March 5, 2010 - The Four of Wands

Sometimes I am an optimistic pessimist. Sometimes I'm a pessimistic optimist. I keep one ear cocked always for the other shoe to drop. When I was little, my Greek grandmother would always caution too much joy lest the fates grow angry. She'd find not the worst case, but just enough wrong that the powers that be would leave her loved ones alone. At fifty-one, I find myself more like my grandmother than I know. I never celebrate completely. I may not consciously worry about tempting fate but surely there must be some of that in my tepid responses. Perhaps four years of flying high, too close to the sun, along with the requisite fall from grace at such daring, has cured me of peaks and vales. I may look a the sky, my dream of the sun, but I keep my flight at more moderate levels. No use risking melted wax and the deathly plunge into the ocean. I've fallen from great heights and survived, barely. I'm not sure I can be brave enough to do that again.

I wonder if the Four of Wands knows this and is trying to get me to celebrate a bit the good things of life, the gifts I've been given. It definitely heralds a celebration, usually the formal kind. It asks you to recognize success, reflect on your accomplishments, and enjoy some well-deserved rewards. Life always has its ups and downs but it has been, for the most part, pretty wonderful this last year since my bypass. If it's indicative in any way of the next half of my life, then things on the whole are going to be good. So maybe it wouldn't be so wrong to celebrate a bit. Surely the Fates are as angry at those who ignore or forget to honor their gifts as they are those who forget to honor the Fates.

Of course another aspect of the card is freedom. It urges you to get our of oppressive situations, break free of bonds, open to new possibilities, let go of limitations. Since my bypass, but even before I've had a hard time thinking beyond the edges of the life I've been living. I feel its narrowness and find little comfort in that anymore. I want to overflow my edges, move beyond my traditional boundaries. I don't want to be that tiny local creek with its safe trickle of water. I want to be a river and I want a river's rights to flood, to dry, to flow, to make my own way to the sea.

Before the levees here tamed the Delta for agriculture, the span between Sacramento and San Francisco was a great meandering inland sea. I want that freedom to spread when I need to, narrow when that too is right. We think of rivers as dependable, set. We need them to be that. But water has a mind of its own, as do I, and it will find its way to the sea. It strikes me that maybe in my second half, this two is my goal to find my own wild way to the sea.

Not sure what the Four of Wands has in mind but I'll keep you posted.