Today may not be the best day for being a reliable narrator of your own experience.
Something about this feels accurate for me today, on the cusp of leaving for a college reunion and newly shaped by a ritual-release-fire I engaged yesterday. I feel tender-hearted and a bit fearful, feeling old-stories playing in my fears. Not enough. Ought to feel ashamed. Accused by those I have loved.
Not a reliable narrator, to be sure.
The interpretation arose from the card I just pulled and its companion-text. My heart did expand upon seeing the Page of Swords card from this new tarot deck I’m exploring–Tarot for the Wild Soul by Lindsay Mack, illustrations by Chelsea Granger. It’s probably the first tarot deck that I feel safe enough pulling just one card a day. The MotherPeace deck with which my introduction to tarot began has a much more wounded expression to it, meaning you can pick one card and feel the trauma of wounded women searing your fingers. I got into the habit of always pulling three cards, simply to diffuse the possibility or felt-wound there. Mack’s deck, though surely no less wounded–she speaks to her own deck as ‘trauma-informed’–speaks to the unifying invitations in light-shadow, shadow and light. I’ve been pulling a card a day for the past three weeks or so, heartened and grounded, curious and Led, somehow.
The Page of Swords card in this deck shows a shaky-legged foal with its mother looking on from behind, both grounded in a beautiful pasture with blue skies in the distance. The foal is standing, if shakily so. It is experiencing its relatively recent birth, beginning to walk itself into the world around. Feels apt for me today, feeling a bit weary from re-birthing and a bit shaky in moving forward.
Yesterday, I said a ritual-farewell or auf wedersehn to one of the most significant relationships in my life these last several years through the gifts of fire yesterday at the nature preserve/retreat-center across the street from my home. A letter saying I love you, I thank you, and fare-thee-well, released by flame into the world so to bring prayer and blessing to me, to her. We may be in sparse touch in the weeks, months, ahead, but our connection has changed. This ritual was to honor that, and...I know for the rest of my life, daily for a while, then regularly at unexpected intervals from there on out, I will be reminded via song or scent or image of her gifts to me, her Spirit-led unconditional-love of me, the gifts our relationship brought into the world. We now seem to be on divergent paths or in the farthest reaches of an eccentric orbit--boundary for my best Self required, sadness at the felt-distances and her projected pains onto my own bodysoul. Twinges of grief when they arise without expectation. Practices of grief transmuted into praise, praise transformed into prayer. Gratitude. Love. Hope for her best Self, abundance she would choose for herself. We will always be soul-entangled, in other words, but for now, I refuse her projections and release her to her chosen pains.
Before leaving for the fire-circle, I had browsed my various symbolic collections–pendants, stones, sacred items retained because of their associations with the Holy along our way. I gathered all those things needing to be released, placing them into a bag with a collection of sage, matches, shells. Putting Nala in the car so she would be close-by, I returned to the fire-circle where I had relinquished a previous spirit-friendship-connection, looking for the albino squirrel that always seemed to companion my ritual releasings. It did not appear this time, at least to my eyes, though certainly in my awareness. I played a particularly meaningful sacred tune so to bring this new association of gratitude and farewell to it. I read the letter aloud before burning it, wondering if tears might come. They did not, surprisingly. Grief already into acceptance, apparently, though my body still feels the sadness in waves, from time to time. And I released the letter, some sacred textile-art she’d given me, the dried pomegranates we’d carried for our circles for years. Some associated stones and old chains (necklace-chains) I released into the woods.
Then Nala and I went off to get good fish for dinner, her licking my face, me smiling, weary.
What does it mean to be released from an energetic connection that has shaped my life for almost 13 years? Jewish number of completion, divine attributes, that. Interesting. Released yet not overtly so, to her knowledge. She may yet reach out to me, if she chooses. Yet an energetic skin now protects, reminds me...we are not who we had been.
And tomorrow I get into Brian’s car, driving myself to Rochester, MN, so to be one hour away from Northfield, MN, able to arrive for Reunion Weekend by 9 a.m. Should allow me to check in, get a little oriented, and make it to Skinner Chapel for 10 a.m., Ingrid and Nat’s talk on their new book on the Arboretum. May my Grandfathers Hess guide me well, listening into the mysteries of the world around me as I return to these lands for my own soul-reclamation (whatever may have been left behind there).
That’s how I’ve come to think of this pilgrimage for myself, sans-Brian, into the past-becoming-present again. I’ve never been to a Carleton Reunion, for the reason that I’ve always felt I failed college somehow. I came away from Carleton disempowered and feeling like I was stupid, undesirable. In some ways, it feels like I left parts of my soul back there, back then, and I’d like to reclaim those parts of myself for today, for my present-into-future. Most of me has gotten over this disempowerment, in other words, but some part of me remains bound back there.
That is my intention anyway: to reclaim any part of myself left behind, to arrive curious about whom I shall meet, either again or for the first time, and to feel the land beneath my feet. To be on pilgrimage toward perceiving more and more of the sacred in the world around me, shining with ancestral guidance and care for me, delight in me. May it be so.
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