Geese, Badgers & Mary

So today’s Elemental Dignity reading moves to another deck. It’s not that I don’t adore the Mary-El. I’m finding it almost too trance-inducing–if that makes sense. I needed to move back to a deck that I know. To quote Alison Cross of This Game of Thrones, I needed to get into my “comfy slippers” again. Aside, if you are interested at all in exploring the Court Cards, I highly recommend Ali’s blog.

So I have:

Body Earth (Guardian/Queen of Earth)
Mind Earth (Explorer/Knight of Earth)
Spirit Air (Four of Air)

The main card, Body, is that woman digging in the dirt–the Explorer of Earth. I am working on some community issues for myself. Trying to remember where I grow and how I connect. She is the mover of earth–bulldozer comes to mind. But she is more gentle than that image, isn’t she. The badger in the foreground is a hint to how stubborn I may have to be today in order to get something done for someone.

Body enhances Mind here with another Earth. Our Guardian of Earth focuses on the corn. He’s checking the tassle to make sure it’s ready. This reminds me to continue my work of being healthy in body and self–it helps my sense of community as much as my sense of wholeness.

Then Spirit is shown with Air in which is neutral to earth so it doesn’t detract. Perhaps the Four of Air means my Spirit is on a self-imposed time out after all the fire of the past few days. Time to stay home in a spiritual sense.

On a sad note, Mary Oliver is ill. If you are not familiar with that name, you may be familiar with this poem:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

That’s from Dream Work, 1986. I recently wrote about “Messenger” which inspired, in part, my Brilliance Spread.

Here is another piece. I found this one today. I don’t own any of her books. I will be correcting that.

White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

Coming down out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful, and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings — five feet apart —
and the grabbing thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys of the snow —
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows —
so I thought:
maybe death isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us —

as soft as feathers —
that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,
and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light —
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.

From House of Light 2003.

No Voyage

I wake earlier, now that the birds have come
And sing in the unfailing trees.
On a cot by an open window
I lie like land used up, while spring unfolds.

Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them
Did not board ship with grief among their maps?—
Till it seemed men never go somewhere, they only leave
Wherever they are, when the dying begins.

For myself, I find my wanting life
Implores no novelty and no disguise of distance;
Where, in what country, might I put down these thoughts,
Who still am citizen of this fallen city?

On a cot by an open window, I lie and remember
While the birds in the trees sing of the circle of time.
Let the dying go on, and let me, if I can,
Inherit from disaster before I move.

O, I go to see the great ships ride from harbor,
And my wounds leap with impatience; yet I turn back
To sort the weeping ruins of my house:
Here or nowhere I will make peace with the fact.

That’s one from her first published collection, No Voyage And Other Poems.

A tribute blog has been set up by Julie L. Moore and Julie Brooks Barbour. You can learn more about that here.