Day 13

It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.

D.W. Winnicott

The Nine of Pentacles is looking at me. Even though her eyes do not meet mine, she is softly calling me, directing my gaze to the robin on her finger. Her serene contentment is like a small, secret smile, inviting me to understand the utter simplicity of the truth that lies behind being fully at peace within oneself. She is providing the answer for me in her very stillness; all that remains is for me to listen, and understand.

I have almost avoided looking at her since I drew her from the deck, avoiding confronting whatever message she has to offer. Why? After all, there are many cards which it would be very challenging to draw, including the Five of Pentacles. I have wondered how Wild Moon Tarot will work with such energies when she draws them. No doubt she will find a way to help someone or do something to honour those who are suffering. Or else meditate in compassion on her own griefs and sorrows.

But for now, that challenge is not mine. Instead, I have drawn one of the most beautiful cards in the deck and I feel entirely unable to relate to it. Its energy seems to mock me, giving me a glimpse of something from which I am not only shut out, but which is so entirely alien to me it feels disturbing. And that, no doubt, is exactly why I had to draw it. They say it is the cards we find most difficult or uncomfortable, or those that we would most readily dismiss as “irrelevant”, that in fact hold the most powerful messages for us. Those cards point to the places to which we most need to direct our attention. As the Nine of Pentacles is now directing my attention, to the robin on her finger. And even though I know that the rich bounty of her harvest is behind her, and that now, replete with all she needs, she chooses to focus on her friendship with the robin, it feels as though the true harvest is the robin.

And perhaps it is. Perhaps the harvest represents, not material wealth, but the knowledge that we have all that we truly need. We are unable to focus outwards while our own survival, our own sense of self, is lacking. Only when we are complete within ourselves, secure in our own being and in the assurance of our immediate survival, can we look beyond ourselves in love, interest and compassion. Like Maslow’s hierarchy, each need or state of being can be fully entered only when the lower ones are sufficiently satisfied.

The Nine of Pentacles seems to be telling me that I am looking in the wrong direction. I have been looking at the means as though they were the goal. What I truly seek is what she has found with the robin: complete, naked, vulnerable trust and kinship. And the robin is so beautiful! So delicate and tiny, so much of another world and another way of being! As I look at the Nine of Pentacles, my awe is directed at the robin, and her ability to win its trust. It feels as though it would be an absolute honour to win the trust of such a friend, and to learn to view the world through its eyes. The world could never be quite the same again if one could vicariously live the life of a bird.

The Nine of Pentacles is laughing quietly now, pointing outwards, at the other card I drew but did not mention. Because it is another card I do not understand and that makes me feel uncomfortable. This time a Sacred rebel. Yes, I drew a third card. On an impulse, a couple of days ago. I suddenly needed to. Then wished I hadn’t. Because the card I drew was Conscious connections. It depicts two women, nearly naked. Each wears a towel at her hips and protects herself with a parasol. From what are they protecting themselves? The picture has a strongly erotic quality for me and their bodies are turned toward each other, nearly touching at the pelvis. But their faces are turned away. One, nearest to me, looks directly out at me. Her parasol and towel are in brilliant colour and she directs her energy forcefully, facing directly into life. The other looks away, avoiding both me and her companion. Her gaze is downward, eyes nearly shut, and both her parasol and towel are depicted in black and white. What are in colour are the fish that swim past her through the air – vivid dreams or strong emotions, pulling her attention away from the here and now and into her own internal world.

It does not take a genius to work out which of these two I would be, though I struggle to imagine myself standing in such intimate relation with another human being. The robin, yes. But a person? Perhaps it is for this reason that I find the eroticism of the picture both intoxicating and confronting. It scares me not a little. There is no sense that the photo is intended to be sexual, the eroticism relates to the power of their connection. A connection which knows and sees all, accepting the differences. Each woman remains fully herself whilst being also fully present to the other. And that is, of course, the message of the card. It reminds us to live with full awareness of and attention to those in our lives. Not to dismiss those who matter to us or to take them for granted, coming to “see” them less and less over time. The challenge of the card is to welcome relationship and to continue to see it with new eyes in every day, no matter the years that pass.

Today appears to be my day for association, because, thinking of that message, my mind passes on yet again, this time to a book I read for uni: The piggle. The author, Winnicott, was a child psychiatrist (“The Piggle” was a young patient), but at uni we read him as a lesson in seeing. Winnicott teaches that the best relationships are negotiated freshly in every moment, with no assumptions based on yesterday. Or even on five minutes ago. In every interaction, in each fresh conversation, we (re)discover both ourselves and “the other” through our communication. The challenge is to let go of everything we think we know or believe, every association (!) that carries us away from who we are, right here and now. Who are you? If I truly value you, I will continue to ask that question every time I see you, and I will not allow my knowledge of the past or of the world to influence me as I listen to your answer in the way you respond to me right now. Or at least, I will hold my knowledge, my memory, within me, but I will do so consciously, leaving it gently to one side as a ready reference, but not at the forefront, where it may obscure my vision.

