Tarot Butterflies 2: Exploring the Minor Mentors of Tarot

The Ace of Cups is the open heart, the clear heart, the trusting heart, the spiritual heart. This is the Holy Grail sitting within the emotional nature...Angeles Arrien, Ace of Cups, from The Tarot Handbook

I discovered a second link between tarot and butterflies this week while preparing to teach Exploring the Minor Mentors of Tarot on-line for Story Circle Network in March (I wrote about the first link in Tarot Butterflies and Poem Disorder). As a poet /image celebrant in love with the narratives images impart directly, I find tarot helps me connect with my own soul and that of others. I borrow the term for the course’s title from Eileen Connolly who refers to the minor arcana as Minor Mentors. Engaging in several years of writing based on the cards with a tarot companion (Feb 19 addition: Mary Allen: Under The Tarot Moon, Tiferet Journal) inspired me to design this course and work with the cards in new ways. We’ll be using the tarot as a source of inspiration to generate writing, spending a week on each of the four suits: Pentacles (earth), Swords (air), Wands (fire), and Cups (water). You can read the full description here: Exploring the Minor Mentors of Tarot: A Tour Through the Suits (no prior knowledge of the tarot required).

Tarot has been part of my life for over twenty years now. I scavenged deep in my files to find the logo I used in my life BK (before kids) from when I gave readings in Iowa City. I also photographed a few selections from my library to share with you. Preparing to pose questions to my students--What is your tarot lineage? How did the cards first come to you?-- I came across an entry I started but never finished for a column:

The Royal Road: 100 Butterflies and a Bicycle

The summer I graduated from college, I was living in the Sacramento Valley, surviving a record heat wave and the state of indecision that descends on every undergrad: where do I go from here? In search of shade, I threw on a pair of overalls and headed out by bicycle towards the olive groves. Tar from the road stuck to my tires while heat-waves wrinkled the horizon. Suddenly, the sky filled with hundreds of butterflies fluttering softly in droves across four lanes of traffic from Interstate 80 and down the frontage road, wafting over my hair and shoulders, fluttering between my tire spokes and peddles. I braked and hopped off, the road littered with pale yellow wings of the cabbage whites. What to make of the omen, I wondered, and filled my bike basket with handfuls of the glittering wings of the perished and rode home.

At that time I had trouble taking responsibility for my future or claiming a space of my own, crisis plaguing my love relationship. I meant to ask for a room of my own to write in but hadn’t, meant to write daily but wasn’t. So I staked out a corner of the bedroom, filling a basket with rocks and pine cones and the limb of a madrone tree the neighbor had cast out on the curbside. Below the tree limb, I scatted the lifeless butterflies on driftwood I had gathered earlier at the mouth of the Russian River where it meets the sea in Jenner. I felt oddly calmed by the stilled butterflies, inert and grounded just like I was.

Later that day, I found a deck of tarot cards tucked into the bookshelf. It was my lover’s, but not being used, and from that day on, the colorful cards became my quiet allies as I turned inward to begin the long journey to wholeness through listening. Without the deck’s corresponding book of explanations, I began my tarot journal by pulling one card and meditating on its possible meaning each day, guessing at the interpretations, reading each card as if it were a dream delivered in the night. I found a temple nearby where self-teaching was celebrated and learned more about the tarot under a woman named Reverend Jacqueline.

That summer of inner contemplation culminated in my decision to formally pursue my dream of becoming a writer. I applied to grad school. In the heartland I attended the program of my dreams. In addition to its university community, Iowa City hosts an intense group of spiritual pilgrims, scholars, channelers, psychics and body workers including (at that time) astrologers Quan Tracey Cherry and Bonnie Orgren. Both of them offered me a deeper look at the tarot through the lens of astrology.

Eventually, post MFA, while scoring essays by day and teaching as an adjunct English instructor by night, I’d give tarot readings between shifts as a retail girl at The Vortex Crystal and Gem Store in Iowa City. Working there meant exposure to a diverse braid of seekers and speakers. Sadly, The Vortex has since closed its doors, but I will always remember the crew of brilliant fellow workers (and our employers, generous and large-hearted enough to watch over us all like protective parents). Nor will I forget what it was like closing a late night shift, the store at last void of customers, the massive vibrant brown and red hued Buddha in the front window next to the door-sized purple amethyst crystal cathedral, snow falling steadily outside, diagonally, while I vacuumed between the thousand beautiful items I hoped to someday be able to afford.

