Fate

Spring surrounds me. The lime-aide colored leaves, healthy and vibrant emerge from the dead wood. Lifeless a week before the woods and fields birth the season. Returning birds fill the air with mating calls, territorial warnings, and songs welcome each sunrise.

Strength returns to me as the light increases daily, filling my soul cloaked in winter dark. All my senses soak up the minute changes. Changes perceived through sight, smell, touch and hearing. I can taste spring as I breathe in the awakening life around me. As a seven of Wands page wields his staff against six, I stand steadfast, barring any who would drive me back into despair. Six phases of my life, six sets of choices have brought me to this spring.
Three cups overturned spilling their contents onto the ground while passive handmaidens look out to the future. Three deaths in six years began with my mothers, next my sons, and now my fathers; each death different but alike. My son’s rite of passage to eternity was broken. Pulled back into this life, he struggles to renew his soul residing in his injured body and damaged mind while I look out to the future.
Reversed… I wish his brush with death could be reversed. I requested too late to skip this lesson but there is balance in turmoil. The night moon illuminates our landscape differently. The wild urge to survive is balanced by the domestic drive to have everything be neat and tidy. The primal nesting instinct, the dominant drive to protect one’s young at all cost taught me to fight, to be assertive with his needs, our needs. Moonlight on the water of our consciousness, the concentrated light passes into murky depths showing clearly which way to proceed.

As high priestess I sit enthroned weighing life’s meanings, seeking to unroll the scroll that contains the answers, attempting to put a “why” to life’s burdens. The ancient document is fragile. Unrolling the faded brittle paper might destroy any hope for understanding. So I sit calmly, nesting in the cobalt robes that drape my aging body. Cycles of time reveal glimpses of meaning, threads of light from a sliver of new moon in a star encrusted night sky.

Blindfolded enough to not see the eight two-sided swords that surround us, we make our way through each day, each month, each season reversing what has befallen us as “Fate”.
EMM 5/27/98