It is Tuesday and I call the Empress out for the role of the day. It seems a simple matter of integrating the soul’s awareness to sync with my immediate surroundings. Here is where my inspiration is born. It is a place where Arcane, high and low, manifest in everyday life. Often this manifestation means I have crossed over another threshold and into another realm. In the least, here of all places, the shades move from my eyes and disappear from what I know of the ancients. What remains for me of my ancestors in light of Empress? It is the fact that my values, ethics, and desires need not be forgotten to realize into her fullness.
For instance, plenty of women have given birth to menopause babies. The children come into the world healthy and live to see the next age turn as their parents did. I have to remember that for me, it is not over. I have to remember that even if my ova spill over and uterus shrivels up, I will still beg for purification’s waters and try another approach into eternity. Even if discipline and clout are the only reasons a man would want me, I need not be locked in a loveless and fruitless marriage until death. That seems a different trap of the Empress guise that I never considered. Love? Is that it? Marriage should be like a cold teapot in the beginning and come to a roaring boil over time. At least that is according to a Hindu couple I knew long ago. I secretly keep that one close to heart with every smile, polite turn of a phrase, and attracted gaze toward a man.
In some tomes, Empress is cited as the pinnacle of womanhood. I further assume the presumption that she is an archetype to which all women aspire to attain. Right now, all I see is a dead end existence. Despite the power she exerts in daily life, her presence is confined and defined by children, the obligations of motherhood, and the sacrifices of youth. Her position is a high attainment, but there is so much more to being woman than a June Cleaver life. A higher calling seeks to be involved in preserving humanity and the environment compared to the cardboard box full of low expectations that women have been confined to live in for centuries. Maybe I just sit here full of jealousy, envy, and masking the wanton. Through these jaded eyes, I presumed I have nothing else to define my life except the work of my hands and mind. My efforts may be forgotten before I die. Empress, however indirect, teaches womanhood as something to preserve and conserve. Her contributions may be spoken of for an eon, maybe for eternity. Now I know that these written spites make me a prejudice classist well as a feminist reactionary. If it were not for the gown, skin color, and crown, would I have shifted my perspective to honor her representation of fecundity and femininity? From my core in the very beginning, I presume her manifestation would be foreign to me. Her experience is not mine. I still cannot seem to connect. I thought archetypes applied to us all. This is another reminder of being on the outside, but there is time left. These loins have not completely dried out.
Where I sit in reposed shadow is in a daydream compared to Empress suggests. She has nothing to tend but a husband and children. She has no detailed budget of what she can afford at the grocery store. For her, beef is a reality; while, beans, chicken and fish are staples to others. Maintaining a fixed income and small savings must be foreign to Empress as well. Her monthly allowances and credit limits are more than a year’s allotment compared to my coffers. Believe me when I tell you it is not the money in her repose that wrecks my composure. It is her ease of living, the cushions, that pampering, the hedonism, and the intimated selfishness that ranks me raw. Still, I presume her in her personal power. Called out of the card, books say she is full of what self-actualization for a woman means. I come from a long line of working women. Empress seems not to represent the fold. Then again we do not show all faces for long periods of time. Flux and development and dynamic change happen for all of us. The day I embody Empress’ symbolism it might be a fleeting moment of understanding. That makes for every reason to continue to confront my shadow arising from the tarot. Should these depictions be timeless, we need know the dark side of their creation. The histories of some decks are as rich as the artwork that depicts the arcane, high and low. For now, my angle of discernment is low and hidden in direct light. With that in mind, know this card is about woman and her selfish pride in procreation. God enters not. In this picture, the child portent will know family and mortality long before the staid and holy.
VII.
Empress sits in the seat of creation. For some, her powers source from her hips and out through her loins. For her, some would only count birthing flesh as a valid rite versus creativity that sources from the eyes and hands. It is the feminine that charms and channels into being the new and exemplar of a covenant with her and her husband’s family. Another deck I use tells that type of giving takes a pine soft heart and an open mind for God to dwell within and season the seed to germinate from a feminine core. Giving birth never meant so much to me until I turned 32. Before then, I was divorced from my center and consumed with work and studies. At that time my identity and incubator lay in my head, not my hips. Where my actions stemmed caused my mind to spill out in lace and rounds of speech. Having hands and deft fingers made manifestation of thoughts easier. (Sometimes, we conceive better in form than word or memory sometimes.) Furthermore, I took advantage of the skills developed and constructed in worship. Soon, being fruitful came with steady productivity, where as begetting from my loins never realized. If I tell of Empress as a symbol for channeling wisdom through art, the cold wind over my right shoulder dissipates. I can learn to honor her and her struggles without being forced.
