wildflowers

Next I saw this tall scruffy plant which I find rather menacing as it grows in gangs and looks like a Triffid (as in the 1981 TV adaptation of John Wyndham’s book). It’s called Hemp Agrimony, but is no relation to Cannabis (sadly) or Agrimony  - which is a small yellow spike of a flower, and one I also saw yesterday along the canal.

Hemp Agrimony

Hemp Agrimony

Agrimony

The next plant to catch my attention was this Meadow-sweet, so-called I presume for its scent – a weird almondy one. I like its confidence and its scatty prettiness and am trying to grow it round the pond in my garden.

Meadow-sweet

Sunny St John’s Wort was in flower for the first time this year. As you probably know, the word ‘wort’ means any plant that was used medicinally and St John’s Wort is still used to cure depression (but take advice as it can also be harmful or interact with conventional drugs).

St John's Wort

Lovely Scabious, which actually prefers dry places, was in evidence from time to time, well attended by insects like all flowers of the Daisy family to which it belongs.

Scabious and Hoverfly

Yesterday was a good day.

 

The Grand Western Canal near Tiverton in Devon is a Local Nature Reserve and well worth a visit at any time of year. Yesterday it was full of birdsong as well as wildflowers, and when I find out how to transfer audio and video clips from my phone to my computer I’ll share some of that with you as well.

Reading, writing and being a zero-dimensional, non-existent point, floating in space

Since Frog died I’ve only been able to read light novels with happy endings, and I discovered in the library an author called Sarah Morgan who fitted exactly those criteria.

I’ve now read almost every single one of her books at least once, if not twice, if not three times, including the romances she wrote at the beginning of her career (what me, a one-time serious book editor, reading romances? Whatever next?) so, when I saw her latest book A Secret Escape on offer in Sainsbury’s recently, I snapped it up.

At the same time I saw Here One Moment by Australian writer, Liane Moriarty. I haven’t been able to read Liane for the last few years because she’s too worldly and cynical. You can never have too many books piled on the bedside table however, and it could be that I was stronger now, so I bought that one too.

 

I spent the first three years after Frog died clearing his Stuff from driveway, garage, shed and music room not to mention the rest of the house. He was a bit of a hoarder. Then I turned my attention to the structure of the place, doing essential repairs and improvements just in case I was going to move.

This month at last I’m free. I’m without clutter, builders, visits and visitors. It was deliberate. I wanted the rest. I wanted to get back to myself. But yesterday morning I wrote in my journal (my post-Frog record of thoughts and feelings, my best friend, my ladder of recovery), ‘It’s all a bit meaningless without Frog. He was my purpose and my sounding-board. He saw me, so I was me.’

 And I thought of a passage in Here One Moment, which I’m just about managing to read. It's not uplifting me, like Sarah’s books do, but I’m intrigued by the subject matter – psychic prediction – and I’ve no idea how it’s going to end.

In the passage, a mathematician is describing a letter she wrote to her fiancé when he was fighting in Vietnam (no, I didn’t know either that Australians were drafted for that war). She is remembering a lesson from school.

    “… a point is ‘zero-dimensional’, meaning it doesn’t actually exist. But once you have two points – two non-existent points – you can fill the space in between with lots and lots of points, and you get a line, which has length, so it’s now one dimension, which you could argue means it does now exist.

    … I told Jack that when I was with him, I felt like I was close to understanding what I had nearly understood that day.

   I told him I was a zero-dimensional, non-existent point, floating in space, until I met him."

When I first read that, I cried. As I copy it for you, I'm crying again.

 Thank you for reading this blog and being that other point at this moment.

 Maybe writing is an answer.

The Greenfinch

Greenfinches used to flock to our bird table, especially when we put out sunflower seeds. Then, about twenty years ago, they vanished. They had apparently fallen prey to the parasitic disease Trichomonosis which they were thought to have caught from pigeons, and their numbers had crashed by 60 per cent. I added them to my list of birds I no longer see, like swallows, barn owls, thrushes and pied wagtails.

At the end of March I was staying with my brother D at his farm in West Sussex, most of which he is now leaving to nature. The birds were in full spring throat and in among the dizzy-making tangle of sounds I caught something new - an insistent but gentle chirring noise. I didn’t know what it was and neither did D – who is an expert on birds – but Merlin, the trusty smartphone app which identifies birdsong, told us it belonged to a greenfinch.

I started to hear the noise everywhere, in the garden at home, on my long rambles every day with Ellie (who is now 15 and not showing much sign of slowing up). The greenfinch became my bird of this glorious spring, my bird of the year.

If you’ve read previous posts, you might remember how important affirmations are to me, particularly since my husband Frog died, three and a half years ago. I recite them to myself every day and hope that one day they will stick. Some I make up myself, some come from that inspiring book You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, and one – the queen of them all – comes from a medieval woman mystic whose name I’ve forgotten.

A few days ago I was dozing in the garden and the greenfinch was chirring as usual, and the sound was so beautiful and loving and warm that my half-asleep brain connected it with that queen affirmation. The greenfinch was chirring ‘All is well’. He was telling me that he and his species had come back from the brink, and so could I.

Crab-apple blossom (I think) in a hedgerow a few weeks ago