Another woman in the Walking the Sacred Wheel Zoom call held up the High Priestess card from Joanna Powell Colbert’s Gaian tarot deck. [Image credit: Joanna Powell Colbert; print available for purchase here.] I was startled into memory and not a little wonder as I listened to this woman speak what the card signified to her in that moment. A cascade of associations arrived in my own sensations, with a rising desire to story-tell a little. Unsure of ultimate purpose or aim, I find myself returning to this cascade of associations this morning as my own current walk through the sacred wheel comes to its conclusion, perhaps possible beginnings…again and again, as the cycle moves.
A bit of context, first. The Gaian deck arrived in my world about 2013, with the introduction from a Hearthkeeper writing-circle sister, Jane. She and I were both in the Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy, led by the founder of Women Writing for (a) Change, Mary Pierce Brosmer. Jane and I had both purchased the required tarot deck for the course, MotherPeace. Jane brought the Gaian deck into our conversations, however, alongside the “earlier-wave” feminist deck painted/written in 1978 by Vicki Noble and Karen Vogel. Mary was not thrilled with this new addition, preferring to honor “the classic” she had assigned us. Yet several of us appreciated deeply the integrative, ecologically-grounded, multi-generational and multi-natural wisdom of the Gaian deck. For a long while, I would do a pull from MamaP, as we called it, then find the “equivalents” in the Gaian, for more expansive interpretation and association. Today, MamaP has become more of a relic from those CFLA years, with the Gaian a much more steady companion. Alongside JPC’s HerbCrafters deck, when I wanted to familiarize myself more with wisdom from the Plant Nation. When the Walking the Sacred Wheel opportunity arose, “with my favorite tarot artist” I’d say, I jumped at the chance for a steady presence of feminine-ecological wisdom amidst my more-establishment, ecclesially-oriented work in the world.
Seeing the High Priestess card amidst the Zoom call, I was yanked back to the day it first “spoke” to me, rather directly. It was the summer of 2013, and I was immersed in all things conscious feminine after a week’s retreat with a deepening women’s leadership & writing circle of sisters. I was becoming aware of a strong internal nudge to attend the funeral of my father’s first-cousin, Wilmer Heisey, though it also seemed like “a bit much,” given he was only my second cousin, the drive would be nearly 500 miles one-way, and I would know relatively few persons there. I had had a number of conversations with him over the years, as he was an avocational family-historian, fascinated with our Pennsylvania-Dutch, Hess/Musser/Heisey heritage rooted for generations in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania. I called his daughter to share my sympathy at her loss, my wish to attend, but also the inability to do for work reasons. But the nudge wouldn’t leave me alone, so I did what I was learning to do that summer: I pulled a tarot card, this time first from the Gaian deck.
I gasped. It was the High Priestess. I was immediately aware of the cruciform shape of her white undergarment, the pomegranate at the center, her red hair. I knew immediately: I was going to the funeral, and that my purpose was to leave a pomegranate on the gravestone of my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Musser Hess. How I knew that exactly didn’t concern me in that moment. A tension that had arisen in these early con-fem months was how to hold my decades of Christian formation/service while my life was literally breaking-open to the More, the wilding feminine, the return-to-the-body journey I’d been on for over twenty years by that point. This card had it all, implicit but overt at the same time: my youngish self, a crone figure, sacred heart of the feminine (pomegranate) yet at the center of a cross. Owl wisdom. Moon. Salmon. Surprising my folks, I drove the nearly 500 miles the day of the funeral. I met them in their hotel room before we drove over to the Crossroads Church, where the funeral would be held, where the cemetery of our ancestors was.
I was not remotely prepared for what this pilgrimage would turn out to be. Way opened for me to ease out of the funeral itself so I could visit my great-grandmother’s gravestone. “Wilmer would understand,” I whispered to my father. The air smelled like chocolate, given the Hershey Plant was not far away. My ancestors being plain-dress, Anabaptist farmer-folks, the gravestone was efficient and communal. ABRAM Z HESS read the large name. Underneath it, without a marker of her own: Elizabeth Musser Hess. Rage coursed through me first, feeling the weight of the known masculine above her name, towering over the silent/silenced feminine as is always that case in my family. I see financial prudence and familial stewardship of resources today, of course.
But why I came then became clearer... I began to weep, quietly at first, then almost violently. I startled inside, unaware of where the tears had come from or how they were now releasing. The tears did not feel like my own, somehow. But I was willing to let go, to receive, to…something… At one point, I did begin to feel like I might be losing my mind, my center, so I pulled myself back to conscious awareness of my surroundings. It was okay. I could feel myself again. So I relaxed once again and let the tears begin to arise again. Exhausted, I then sat quietly by the gravestone for a while. Time was not, then it was again. Wiping my face with the underside of my dress, I stood up, placing the fresh pomegranate I had brought next to her name, on the grass.