Still, as I look at both cards, Conscious Connections and the Nine of Pentacles, I feel naked and exposed. And out of place. You know the dreams where you find yourself on stage but have forgotten your lines? In my dreams, I am confused as to why I am on stage at all. There has been a mistake. I am not meant to be here, and even though the error is not mine, it will be my fault that the production is ruined. My fault that I do not understand how to be the person for whom I have been mistaken. If I sing, my voice will not soar like an opera singer’s but squeak and croak. I cannot be this person, but in the dream, I must be.

I feel a little like that about relationships. Not just romantic relationships. All relationships. I feel as though I disappear within them so that I no longer know who I am. And if I am accidentally touched, it is like fire and pain shooting through my entire body, so that I want to scream. Conversations frequently make my head ache and I become dizzy; I lose any sense of who or what I am and become invaded entirely by the other person. I therefore like the relationship I have with my parents. A once-a-week email each way, along the lines of “I’m well. Work’s very much as usual; not too busy. The weather’s still lovely up here…” Nice, safe, and distant. Perhaps that is why I love YouTube so much; I can absorb the energy of the beautiful people there without being invaded by them. My head does not spin and I can turn them off just at the moment I need to. Just like books. My text-bound friends talk to me and share with me the most profound and intimate knowledge of their essence, but demand nothing from me. And yes, I know, that is not friendship. And yes, I know, I have created “you” to be the witness to my own journey. I have written you into being in order to give me the attention that Winnicott gave to The Piggle.

And so, both cards challenge me. Conscious Connections is a slap in the face with its bold affrontery, the more especially because it tells me plainly that even the shy dreamer can exist in intimate relationship to another. The Nine of Pentacles remains softer, more enigmatic, but offering no less of a challenge. As I look at her she becomes also Anita Moorjani, who returned to the world after her near-death experience with the knowledge that life is to be chosen and embraced for all that it offers in terms of sensory experience, thought and emotion. Separateness, the duality of “self” and “other”, is, for her, an illusion. The five senses are extremely limited and our non-corporeal selves know a oneness and expansiveness beyond anything our limited bodies can conceive. But yet, limited, corporeal life is chosen, precisely because of the ability to know and understand self in relation to that which is “other”. It is our very capacity to see and know ourselves as separate, to feel and sense, laugh and cry, to breathe the other and experience the full reality of their essence as distinct, unique and beautiful that makes this incarnate life inestimably precious and valuable. For Anita Moorjani, non-finite beings choose a finite life in order to experience exactly what Conscious Connections describes. There is thus no place to be or go other than right here and right now. Here is the gift. Now is the gift. Life is the harvest.

Even now, the Nine of Pentacles has not finished with me. I fancy I see silent laughter shaking her shoulders at the idea that she could be so simply and easily explained and dismissed. Her story, her relevance, is never over, never complete. “Just one thing more – for now”, she whispers to me. “A question, or perhaps two. Who are you? What is your harvest? Here you see me, surrounded by my harvest, and able to enjoy rare friendships because I know who I am. Who are you?”

Her question strangely echoes the answer provided by Anni of Mirth and Reverence in her recent video on death and out-of-body travelling. She responded to a question about the danger of having your body taken over by another being while you are astral travelling. If you leave your living body “empty”, does that make it available and in danger of theft by others, like an empty house becoming an invitation to the thief? The answer provided by Anni was along the lines that if you know who you are, in body, in energy and in spirit, no one and nothing can touch you.

No one and nothing can touch you. I feel myself responding to that in terms of relationships. She is telling me that if I know who I am, I need not fear the Conscious Connections card because relationship becomes entirely possible once we have sovereignty over our own selves.

Who am I? I do not know, except that I am become the emptiness that allows the space to be. I claim that now as belonging to me, something precious, strong and sparkling. I am afraid to look much beyond that, and particularly afraid to look at others. I have painted the people at my workplace as being particularly colourless, haven’t I? I remember once, a girl at school describing a housing estate as “toy town”, because, with all its new and identically stamped-out houses, it looked like so many shiny production-line toys. And that is how I have created the people around me. It is not how they truly are. Of course it isn’t. I may be terrified of “suits”, but people wear the suits. They are not the suits themselves. They wear them even as I wear them – or have worn them, as a uniform that does not represent who we truly are at the moment we depart from the consensus meeting point. I just don’t want to see inside the suits. Partly it is because it terrifies me that these other people also might have dreams beyond their plastic lives. I’ve already told you that I am afraid that if not everyone can be who they truly want to be, then I do not have the right to choose for myself either. But there’s more. If I allow them to be something more, then they become real. They exist in relation to me. By turning them into plastic people, I create a safe bubble of security around myself and do not have to deal with the reality of any kind of relationship. And so they remain “suits”. Safe, plastic, boring people, with no imagination and no lives beyond who they are in the workplace. For a pantheist, I am not very comfortable with animacy.