Further contemplation:

(April 10, 2014 addition) Tarot Writing Exercise:

Earth, Air, Fire and Water: Using The Tarot to Inspire Your Writing Practice

If you’d like to join us, sign up here. Cost for 6 week class for members of Story Circle Network is: $192 and for nonmembers: $240

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Here is a question, in honor of Valentine’s Day, from the week we focus on the suit of cups:

Where in your life do you offer the cup of your heart?

Prior posts on the tarot:

Tarot Butterflies, Poem Disorder, A Call for Butterflies and Not Saying Goodbye to Feral Mom

My Cat, My Familiar: Manifesting Totems

Truth or Dare: Sculpture Gardens

Rejection, Rhino Rear Ends and Rapunzels

A few sites of some of my favorite established tarot scholars:

Angeles Arrien

Mary Greer

Rachel Pollack

Bouquets

"...the/mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either/knows enough already or knows enough to be/perfectly content not knowing..." Mary Oliver, from "Daisies", Why I Wake Early

Four deer eat Spanish moss on the hill above my cabin from a tan oak tree top downed by the last storm. Their burro ears twitch warily when I raise my cup of tea off my writing desk for a surreptitious sip, the movement enough to stall them, green moss tines wriggling in their jaws as they asses me assessing them. I have the mild urge to pet them, but know from the Fair Zoo how bony they are. On their end: a mild urge to flee--a stalemate--clearly they sense I’m just another deranged writer hunkered down to my desk chair five feet beneath them, a double-pane window and a damp, steep incline between us.

I’ve been waking with night dreams vapored. Fire: out. Deck boards: amphibious. No end to the litany of to-dos, and the wheel of days showing no sign of slowing. What gives, when all the tiny tasks matter and one remains dogged by the desire to do each task well? You layer your time, right? Take stock of the good, stop dwelling on the unfinished, the how far to yet go?

I remember taking a class from a tarot reader/astrologer named Quan Tracey Cherry in Iowa City, arriving at his doorstep with a bouquet made up of the ferns and flowers I’d found between his door and mine. It was fall, and flowers were scarce—a dandelion or two. I came across a cardinal feather, some overgrown stalks of grass gone to seed, some browning ginkgo leaves. Plenty to harvest, when I let go of my idea of bouquet and looked closely along the sidewalk for what was actually there: the odd bit of bark, the lichen covered twigs.

This year, driving, in the absence of sidewalks, weeds, and tarot, I’m gathering animals. Tracking them on the daily drive to and from town, two, sometimes three round trips. The yield: crows, crows, always raucous crows. Blackberry sparrows fleeing my van on Green Valley. Wild turkeys, gangling away, flustered, around the man-made pond at Lazy G Ranch. The kids and I spout out a greeting to the black goat, speculate he’s forgotten he’s a goat, so near he loves to stand to the white horse. One pert, pesky blue-jay right before Bones Road cruises the curve for crushed acorns. On Mill Station, the dark brown elongated heart-shaped shoulders of five turkey vultures congregate over a deer carcass in the ditch. Finally, in the rain plush grass of the kids’ school, forty or more robins feeding, and one massive crow strutting in their midst.

Later, animal totems of the day recorded in my journal, I spend a futile portion of the night trying to reassemble Rudy, my son’s 52 piece interlocking balsa wood Tyrannosaurus Rex. A xmas gift from my brother’s sweetheart, Rudy took residence in my son’s heart from the moment Maria took the time to snap him together (smart girl, suspecting accurately the fate of gifts delivered for future unsupervised assembly). Rudy’d fare better glued together and placed high on a shelf. But once named, along with my daughter’s matching interlocking Brontesaurus (Sally), he acquired stuffed animal status and slept under blankets. Ever since, we find dinosaur spine bits and forelegs in the couch, under the table, in the tangle of blankets at the foot of the bed. Though five goes of scotch tape refuse to repair his broken tail, Rudy’s got most of his outline. I gather up his errant parts and plunk them in a cup, tail end ferning up into the air.