I waited for the deck on the doorstep and opened it in the late-afternoon sun. My first reading was extraordinarily clear.
Strength. Five of Pentacles. Seven of Cups. And the Ten of Swords fell out of the deck too.
The cards reflected a life made up of shards of meaning, glimpses of light, disconnected hurts. Pieces of experience that do not fit together.
In Strength, which of the two figures is strength: the headless woman or the masked woman? Can the headless woman keep the masked figure from expressing inappropriate frustration and anger? Or is she the monster, able to wrap a hand around the masked woman’s throat whenever she needs to speak for herself?
There is not a hint of hope in this Five of Pentacles. Tiny figures fly through driving hail. The windows above them are open, tantalizing and unreachable. It is a different world in there, and those figures will never know it.
They may never find shelter anywhere.
The Seven of Cups looks like the canoe that comes to me when I travel to the shamanic underworld. The underworld I have seen in those journeys is lifeless. No person or animal is there.
If I climb upward into the light, I reach green cliffs overlooking the sea. Farther inland there is a stone structure, later a stone church, and eventually a village.
No people.
I can fly far out over the sea.
No birds. No fish.
At the foot of the cliff, I can sometimes walk along the beach and climb into caves.
No seaweed. No shells. No spiders or lizards.
There is no life there.
Back underground, where I first emerged, the river is real and a canoe comes for me. There are miles and miles of dark tunnels to explore, sometimes opening into enormous caverns. Farther on, some of the water pours from the side of a cliff into the sea.
Except for the sound of my feet on the rocks beside the river, or the water lapping against the boat, there is only silence.
The swords keep killing him and killing him, and still he asks:
What was I supposed to learn from this lesson? And that one? And this other one?
There is no pattern.
No meaning.
There is no love.
It was a waste to look.