Today, I see this pilgrimage as the opening of my own conscious ancestral healing work, seven generations back, seven generations forward. I think Wilmer was calling me back to the ancestral home to tend to Elizabeth somehow, to connect me to my own feminine line in the Hess lineage. Doing archival work, I found the names of my feminine line, honoring them in the acknowledgements of my third book, A Companionable Way: Path of Devotion in Conscious Love (2016).
Several years later, I told my uncle John and his wife, Gina, the whole story. Neither would consider themselves “people of faith,” in any traditional sense. They’ve lived in Missouri, amidst the bible-belt’s hypocrisies and violences for too long. But both of them are more in touch with wonder in the natural world, with awe at the mysteries of its workings-energies, than anyone in our family. In that sense, they’ve always seemed like the ones of most faith to me, able to sense and care for the silenced, the excluded, those most wounded or persecuted by “people of faith.” But I knew I could tell them the story and have it received as the unknowing mystery that it is. About a month later, I received a package in the mail. My uncle, ever the photographer and artist, had located the Gaian deck image of the High Priestess, photoshopping my face onto hers. I gasped when I realized it, then let the tears come. I could imagine the original artist being less than thrilled that he had altered her own work, but I also knew his heart in doing so. He saw me, and honored my conscious feminine path when no one else in the family could or would. Even my parents, who shunned me for nearly a year, unable to have any contact with me because they were so fearful, somehow threatened. The framed 5x7 ‘rendition’ sits in my campus office at an increasingly conservative seminary (un)consciously hostile to the feminine.
The final bemusement (so far) is what I like to call the baptism of my entire Gaian deck by the Stillwater River in Ohio. Given the waters on which the image of the High Priestess rests, it feels fitting. I was camping with my closest friend, also named Lisa, in the early summer of (maybe?) 2017. She and her husband had moved to a small house on a larger plot of land, with a wooded area leading down to the river banks of the Stillwater. We set up the tent down by the river, bringing the kayaks along with us. The first night was uneventful, blessed by a cracking fire and eventually starlight wafting down over the quiet gurgling noises of the river. We awoke to our intention to kayak the river, zipping up the tent door and preparing ourselves for a good 2 hour meander down the river. About an hour in, we heard this rushing sound, turning around to see what it might be. “Did you check the radar, Lis?” I asked then, clearly way too late. A squall could be seen coming down the river, some of the heaviest rain we’d seen marking its approach clearly on the Stillwater, becoming much less still! We laugh today, but of course the urge was to paddle like hell to get down the river. We did…then just laughed, and laughed and laughed while we were inundated with water. When the thunder and lightning started, we pulled the kayaks off the river and sheltered as best we could under honeysuckle branches and sycamore trees. Eventually, we could get back on the river, pull off into the park where the pick-up truck was waiting, load the kayaks and get back to her home. We dried off and then returned to the riverbanks, to see how our tent had fared.
“Oh no!!!” I cried, unzipping the door and seeing my precious Gaian deck literally floating its cards in the pools of water inside the tent. I gathered them all up, afraid all was ruined. Lisa suggested we take the cards back up to the house, spreading them out to dry. So we did, highly bemused when her pastor husband and his pastor-friends came back to the house earlier than they had planned–also due to the storm–and saw these tarot cards all over the counter tops! They paused to look at them for a while, not knowing they were tarot cards, then went back to whatever they had come back to do. Lisa and I laughed quietly, and I was relieved when I realized they could all dry, retaining most of the colors and images in tact. Today, my deck rests in a loose pouch with “bleeding hearts” embroidered onto it, showing the water-damage in the unevenness of the cards, the stack that shows buckles and warped cardstock. I smile each time I notice it, actually, recognizing the sacred character of being baptized by the Stillwater River, the river upon which my father and his brothers grew up every summer. Everything comes full circle, eventually.
I continue to smile at the arc of this conscious feminine journey, now ever curious of the relationship between freedom and forgiveness. I have often wondered how long must I remain at United Seminary, amongst folks rarely interested in what I have to say, what and how I have come to know. The High Priestess smiles at me most days, me/not-me, a shape content to share her medicine without concern for how it is refused. Chocolate-covered pomegranate seeds continue to sit with me in women's circles I hold, a nod to my feminine ancestral line of old.
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