Gaian Tarot Artist's Journal

Scorpio New Moon Action-as-Devotion

The day after the election, we talked about making a daily devotional practice of taking some kind of political action. Some days we'll do more, some days we'll do less. Today there is an email in my inbox from EarthJustice urging us to make our voices heard -- please follow the link, if you're so inclined:

"Last week, the Bush administration -- the most anti-environmental administration in American history -- secured a second term. The coming years will hold many challenges for the environmental community, but here's the first one: Stopping the administration's reckless plan to scrap the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. . .

"This is your FIRST chance since the election to speak up and declare that last Tuesday was not a mandate to despoil our wild forests -- and it's your LAST chance to speak up and tell the Bush administration and its friends in the timber, mining, and energy industries that you support the Roadless Rule. The deadline is MONDAY, NOVEMBER 15. Make your first action since the election count. Click here . . . "

Meanwhile, check out Mooncircles for thoughtful articles on the Scorpio New Moon and the season of Scorpio too.

And on another topic entirely, Bonnie Cehovet has just published an interview with me about the Gaian Tarot in her newsletter, The Crystal Gate. Bonnie asked great questions. Hope you enjoy it.

May the Scorpio New Moon lead you deep into the season of the Crone . . .

Rain and Yoga

It's been raining for two days straight now. Lovely, silver, earth-renewing rain. Many folks I know are in a post-election grip of depression, others are doing the post-mortem and wondering what to do next. Craig wrote a song called "Wednesday Morning" and can barely sing it without crying; I can barely listen to it without crying too.

I went to yoga class this morning. It's held in a studio with great vaulted windows and skylights that let the forest inside (except that we are warm and cozy instead of wet and cold). It felt right to spend this Sunday morning challenging my body and centering my spirit. This is "Yoga for Beginners" but I feel like I should be in yoga pre-school. Some of the poses come easily to me, but others are quite difficult.

This morning, during one of the standing poses, I was looking out through the window at the forest. Most of the trees are Douglas Fir and Western Red Cedar in shades of grey, brown and dark green. But there are many Big Leaf Maples too, with their huge gold & yellow leaves. The contrast of gold against the dark green & brown is quite striking. So there I was, attempting to stay balanced on one leg while remembering to breathe and release the tension in my body, when I saw a bright golden maple leaf slowly glide down to the forest floor. Ahhh . . . I saw my own Tarot card, the Tree (the Hanged One) in my mind's eye. I've drawn that very leaf, I thought, and here I am attempting that very same pose. Many of my paintings are inspired by everyday events, but here's a case where an everyday event was inspired by one of my paintings.

Namaste.

Justice, the Morning After

"Blue" America is in a state of shock right now. In our household here, and via emails from friends in faraway places, we are stunned and shocked and grieving. The atmosphere is not unlike the aftermath of the unexpected death of a loved one.

I have really just begun to use my own Gaian Tarot majors for readings. A little while ago, I sat on the couch with my friend Cedarwind and asked: "What can progressives and Democrats and cultural creatives do to heal? What is our next step?" I shuffled and felt the energy move through the cards. I cut with my left hand. I turned up: Justice.

Zing. Wow. The same card Diane Wilkes wrote about in her Tarot Passages review of my deck (see yesterday's entry).

Here's part of the commentary I wrote in the booklet (it's not on the website):

When you get Justice in a reading, it is time to deal with the consequences of your past actions . . . You may be coming to an understanding of your place in the web of life, and of how far-reaching the consequences of your actions can be. It may be time to take a stand for social or environmental justice in your own neighborhood or on a global level. Each of us has a responsibility to leave the world in better shape than the way we found it.

I think we need to start preparing for 2008 now. And I think we -- all of us, half the country! -- needs to start making activism more of a priority in our daily lives. As Cedarwind says, we need to make standing up for Justice an act of daily devotion.

Let it be so.

The most important thing you can do today . . .

is VOTE (if you live in the U.S.).

But you knew that already!

Here's an article on the Top Ten Ways to Make Sure Your Vote Counts"!

Blessed be.

Heron House says: Give Bush the Boot!

Craig downloaded this sign from MoveOn.Org, printed it out and put it up in the window of his studio. The four houses that are clustered together at our end of the road all have Kerry signs out. Wish I could get a photo but our houses are too far apart. I think I've only seen one Bush sign on the whole island and a couple of dozen for Kerry. That's heartening!

I've been watching this independent Electoral Vote website for the past couple of months. It's a personal project created by an American professor of computer science living in the Netherlands. Very interesting guy. He updates the site daily based on the most current polls. This morning he has Kerry winning, with 298 electoral votes to Bush's 231, using the data from 50 new polls. But he goes on to say: "The reality is that everything depends on turnout, how many voting machines fail, and how much monkey business happens."

Jeez. Are you as anxious as I am?

We are heading over to the peninsula tomorrow after we vote to watch the election returns with close friends. Definitely not something any of us should be doing alone!