What is my harvest? That is an even harder question to answer. I look around myself, at my apartment, and do not like all that I see. It is bare and functional, devoid of imagination, except for the decks of cards that now lend so much colour and fantasy to it. I have avoided having “things”. It would be tempting to say that this is due to non-attachment on my part and ascribe moral value to it. It wouldn’t be true. The truth is that material possessions represent “work” to me. Possessions are the “fruits of the labour”. And anything that derives from my work is something I prefer to avoid. It’s as though, in some crazy way, I illogically imagine that if I own little, then I am less dependent on work. By owning things I am allowing work to own me. If I value anything, then I have to be grateful to work for allowing me to have it. I want to imagine that I do nothing that puts me in a position of dependence or creates a debt of gratitude. I want to thank work for nothing.

Of course that’s silly. If I was not dependent on work for anything I value, I would not be there. What do I value? My physical survival. Shelter. Food. I cannot, much as I would like to, escape these needs. And also privacy. I could save money by house-sharing. Even then I could not entirely abolish my need for money, but I could minimise it. But privacy means even more to me than not working. Privacy, above all, is something I need and cherish. Privacy in which to escape the dizziness and headaches, the fire and pain, that close contact which people represent.

So there is little around me that brings me joy. There are the obligatory family photos, but it would appear I am an unfeeling monster. They bring up no emotion within me. They are there for the sake of “form,” in case anyone – such as my parents – should arrive. One is supposed to have photos.

On the other hand there is, unaccountably, my quilt cover. It’s a strange thing to care about, but I do. It is a beautiful, deep, swirling sea of purple, and soft beyond anything else I possess. I love its softness and its varied depths of hue. At night it holds me very softly and I feel as though I ride within dark clouds of purple. I could be my own fantasy novel. It is safety and protection, and also beauty and mystery. I dread the day when it becomes old and worn.

There are a few books. Not many, because I do not have room for many. Most are electronic, on my phone, and some are library books. But just a few are “real” and sit on my shelves. These are the ones I have not given away as soon as they have been read, or the “finds” from second hand shops that I have yet to read. There is Harry Potter. Harry Potter of all people! For some reason I cannot let him go. Perhaps one day I will even re-read him. And, of course, Lord of the rings. The piggle and a few other uni books. Also my Famous fives and other Enid Blytons from childhood. For some reason I still do not understand, I brought them with me when I left Canberra. They were the proud earnings of my pocket money and the joyous repositories of my secret dream world.

There is also a small teddy bear. Horatio sleeps with me every night. He wasn’t given to me by my parents (I don’t remember a teddy bear from childhood – why?). He was a gift from my favourite English teacher. It seems an odd present to receive from an English teacher. Funny that her gift isn’t a book, sitting alongside other childhood favourites. But I love him and wouldn’t exchange him from anything. No doubt, before much longer I will love him to pieces (literally!), but I am glad to have him with me! How did she know? Ms Crane was (and presumably still is) a tiny woman, almost hidden behind her glasses and voluminous skirts and cardigans. There was no particular colour to her and yet she walked with quick confidence and an appearance that she always knew exactly where she was going. She taught us all sorts of technical information about language. From her I learned the meaning of “irony” and “epiphany”. It was she who taught me to recognise and appreciate metaphor and simile. But beyond any of that, she demonstrated her own passion for words, and for the rich meanings behind them. She was on fire as she spoke, far eclipsing her more vibrantly-clad colleagues, and pacing the room with feet that barely seemed to touch the floor, so carried away was she with her subject. And we were carried with her.

Strangely, she was also the one person who, more than anyone else, seemed to see “me” and not some insufferable, arrogant little upstart. She valued my work and wrote comments other than simply “good” on my work. And, at the end of the year, when she knew she was leaving the school, quietly, and without explanation, she gave me Horatio.

Nine of Pentacles is laughing openly now. This, she tells me, is my harvest. My memories, my dreams. The few people whom I have allowed to enter into my heart – who have seemed to want to be there. And my choices. The choices that I have made, and the choices open to me now. The ones I could make at any moment, changing my life.

“Who are you?” she whispers. “Look around. The evidence is everywhere. All you need is already within you.”