Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
Love is asking us to work with it — this is this week’s message, clear and simple as it is. It is offered to us, so that we can align with it and bring it into this world, with the understanding that everything has its season, but that true love is unchanging and limitless.
The first thing that I feel when looking at this reading is that it is a very feminine spread. It also feels important to keep in mind from the outset that the idea of feminine is something that everyone holds within them, no matter their gender. There is nothing exclusive about this reading. On the contrary, it is inclusive, expansive, expressive.
The first card we come to, moving from left to right, is The Empress. She is the counterpart to The Emperor — the yin to his yang, if you will — who consorts with him to create balance. Whereas the world of The Emperor is the world of action, battle and single-mindedness, the world that The Empress inhabits is one of receptivity, and it is cyclical. The Empress understands that the rules of engagement that we have with the world and with each other can only carry us so far, and that there comes a time when we learn that letting go and moving with a greater understanding of the underlying rhythm of life can open us up to mysteries far beyond what we know with our five senses.
I see this sense of opening in her body language: She is at ease, subtly inclined, side- (as opposed to head-) on, her legs slightly apart — her position emphasised by her left hand resting on her left knee. However, she is far from submissive. Her gaze meets ours fully, and in her right hand she holds up a sceptre. This is her domain, and she is intimately acquainted with its workings.
Unlike The Empress, who is very much a part of physical reality, the female figure in The Star bridges the world and the heavens. The planes of the top half of her body move in line with the stars that curve down from the sky above her. Her left knee rests on the land, her right foot seems to sit on top of the water. She belongs to neither. She is otherworldly. I see her nudity as testament to this: She has no need of the vestments with which we clothe ourselves to hide our shame and to shape our identities. She is unselfconscious; there is no ‘self’ to be conscious about. She is flow, pure and simple.
Third, we move to the Ace of Cups: the Holy Grail. From it, water springs in five streams into the lake underneath. These five streams are echoed in The Star; they are what the figure in The Star is working with. As with all the Aces, the cup is brought by a hand that emanates from a cloud. It is the hand of the creator, however you choose to understand him/her/it. Nothing feeds the cup because the cup is source itself, self-replenishing, infinite. The Ace of Cups is the divine feminine as container.
And so, moving back from right to left, we move with the idea of birth. With the Ace we witness pure potential before life draws its first breath; it is the receptacle for the seed of life, offered to us unconditionally. Next, in The Star, we enter the birth canal, enabling what is given in the Ace to be brought into being, into consciousness. Finally, in The Empress, we are born into a world of polarity, where both life and death have their place, but where the purity of what is coming through can still be expressed in these rhythms.
And what is being brought through? Love. All-encompassing love, or agape love. This is love expressed in service to something greater than we are. The figure in The Star bows at the feet of The Empress, and in this gesture I am reminded of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. What is given is received; what is received is given. Look how the pool of water at the bottom of the cascade in The Empress feeds into the pool into which the cup in the right hand of the figure of The Star pours. Look how the cup in the left hand pours seemingly onto the ground — and yet rivulets feed back into the pool at her feet, and into the body of water beneath the Ace of Cups.
Notice, also, how water pours from both cups in The Star where we might typically expect one to be giving water, while one receives it. It might seem strange, but then this is the nature of love. It cannot be used up. In fact, the more that is given, the more there is.
Perhaps this is an invitation to us to see love differently from how we are often used to seeing it: not as a finite resource that we can mete out, control, or that we can turn on and off. Rather, as an infinite, unchanging energy that we can embody right here, right now, where we are; which is with us through growth and decline, entrances and exits; which asks nothing of us in return, but which could enrich our own lives beyond imagining.
Burning River, your kind words have touched my heart. Thank you. I love seeing your name in the comments because I feel equally uplifted by your eloquence and the honesty of your postings. When you are not here please know that I think of you often and through this blessed, connected community here, embrace your healing journey as I know you do mine. When you suffer, I suffer, when you heal, I heal, when you love, I love. I know something wondrous is being woven here at PW, with each of us contributing our own unique strand of living that in turn gets woven into a dazzling yet soft, comforting blanket that we can wrap around us like a warm hug at will. I love pulling you and the other contributors into my mind’s eye and wrap that blanket around me when the going gets too tough.
Like today. I have a very challenging day here and though I teetered near the edge of panic and despair several times over, it was the knowing, the rock solid belief that an authentic love we are all choosing to grow within our hearts is expanding in ways we are only just beginning to appreciate. That is the well within myself that I drink from to ride out days like today. When I consciously (and today I have to admit it with a huge effort many times over) place my feet on that rock solid centre knowing that by focusing intently on the bigger picture that I just know is being born, my sprits are lifted. I know my difficulties will come right in the end. I won’t stop fighting until they do.