Sacred Voting

When I was a little girl in the 50's, I remember spending countless hours pouring over a book of black and white photographs called The Family of Man. Do you remember that book? I know now that it was filled with photos by famous photographers like Edward Steichen, Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White. But I didn't know that at the time. I just soaked in the power of the images.

The past few days I've been remembering one photo in particular of a man, dressed in worn out clothes, putting a ballot into a wooden ballot box. The caption read: "This is very sacred, and you must always treat it as such."

Don't ever think books and images don't affect children. I've never missed voting in an election since I turned 18 and voted for George McGovern.

You probably know that Michael Moore has organized a campaign to keep an internet eye on election fraud and voter intimidation. If you witness it, report it here!

Meanwhile, here's something we can do to be pro-active while we're waiting for the returns. Visit the MonsterSlash site, to watch a cartoon that is hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time. Laugh and cry, then send the message to the US Forest Service urging them to protect our forests. (Bush wants to open up millions of acres of our last wild roadless forests to mining and logging.) Thanks to Kim Antieau of the Furious Spinner for the link.

Tarot Justice

My Justice card is done!

I found Justice to be a rather difficult concept to illustrate, once I decided not to use the ubiquitous set of scales in the image. I gave a lot of thought to the idea that there are really two kinds of justice implicit in this card. There is social justice, which I think is the first kind that usually springs to mind when we hear the word. We think of "law and order" , and bringing a criminal to justice. We think of the social justice movement (or some of us do, anyway) and standing up for the rights of oppressed people. Those of us with an environmental bent certainly think of the rights of non-human species and how we need to give them a voice when they are under attack. (I recently joined the organization EarthJustice -- I love their slogan: "Because the Earth Needs a Good Lawyer.")

But we all know that injustice runs rampant in the world today, and we don't always understand how so many people apparently get away with unethical, illegal, unscrupulous behavior. And that's where the second kind of Justice comes in -- a kind of psychic, or karmic, justice. Karmic Balance, which extends beyond this world into the realm of Spirit. I even thought about calling this card "Karma," because it does seem to be more expressive of what the card is really about. This is the idea that consequences follow every action, whether we see it or not. That we will always reap what we sow. There is great comfort in this idea, because it gives us hope that evildoers will someday, somehow, have to deal with the consequence of their actions. And it should also act as a check on our own actions -- no, we really don't get away with anything.

My friend Lunaea says that this card is about impersonal Justice -- cause and effect -- that there is no mercy in this card, as compared to the Judgment card, where compassion comes into play.

I wanted to create a card that expressed both these concepts of Justice -- social justice and karmic balance. For the social aspect, and because the deck has an earth-centered theme, I included a clearcut forest and many endangered or threatened species in the card. As many as I could pack in, actually! The river in this image is significant too. How many folk songs have we sung over the years that have a refrain like "Let justice flow like a river"? The most recent one is on the newest John Gorka album (Old Futures Gone), a tune called "War Makes War." He sings, "War makes war, it won't bring peace . . . Let Justice run down like water, righteousness like a mighty stream . . ." (BTW I think of the word "righteousness" as meaning "right action.") Listening to that song just now, I heard another killer line: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it's bent towards justice. . . " I see from the liner notes that he is quoting Martin Luther King Jr. No wonder it's so powerful. Thank you John.

When I saw the photos of the 500,000 protesters in New York City on August 29, they looked like a River of Justice to me too.

So the concept of Social Justice is set in the card, with the endangered species and metaphorical river of justice. The idea of Karmic Balance is expressed through the central figure, the man holding a flaming heart in one hand and a feather in the other. His posture suggests the familiar "scales of justice," and the heart/feather motif refers to Ma'at, the Egyptian Goddess of Justice, who weighs our hearts against a feather. What an image to keep in mind whenever we are tempted to do something that is less than ethical!

Well, I've written more than enough for one morning. Please let me know what you think of the new card.

Venusian Values

Even though I knew about the approaching Venus transit of June 8, I wasn't too excited about it. My mind is just elsewhere these days. But this morning I woke about 4 AM and decided to catch up on a little blog-reading. Sage at Goddessing reminded me that the pentacle, that 5-pointed star so beloved of witches and Tarotists, is a "two-dimensional plot of the eight-year Venus cycle." Right, I had known that, and forgot!

There appears to be quite a bit of conversation in the astrological community about this Venus transit -- the Wild Hunt blog has some great links -- and what it might portend for the future. If it is true that this transit is ushering in an eight-year cycle of "new consciousness for a renewed world," as Sage says, I gratefully celebrate it. I do find it interesting that the mainstream media is focused on the death of Ronald Reagan and eulogizing him just as this transit occurs. Can it be a case of "out with the old, in with the new?" That'd be just fine with me. (I appreciate Kim Antieau's remarks about Reagan over at the Furious Spinner.)

