QUESTION:  What interests you about Tarot? Why bother with it?ANSWER: Ever since I lost my

QUESTION:  What interests you about Tarot? Why bother with it?ANSWER: Ever since I lost my poetry life has felt, at best, adrift and chaotic. In the past, though, I knew who I was. The suicide attempt in Armenia, various life-partners who beat the shit out of me, my failing thyroid, my alcoholism—none of this took away my core reality. Poetry was the bedrock of my foundation. I say all this not for a pity party, but rather that I’ve been searching for a while for something of equal value to call my own, to take pride in, to prove to myself that I still have some scrap of worth.For a while I thought perhaps that Tarot would fill that void. It might, one day, but for now it is a struggle.  None of this comes effortlessly. I am finding that I am forgetting key elements in all these cards’ designs. What I was sure of yesterday leaves me baffled today as to why I even made that choice or decision. I write down these thoughts and words so that one day, when I am no longer here, someone might read them and understand that there are as many shades of grief as there are of love and this one is mine. It’s a bit like that line from the Indigo Girls, “My dreams came in like needy children tugging at my sleeve/ I said I have no way to feed you, so leave …” All of this leads me to the Empress, someone who actually has the warewithal to feed what I cannot. In the past I balked at using the word, “nurturing,” for her. “Of course she’s nurturing,” I scoffed, “that’s all women are ever described as being.” Yet, if I am being honest, that complaint has nothing to do with the Empress archetype and everything about my own sense of helplessness. If I can’t nurture myself how can I possibly nurture someone or something else? Again, I must remind myself that this isn’t about me, it’s about feminine energy. This is the card that talks about the beauty one finds in the act of creation. Here is sensuality, fertility and erotic expression. If there is joy to be found in elegance then that’s the realm of the Empress.As the Empress breastfeeds her daughter, Syssk sits nearby, singing about the royal daughter’s birth. I have never attended a traditional Japanese birthing ceremony so I don’t know how accurate this panorama in the background is, but I often take a lot of artistic license (to put it mildly) with these designs so perhaps I should focus on the idea of midwifery, and not the image itself? Perhaps. -- source link

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