Late Spring with the Heirophant

Taurus // Finding my Ground of Being

As soon as you imagine spring will never come, there she is! My garden is bursting and the everything is bright green and the rain falls just steadily enough that I don’t need to water yet. But then this week it is going to hit nearly 90 degrees, and it’s my kids’ last week of school - so just as spring settles in summer is right around the bend!

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I drove to the lake last week in the rain. My weather app said that there was only a small chance of rain later in the day, but as I drove over the bridge just after lunch the rain pelted my windshield and the sky looked ominous and dark.

Illness and school breaks kept me from swimming in the month of April, but waiting until May means I got to come right on the cusp of Bird Week! The 10-day festival that celebrates the peak of songbird migration to the shores of the Great Lakes. I didn’t see many birds on my walk (warblers are adept at hiding in leafy trees) but I heard many new calls and my merlin app¹ did too!

I walked up to the beach and could still see the streaks of rainfall receding to the west and tried to remember the word for that misty phenomenon. Virga. From the latin word for streaks. The air was chilly and there was a faint breeze, but the water was still. Because of all the spring rain the lake looked silty from runoff and the murky brown color was not very inviting. Neither was the chilly 55 degree water temperature.

When I finally walked into the water the cold was shocking and sent instant chills up my body, but after a while my legs quickly acclimated and just felt tingly and strangely warm. The runoff that causes the muddy water will also cause the toxic algae in the summer months, but for now it just made it hard to see my feet. It was a bit disorienting to look out at the horizon line and feel the gentle tug of the water against my back, my feet obscured by the murky depths.

But if I sent my attention downward, I could feel my feet pressed into the sandy bottom. The silty water swirled around me, the cold lake tugged at my waist, but my feet on the earth did not move. That’s the feeling I long for right now. I long to feel rooted, even when the water around me moves and swirls. Even when the sky is dark and foreboding. I’m trying to rest on the solid, steady earth.

Every time I sit down to write, the words just won’t come. It’s like they are stuck in my throat. Or maybe more accurately, they are stuck in my mind. I am a collector of ideas and I feel like my proverbial storeroom needs a good spring clean. I also think after a year of relative flow with my writing, I’m having a natural response to the sharing that feels a lot like anxiety - I’ve said too much! Or worse, no one cares!

There is also the silencing, like a hand clamped around my throat, that comes with living in unprecedented times². When my youngest lays with her hands over her ears at night because she is afraid there is going to be a thunderstorm, all I can think about is how other children are pressing hands over their ears to muffle the terror of bombs falling around their beds.

What could I possibly write?
What could I possibly say?

There are no words. Just my hands lightly rubbing my child’s back, reminding her that the flowers need rain and that thunder is a just a sound and that I am here. That I will always be here. My empty promise comforts her while my heavy heart breaks.

There are no words. Just my hand pressed against my own chest, sending kindness deep into my own heart to try and slow its’ racing flutter. There is just slow, ocean breathing and bare feet on the ground. There are just hands on shoulders like anchors as we try to keep each other from floating away.

There are obvious questions for this season. We ask them with terrified, open mouths. Why is this happening? How do we go on? I wake up in the middle of the night with tears on my cheeks. I don’t remember my dreams.

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The Heirophant is an old word for keeper of knowledge. One who unlocks mysteries. A priest. A teacher. A ritualist. They hold out golden keys to unlock the things that are murky or unknowable. But it has been really hard not to be pissed off at this card. Why the fuck is this happening? How can we be so indifferent to other people’s suffering? Why are humans so hell-bent on destruction? This priest, with his beard and his indifferent face, looks more like the men causing all the chaos than the one who has any answers.

WTF, dude

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This time last year, I wrote my way through the decans of Taurus season. I wrote about Refuge, Reciprocity, and combatting Negativity Bias. And honestly, rereading my own words was a balm for the open wound that is my heart right now. I wrote this about the beginning of the spring season which corresponds with the 5 of pentacles:

“In times of struggle and difficulty it can be hard to lift our eyes and look for the help and community that may be near or available to us… it can also remind us to turn to spiritual practices that sustain us. Lighting candles. Centering prayers or mantras. Building altars. Walking in nature. The two figures also have each other - it may not be much - but at least they are not completely alone. Remembering that it is human to suffer, not a failing on our part or an indication of unworthiness, can connect us to others in a deeply consoling way.”

So I’m trusting that these are the two golden keys being offered to me right now: grounding³ and connection with others. I can go for walks and remember that the earth is a dynamic, ever-changing system that holds me and grounds me. I can remember that trees⁴ are our ancestors and have seen millennia of human suffering come and go. What keys do they offer us if we listen? I am holding tight to human connection; that even humans on the other side of the planet are my kin - no preacher or politician can convince me otherwise.

I’m moved by Paul Tillich’s phrase of God as Ground of Being. Yes, that. I want to find grounding in the hallowed cathedral of the forest. I want to listen to the trees. I want to make new rituals of cleansing in murky lake water. And I want these keys to allow me the presence and safety to imagine a different world.

// May Day altar //

1. I am obsessed with Merlin.

2. Even if the pandemic is not front of mind anymore I think we still live in a time of change like our species has never experienced before. Some of these problems are old - violence begetting violence, fascism, climate change - but they are made more complicated with our new technologies and they require new solutions.

3. I am reading two books on the subject right now:
Grounded by

Ruth Allen

offers wonderful ideas for getting out in nature, and I learned my new favorite word: topophilia!
Grounded: finding God in the world by

Diana Butler Bass

is healing something in me that I didn’t even know was wounded. And this book also inspired the two keys of this post with her quote from Paul Tillich and her explorations of the three-tiered universe and our ideas of God “coming down” to earth.

4. I commend this wonderful piece on Trees as Teachers to you. Thank you

Hannah Levy