It's been my habit for the past few years to be aware of my actions and thoughts on the day of an eclipse, ever since I heard that Tibetan Buddhists spend the day of an eclipse in intense prayer for the planet. My understanding is that they believe that all actions are multiplied a thousand times over on the day of an eclipse (I can't remember at this point where I heard that -- if I'm wrong, please let me know). At any rate, it seems a fine idea to have spent the day of a rare Venus/Sun transit honoring Venus and her values.

The Heart of Ground Zero

On my fourth day in the city I met up with our native New Yorker, Debbie, who took Valerie (from California) and Janet (from Pennsylvania) and me to a real New York City diner for breakfast. She also initiated the three of us into the Mysteries of the Subway, and we took the train down to the World Trade Towers site.

We emerged from the subway onto a wide cement area that used to be the mezzanine of the World Trade Center, according to Debbie. The site itself is not as shocking as I had expected. All the rubble of the devastation of September 11th has been cleared away, and it looks like a huge construction site enclosed by a metal fence. There are signs everywhere asking people not to leave notes or messages or anything, so I was disappointed I could not leave my island cedar and beach glass as offerings. But Valerie had brought a loose mixture of tobacco and sage and sweetgrass, so we blew that, with a prayer, through the chain link fence and into the site.

We wandered across the street to old St Paul's Chapel, which dates from 1766 and was a center for rescue workers after 9/11. That chapel seems to be where the "heart" of 9/11 now resides. It is not large -- about the size of our island church -- and the outer aisleways are filled with memorabilia and shrines to the people that died, especially the rescue workers. Being inside the chapel was very moving. Colorful banners bearing messages of love and peace from people all over the world brightened the walls. We sat in the pews and prayed, knowing we were privileged to visit holy ground.

We were just about to leave when a young woman said they were about to have a prayer service that they only did once a day, and would we like to stay for it? Yes, we would. So we went back in and sat down. The young woman, her skin a lovely caramel color, was calm and self-possessed and stood in the pulpit as if she were born to it -- a true priestess of New York. She explained that the church bells would toll four sets of five rings each, which is the traditional firemen's tribute to a fallen comrade. She asked us to pray as the bells tolled, for everyone who died during 9/11, for all victims of terrorists everywhere, for our armed forces in Iraq, for the people of Iraq, and for peace throughout the world.

There was a full, weighty silence in the church, as thirty or so of us listened to the bells and prayed, each in her or his own way. We then said the prayer of St Francis together -- you know the one, "Where there is hatred, let me sow love . . ." But the lay preacher (the priestess, as I call her) was very respectful of other religious traditions and pointed out all the other prayers in the booklet, including a Buddhist one, a Native American one, a Baha'i one and more. It was wonderful to feel included and not alienated by the service. She then encouraged us to reach out to those around us. I shook hands with two gentlemen on my left, and then the three of us women held each other and cried.

We were very grateful that Serendipity had led us to be there at just the right time.

Spring Equinox, light and dark in balance, light ascending

The first Salmonberry blossom of Spring!

My almanac tells me that for the past three days or so, we've had 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness, with a variance of about 10 minutes. I love the half-and-half, yin & yang nature of the equinoxes, so like the quarter moons. As the year waxes, the Light grows or ascends. As the year wanes, and day and night are equal once again at Autumn Equinox, the Dark grows and gathers strength. All things in balance.

Yesterday was not only Spring Equinox (technically Friday night at 10.49 PM PST when the Sun passed over the Equator), and a New Moon in Aries, it was also Craig's and my 5th handfasting anniversary and 4th wedding anniversary. And it was the first anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. The incongruity struck me last year and strikes me now again. For those of us who honor the cycles of the Earth, Spring Equinox (or Ostara) is one of our High Holy Days. This would be like beginning a war (not in my name, not in my name) on Easter for Christians, which of course Mr. Bush would never do.

Yesterday I began my observance of Spring Equinox (Persephone returns!!!) with another walk in the deep woods. I found many sets of opposites held in balance: Cold wind / bright sun. Deep shadows / sunlit glades. Decaying leaves / electric chartreuse moss. White dog / black dog -- and a dalmation (black & white in one)!

A friend of a friend who had locked herself out of her house walked with us. "Why did you lock your door?" our friend asked her. "We don't have any thieves on this island -- except a couple of Republicans."

I had meant to join in the noon rally memorializing the first anniversary of the war in Iraq down at the ferry dock, but was lost in colored pencil artwork at noon and didn't make it down there (yes, the Teacher is nearly done).

Later in the evening, Craig and I went to dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant and toasted our first five years together. For each of us, it's the third time around, and we have indeed saved the best for last. We talked about the day of our handfasting at the grange, transformed into a temple by our friends and families, spring flowers everywhere. People laughed at the part of our vows when we promised to "communicate in a timely manner"! We laughed too, but it had been an issue with us in the past. We've done well with communication, and we've done well at making room for each other's idiosyncrasies, and at giving each other lots of space in our togetherness.

It strikes me today how privileged we are, as a heterosexual couple, to be able to marry and partake of the rights that only married couples enjoy in this country. Let's hope that soon it will be a right available to all. Regarding gay marriage, I think this post at MadebyMark says it all.