Really all this is big hearted Jupiter speaking to me, the ruler of my chart, always pulling me up and out of the petty and the mundane toward that better society that I know relies on me to play my part in building. I have shunned and shirked that task so many times but still it insists on my involvement and still it insists that I become confident in my abilities, that I am the spiritual warrior that I bloody well know I am. I’m sick of standing in circles swaying from side to side, imaging the changes we need to make yet naively shuffling round the rotten and systemic issues that are choking us, hoping we can will change them through will power alone.
The changes we so desperately crave have to be borne out in action. In the spoken word, in the physical act, in the written letter. Truth be told because truth insists on being expressed. I have immediate battles on two major fronts in my life right now and I cannot acquiesce any more to the bullying tactics of a dying paradigm where I am always shafted by an unjust MO. Love will win out but it is a love that has to be unflinching because it cannot tolerate injustices any more. That love *will* win the day if I just keep believing it will; *we* all need to truly believe in that, 24/7, from this moment on. We may be under pressure as Freddie Mercury sang but we have to give true love a great big collective boost because we know we have nothing to lose and *everything* to gain.
Power to you BR and my beloved community here. We can stay the course and we can light up the world.
Sarah, the poignancy of the spread this weekend, your sensitive and thorough discussion of the cards, the incredible synchronicity week by week with the cards you have drawn in their being pertinent to the events in my own life and the wonderful contribution of the bloggers, such as you, she bear, this week. (shebear, your contributions to this blog are always so rich, interesting and meaningful to me. Especially thank you for the OSHO quote this week) seem to require a response from me today. I am late in posting. Almost always late in posting. My life is erratic at best as I am holding mind, soul, spirit and body together one day at a time this season. And so, this reading reminds me: Love always is. It flows. It cannot be helped, or stopped as it wells up into and through our hearts. It enriches and enlivens us. It heals. It promotes creativity. And then it enters the realm of the Empress where there is polarity, cycles, beginnings and endings. How do we reconcile this eternal, unstoppable force to our own lives when it enters the realm of matter and decay? The decisions I have been facing are all a matter of love—for significant others, for myself, for he Creator, for mankind as a whole. Love doesn’t decide, it flows. But human channels, oh the anguish, as we learn, how, where, when…..hugs +_+…
You are so welcome, Rob. 🙂
So very well done, Sarah. You did this reading justice in so many ways. It speaks directly to me on this day of a week, month, and season resonating with such themes. Thank you…
Thank you, shebear – that is beautiful, and does indeed correlate.
Something to add:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdnAbtIF3YM
Yes Sarah, this is a biggie. A wonderful spread for this exact moment in time. I printed it up last night so I could ponder your words further. You did an excellent job as usual and I thought your closing paragraph was exquisite and quite brilliant. I shall drink it in ’til I overflow by way of fortifying my spirit as I continue stripping away conditionings that no longer serve me. I choose instead to focus on the light of love.
When I sat at my computer in the early hours of this morning I pulled up the Lovers card from OSHO and I would like to share with you part of the accompanying commentary, (written by Deva Padma, who also does the brilliant card illustrations) as I feel it echoes and enhances what you have written:
***What we call love is really a whole spectrum of relating, reaching from the earth to the sky. At the most earthy level, love is sexual attraction. Many of us remain stuck there, because our conditioning has burdened our sexuality with all kinds of expectations and repressions. Actually the biggest “problem” with sexual love is that it never lasts. Only if we accept this fact can we then really celebrate it for what it is — welcome its happening, and say good-bye with gratitude when it’s not. Then as we mature, we can begin to experience the love that exists beyond sexuality and honours the unique individuality of the other. We begin to understand that our partner often functions as a mirror, reflecting unseen aspects of our deeper self and supporting us to become whole. This love is based on freedom, not expectation or need. Its wings take us higher and higher towards the universal love that experiences all as one.***
Yes, under the moon and under the sun, we are all one. We are each other.
*What* a feeling.
Thank you, Aiko, Amanda, Huffy. I had a profound need to do this reading justice — it is a ‘big’ one — and I’m not sure I did. But as long as you can take away some sense of its significance, then it’s already doing its work.
Thank you dear Sarah. Once again this is so what I need to read right now. And so beautifully written, as always. xx
i meant to mention earlier sarah, that i really appreciated reading this today. 🙂 the flow of water between the cards is especially striking and a gorgeous message.
Sarah
Wow, thank you!! This gave me chills.
Aiko
I thought this was a Venus in Virgo reading, but it just entered Libra.