The Lovers

Magic mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all? This reminds me of that time when I had a friend ask my why I was wearing white tights when it was about a million degrees outside. My response: Those are my legs. I was not, in fact, wearing any tights. Luckily I have stopped caring about the paleness of my skin, so we were both able to have a good laugh at my expense. It has taken me years to learn how to love this alabaster tone of mine, mainly thanks to a certain propane incident that occurred a few years back. It gave me a new appreciation for the largest organ in (on?) the human body. At this rate I should probably buy some stock in sunscreen with the amount that I use.

My privileged, dumbass self had no idea for the longest time that the queen from The Seven Dwarfs was referencing a particular skin tone, the white one. It’s literally the epitome of white supremist thinking, the whiter you are the more valuable to society you are. Then why on Earth did I spend the entirety of my teenage years frying myself in a tanning bed trying to have darker skin? Those fashion magazines I read told me that I needed a sun-kissed glow in order to be seen as attractive. So which one is it? Am I too white or not white enough?

Ruled by Gemini, the Lovers in tarot helps us to see and acknowledge where we tend to miss the fullness of the validity and worthiness of our own reflection, all that we are. We are born with this innate beauty and goodness, and at some point in our lives we come to the realization that we have forgotten that fact. We twist ourselves into knots trying to be whatever the culture decides it wants to sell us next, all the while breaking ourselves apart. The reality becomes that we are two parts of the whole, and now we have to learn to accept these dualities, so we can then build the unity from which love flows. This ancestral homecoming is what the Lovers are asking of us. What is right in front of you, staring back at you from that mirror? The choice is yours: give up yourself to the knowledge and fulfillment of worldly senses, or embrace the simplicity of an ever-present now.

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.

Zelda Fitzgerald

The mantra for the Lovers is, “I choose love.” We spend so much of our lives hoping to find some external source to give us this emotional connection that sometimes we forget that we can give it to ourselves. Love is a verb, one which requires some sort of action. Archangel Raphael is known as the “Angel of Healing,” is here to aid us in this reconciliation with these two opposing parts of ourselves. I have spent years trying to find someone to sew the broken pieces of my heart together, only to feel disappointed when it came back looking like some fucked up Picasso painting. There is only one person who can understand you – and that person is yourself.

The Card of Interference

Not to jump Disney cartoons, but the Eight of Swords is rather like the thorny briars that the Evil Queen puts up ahead of Prince Phillip in his quest to save his Sleeping Beauty. Although in the movie he slices through those vines eventually making his way, the reality of the situation is that those trailing plants were magic, a mere mirage placed in front of us to give us the feeling of being trapped. From May 21 to May 31, we can look to this tarot card to highlight a “lack of persistence in the matters of the intellect and the will constantly being thwarted by accidental interference” (Book of Thoth). You may think you are boxed in, which can feel very real, but is it the truth of the matter? The fact is you do have choices, even if you do not like them. You are not powerless, even though it may feel that way at times.

Are you caught in a story? We can put on these self-imposed blindfolds, sometimes as a way to protect ourselves, but more often than not they end up being the thing that keeps us stuck. We can’t see, we feel bound by our circumstances, and we panic when the water begins to rise all around us. We forget that we can take it off, that we can literally walk away from whatever this is. There are times when we need to be honest with ourselves, and see things beyond the story that the mind is telling us. The medicine of this card invites us into a sort of sacred investigation, looking at the ways we get stuck and tighten around these fairy tales we tell ourselves. We could bypass a vast majority of the struggle if we could simply take one step forward.

There are thoughts which you cannot grasp without changing your life.

Werner Sprenger

There are times when we approach something too directly without seeing the fullness of the situation. When you can’t see the bigger picture, then the things you are trying to accomplish become much more difficult. There is an En Vogue song from the nineties (I’m dating myself here.) that says “Free your mind, and the rest will follow. Be colorblind, don’t be so shallow.” As someone who has grown up in an ocean of racism, I can honestly say that you cannot fully understand something or someone if you still have on your blinders. If all you are doing is staring at that locked door, you will never see that the window is wide open, that there is in fact a third door you can walk through.

The Card of Cruelty

The Nine of Swords is here from June 1 to June 10, and proffers us some guidance that is necessary in order to work through this dark night of the soul. It symbolizes that “consciousness has fallen into a realm unenlightened by reason…the world of the unconscious, primitive instincts” (Book of Thoth). When we begin to understand how delusional our minds can be, we can then begin to question these stories we tell ourselves. This can bring up an immense amount of fear and anxiety for us.

I remember coming to terms with my own internalized racism. Fuck it! I’ll throw misogyny in there as well. With both of those realizations came an enormous amount of grief, guilt, and dare I say shame. The inner turmoil this caused felt like a nightmare, not to mention all the outward harm I had caused to other people due to my own ignorance and unrealized privilege. The truth of the matter is that fear and guilt can lock us into immobility. We become so terrified and worried that we lose the ability to choose and our growth becomes stunted. The Nine of Swords reminds us that we have the strength to break free from those shackles that lie in our hearts. Maybe it’s not as dreadful as it seems.

He who has grasped his situation cannot readily be restrained.

B. Brecht

Fear in the mind causes stress in the body. All of this catastrophizing and ‘what if’ thinking has a tendency to make people more fearful, more anxious, and doesn’t always help the situation. This is not to say don’t be prepared, because fear can also be an indication that we are about to expand into something more. In order to do this we must figure out where these fears stem from and what they mean for us. Are they even our fears? I have lived a vast part of my life fearing heights, only to realize that my mother is in fact afraid of heights. Watching her white knuckle the steering wheel every time we drove over a bridge, I internalized that same apprehension. As Frank Herbert wrote in Dune, “fear is the mind-killer,” and that fear wasn’t even mine to begin with. It did, however, keep me stuck for many many years.

The Card of Ruin

The caterpillar must die wrapped in its chrysalis in order to become a butterfly. A hermit crab must leave its too small shell and bare itself to the world in order to find its new home. Some parts of us must die in order to make room for our souls to come through. Are these cyclical thoughts still serving you? Or are we getting into rumination territory? The Ten of Swords assists us from June 11 to June 20 in coming to terms with the fact that sometimes these endings can be quite painful. It is however a very important signal that this particular mental cycle is complete.

The sibling card for the Ten of Swords is the Fool in tarot. There are times when our mental trips are carried so far to the extreme that there is nothing left but to jump into the water, to dive deep into the wounds of our own hearts. There is some wisdom in defeat, lessons that we can learn from our mishaps. This card can be “the ruin of the intellect, and even of all mental and moral qualities” (Book of Thoth), and I mean that in a good way. The invitation becomes learning how to have a new relationship with our thoughts and how we identify with them.

If it isn’t good, let it die. If it doesn’t die, make it good.

Ajahn Chah

During these moments of big expansions, these times when we are transitioning in big and impactful ways, we can see that “reason divorced from reality” (Book of Thoth). This is a clear indicator that we need to move from our heads into our hearts. We must learn how to let go of how we thought things were supposed to be, and then we have to forgive ourselves and deal with all of those yucky emotions that follow along with it. We are merely a soul having a human experience, so we must honor where we fall along our journey. We can then begin to pick up the pieces when the waters finally begin to calm. You can change your mind along the way. In fact I think it’s imperative to your own soul’s evolutionary process. Consider this an end of an era of your life, and now you get to begin a new one.

Mad love, Jenna

deck credit: Rider-Waite Tarot Deck, drawn in 1909 by Pamela Colman Smith under direction of Arthur Edward Waite