1/28/13—Checking In On That Place No One Can Touch

Today's Draw: The Nine of Cups in the Pros position from the Maroon Tarot and the Deck of 1000 Spreads. Are you aware of a place inside you that no one else can visit, touch or destroy? What possibilities exist in this place? And if you had to gauge the health of this place—how often you feed and exercise it—what kind of shape would it be in?

The Nine of Cups is tarot's "wish card". If you're wondering if you're going to get that job or find that apartment or meet that man, this is the card you want to show up for you. Your wishes will come true. The "Pros" position (opposite of Cons) definitely affirms you'll get your wish. You tell that to someone in a reading, though, and they'll think all their bad days will over and life will coast from here on on. But we've all gotten our wishes before and wished we had wished better, right?

Something this combo made me think of today is that, in the absence of anything else, we always have our hopes and our dreams. We always have that place where we can conjure perfect worlds fulfilled by wishes. We always have that garden of abundance that man is sitting in. And we always have a capacity for gratitude that can bring us to tears. 

This is a weird confession and something I don't think I've ever told anyone else. When I was a child, I used to contemplate the possibility of being taken captive and put into solitary confinement, or for some reason having to wander the earth on my own. Could I survive that? Could I live without interacting with people? I weighed these questions heavily and usually came out cautiously optimistic that I could withstand extreme isolation if needed.

Now, I have NO idea why this thought would ever cross my mind, but it actually did quite often. Maybe it was because my mother would often find any excuse she could to send us to our rooms...just to get us out of her hair. She was also prone to forget that she'd sent us to our solitary confinement...haha. So an hour later or whatever, we'd creep out of our rooms, peek down through the railing and cautiously try to gauge the situation...perhaps even quietly call out to her to see if she was paying attention. 

So that could be it. Or it could be some past-life memory from a time when I spent extended periods alone. In fact, I once had a past-life regression where I was a solitary hunter person with no tribe. I basically died frozen and starving. 

Or it could be because I really kind of like being alone. One of my brothers and I were the introverts in a family of extroverts. There were six of them and just two of us. We were generally the only ones that got our own spaces—me because I was the youngest and too young to share a room with my sisters. And my brother because, like Gollum, he was happy to inhabit any dark, damp corner of the house, just so long as you left him alone there. 

The reason why I thought I would fare well is because I'm really good at entertaining myself, thinking up stories and shutting the outside world away. In reality, as an adult, I know I need some interaction. But back then, I didn't really know it. I was a generally lonesome child, slow to make friends and we moved every two years, so I never had much chance to form attachments. Of course, you wouldn't think this of me from the outside looking in, but we're all lonelier on the inside than we are on the outside, aren't we?

But there was something else. From this young age, I also somehow knew that we all had a place within us that others can't touch or control or ever take away from us. We could be sent to our rooms indefinitely, we could be mocked and teased at school, have our world uprooted every two years, conform to rules of propriety and get shoehorned into some vision of normalcy by society, but one thing nobody can ever touch is that personal place inside us. That place where we can escape into ourselves. That place where anything is possible. 

What I was really weighing back then was the strength of this place against all the slings and arrows of life. As a child I thought it would be hard, but that the spirit of hope and magic and possibility would always win. That its little oasis of abundance, comfort and peace would always hold arms wide open. As an adult, I can see where this place can be snuffed out of a person in extreme conditions—through psychological terror or torture of some sort. But I still believe it's indomitable. Eternal. 

Some might call it the "self". Some might call it the "soul". But it's our greatest weapon—a gift from the universe to help us withstand what can often be a cruel world. And it seems to me that it can get lost under the debris of everyday life, numbed by our obsessions and compulsions and neglected as a "childish thing". But it could one day be the rope that saves us from falling into the abyss. So if you haven't seen yours lately, go and open up that creaky door, oil the hinges and let the poor sucker come out into the light once again.