I can find comfort in Empress this way; by keeping the hearth of tradition in quilting while venturing new concepts in fine art. That approach will fill a hole in my soul that widened over the past eight years. I know when I do not create I enter a depressed state like no other. From instinct, I think that is expected of women who all carry a creative spark to drive the intellect an emotion. No doubt this depression is a quality of Empress in reverse; a reflection of Hecate’s arrival come menopause. It is difficult to wrestle my mind out of an emotional downturn once I have gone the ways without creating for months. Finding the time and materials to ignite the fire again takes patience. In thought, creative power ferments and reeks in the darkness when not ablaze. It may remain breathing and never succumbing to finality in decay. Rest, dear sweet repose, kept me alive then and now.
Since 2005 my sights have not completely been on raising new energies. I have been rescuing old fascinations and excavating from the abyss of time items stored in the back of my bedroom closet. It is my heart’s well I draw from while carefully culling a memory that does not completely stagnate and fume. I care enough to clean and cure. I care enough to find a place for visually creative thoughts again. I care enough to cure my methods born of old ills to find their mastery in my heart’s corridors.
It takes pure mind and a pure heart. If I make the Empress of these in my mind she becomes a sign of incubating new thoughts and endeavors. The sign comes with not being focused purely on the new and discarding the old. The sign is in giving my thoughts an opportunity to manifest. The change comes in managing ideas to grow and blossom. The Empress is also a sign that I will be given time to manifest to a point of fullness. With the right care I am sure to manifest fruit if not a bounty worth sharing.
VIII.
Today is a day when I can resolve more anger over the Empress. Opening the birthing concept is a start as well as redefining what it means to come into the maturity of womanhood. The Holy Bible in parts of Psalms clarifies for some generations that pregnancy is a folly leading to death and separation from loved ones. Taking that lead, coming to understand my life’s occasions may be difficult.
I sat in the day room in front of the television for the last two days. I had my fill of cartoons, game shows, and reality television. I was desperate for a mental break and that meant rest in quiet. Unfortunately, that was not about to happen. Other residents took to talking from dawn to dusk about medication. No screams erupted from the ward, but the killer to being secluded and segregated from the outside world was the plain, simple, and stagnant conversation. In past years I learned the chattiness of an addict, the fermented moods of abusers, the pronounced whims of the cult consumed, the gay, and the forgotten militant all echoed in the back of my mind. I knew the lingo and the confession. I was nowhere near being able to listen to it again. Putting down a borrowed magazine, I went asking for the Holy Bible then set my back firm into a distant corner. Without a directed question, I had no idea where to start reading. These days, like my deceased grandmother did, I find refuge in Psalms. In my solace, those chapters are followed with a lengthy reading in the Gospels. In the hospital I took to neither approach. Recanting nothing, not even my belief in Christ, that late afternoon I took to divining with the Holy Bible. With a little prayer to the hallway breeze and closed eyes, I asked for guidance and direction and let the Bible fall open into my lap. One random tap to the text and my eyes opened to read. I did this not three times, not four times, but more than six times I asked for clarification and breadth. What I understood from Old Testament to New was that it was not the time to have children. The world had changed. It would be more of a burden to bear and nurture than any other age. I did not want to believe. I thought I had time left. Again I was proven wrong. Sincerely, I want to have children and raise them in marriage with a man. I have several barriers to conquer to reach that fullness. My envy of Empress dwells inside those barriers. I may never give birth to a healthy child or at all. Medicine and age blocks the way. So, if having a child means I am finally a woman, I will toil and err as a maiden for the rest of my life. It makes no sense to have children just to prove strength or sexual skill. I try to believe I was taught better to value life and make sound judgments before taking action. For now, my education makes me a graduate of profound ignorance and useless knowledge. Daily, I forget knowledge of self as human, especially in terms of the values of an abstract mind trained for administrative labor. From this passage in Psalms, I have no more use to society or men seeking immortality through lineage. If nothing matters but procreation, then, I will be known as wasted flesh; all because I cannot fulfill genetic destiny. By this cannon, I cannot see the realities and meet the obligations of adulthood. I am left to play for the time to come. That may not be a bad situation being left to rescue my childhood and heal from assaults committed when I was younger. Now I question whether birthing changes life passages? What would I have to yield, other than stuffed animals and dolls, to move into the second phase of the Goddess? Why am I in a hurry? Peri-menupause has not struck yet. I have time. Middle age has not yet arrived yet. Time will busy itself as well as for me.
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