March 24, 2010 - The Eight of Swords

This Spring Equinox something changed in me. The endurance that marks me grew onerous. I didn't want to just endure anymore. I didn't want to put my life on hold. I wanted to find my place and live there; find my heart, and live there. I wanted more than ok. I wanted happy. I didn't want to put off until tomorrow anymore. Some day just wasn't good enough.

The Eight of Swords is a funny card. She looks bound and trapped. No doubt she feels bound and trapped. and yet, she's tied loosely. Her feet are free. Her blindfold looks as if it's slipping. And that wall of swords as daunting as it looks, doesn't surround her. Perhaps she can't go back, but she can move forward. She is trapped as much by her own thoughts and beliefs as she is by swords and rope. Joan Bunning writes: "Solutions are not always easy, but they exist. Find your clarity of thought and purpose (the Swords ideal) and use them to take that first step toward home." Well that sounds exactly like what I want -- to go home, my home, wherever that may be. I've been too far from Ithaca for too long. Home is calling, and time is running out.

In the Jane Austen Tarot, the Eight of Quills is depicted by Mary Crawford playing the harp as Edumund Bertram looks on adoringly. Edmund is trapped by his own projections of Mary, his own biases about Fanny. There is what he thinks exists, and what truly is. Fanny can see it clearly. She knows Mary is not well-suited to Edmund. But Edmund sees only what he wants. This card captures the self-delusion of the Eight of Swords, the pretty prisons we construct believing they are not prisons at all.

There was a life I wanted; a man I wanted. I've been successively ripping off veil after veil to see things truly for almost three years. I think I'm getting closer. I think I see him clearly, what we were, clearly. I was much like Edmund. I felt always unsettled with him, like ground you never trust your footing on, every step tenuous, unsure. I didn't pay attention to any of that. Can a man perpetually faithless change with one true love? I hoped so, tried to believe so. I made my pretty prison and I suppose as painful as it was, lucky for me, he stayed true to himself and I couldn't escape what my heart knew already, that he could be trusted with something as precious as my heart.

I want to move. I want a place with different rhythms, ocean rhythms. I find these days it's the one place that helps me keep perspective. I feel the depth and breadth of the world by the sea, and my joys and sorrows somehow grow less overwhelming in the company of the ocean. The ocean was my companion growing up. Years passed with the sound of it filling my ears, the scent of it filling me. I miss her.

I think this spring, a year out of my heart attack, I'm ready to actually reach for what I want. I'm tired of waiting. As fdor how it all turns out, I'll keep you posted.