Card of the Day: Mother of Wands
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The Wild Unknown Tarot [/caption]
Against a glowing background of red-orange-yellow horizontal lines, a mature snake coils around her eggs, a single long black wand threaded through her nest. Like so many animals that we see in this deck, and in real life, she is totally relaxed and totally alert. That warm background suggests the warmth that her body provides to her gestating potential.
In the suit of Wands, we are in the most ephemeral realm of human experience—energy, spirituality, creativity. Our life force. As the Mother, or Queen, or Artist, this snake brings an inner maturity and development to this realm. She has done her time studying, trying, failing, learning, triumphing, crashing-and-burning and reinventing herself to know who she is and what she can do. She is loving and fierce and magnetic and powerful. She knows that the life she brings forth from herself is precious and so she is protective of it.
It’s so hard to know what to say right now. My own life is safe and comfortable—for the moment. So many people’s lives are not. And never were. Some people have never been getting the resources they need, were always falling through the cracks of our cisheteropatriarchal, white supremacist, ableist, capitalist culture. Who are the sympathetic characters in the narratives you’re seeing? Who is worthy of care? Attention? Resources?
At the same time I am navigating my own day to day—ups, downs, agonies, ecstasies, inspiration and despair—these questions are also on my mind. I am grateful to have friends and people in my life who teach me, who make me aware of what I can’t see or would prefer not to look at. I’m also trying to nurture myself, trusting that I have gifts, energy and usefulness that might help others. But really? I don’t know. I think it was Tobias Wolff in “This Boy’s Life” who wrote: “What you don’t know would fill a book.” Indeed.
What I do know: It’s cold and flurries are swirling here in Phoenicia. The world is beautiful and terrible. And I am grateful to be here for it.
What do you know today?
