Sex after Fifty, The Empress, and Tarot for Joy

Cover Photo, Unmasked

With two teenagers in the household and one tween, when am I not aware that I’m aging? Does it mean I’m not allowed to have anymore fun? Of course not! Now is the time to play more than ever. I won’t be bringing my children to this event although they do star in the non-fiction essay I’ll be reading as a contributor to Unmasked, Women Write about Sex and Intimacy After Fifty, an anthology of essays and poetry co-edited by Weeping Willow Books’ publisher Marcia Meier and her colleague, therapist Kathleen Barry. The collection explores the physical and emotional aspects of intimacy and sexuality after age 50 in pieces written by women from the United States and beyond.

Here’s what Gloria Steinem has to say about the collection:

“Sex for women after fifty is invisible for the same reason that contraception, abortion, and sex between two women or two men has been forbidden: sexuality is supposed to be only about procreation. This lie was invented by patriarchy, monotheism, racism and other hierarchies. Sexuality is and always has been also about bonding, communicating and pleasure. Unmasked helps to restore a human right.”

         -- Gloria Steinem

The reading and book signing, hosted by Weeping Willow Books’ publisher and editor Marcia Meier, will be held on October 7 from 5-7 p.m at San Diego Writers, Ink, so pencil us in on your calendar! I will share more details as we get closer. For more information, visit Weeping Willow Books. 

Poetry: Ron Salisbury, Peter Krumbach and Yours Truly

I’ll also be reading poetry in a couple of weeks for A Turn of the Verse at Meraki Café along with poets Peter Krumbach and Ron Salisbury; you’ll really enjoy their poetry. Ron’s work is rich, humble and often humorous while poignant and I love Peter’s masterful gems too. I will be reading from the commune manuscript as well as new poems I’ve written since then. I’d love to see you if you can make it, Friday September  8^th from 7-9 p.m., Meraki Café, 1735 Adams Avenue in University Heights.

Back in June I promised a sound file for “Dropping in the Eight,” which was published in SDWI’s A Year in Ink, Volume 10. Here’s the link: Dropping in the Eight, MP3

Tarot News: Tarot for Two Podcast

I jumped in to this new podcast adventure with writer Mary Allen at Tarot for Two. With our usual sense of humor and our growing library of Tarot reference books at hand, we look at the images and themes and colors and and give you our laid back impression of how the cards relate tangibly to us in present time.

Here’s a podcast in which we ask: How can we find meaning and joy simply by looking at images printed on paper? In other words, is a Tarot deck just a deck of cards?

Tarot for Two: Is it just a deck of cards? 

And we began to look at the Major Arcana one by one:

Tarot for Two: The Hanged One

 Tarot for Two: The Empress

Tarot for Two Cards of the Month: Even though we’ve started podcasting, we haven’t given up on our practice of writing about the cards. How do you define fortune? Which aspects of your life bring you a wealth of joy? Does writing help you see past poverty as a form of currency, as I discovered last month?

Tania on The Wheel of Fortune:

All month long I glance at the Thoth Wheel of Fortune card on my desk. Behind the pale green wheel in the center of the card, one sees lightning bolts, their top jags ending in stars. “The stars exploding into lightning bolts represent the experience of awakening to the possibilities that can turn our lives in more positive and expansive directions,” writes Angeles Arrien in relation to the Wheel of Fortune. The quote accurately reflects what I’m experiencing as I take scenes from my childhood that I first described in poetry and develop them in prose for a new writing project of mine.

Read the rest of Tania on The Wheel of Fortune 

How do you experience personal power and the joy of your will translated into action? How do you hold the world in your hands? Mary writes about the Two of Wands in relation to her writing practice:

I guess I can say that my month was about power brought down to the earth and made personal.  The way I do that is by writing, which as I see it involves connecting to some universal creative power floating in the air sort of like electricity, connecting to it and bringing it to earth and making it personal, through writing. For me this involves seeing and noticing and doing something with what I’ve seen and noticed, capturing it as precisely as I can, with all of its detail and meaning, and mirroring it back to the universe as I write about it. 

Read the rest of Mary on the Two of Wands

Artwork by Tania Pryputniewicz

Fall Writing Classes

Tarot for Joy: Fall Writing Class. Whether you are Tarot curious and new to Tarot or a life-long Tarot enthusiast, this course is designed to help you focus on love, light, and joy by writing about the joy cards in the deck. Love, Creativity, Prosperity, Clarity and Celestial support will be our focus. While we cast an eye back towards how we experienced the aspects of the card before, we also cast an eye forward towards what we’d like to invite into our lives and hearts. If you are interested or have questions and would like to know more about my particular approach to the Tarot, use my contact form to drop me a note and I will schedule you for a free simple three card layout reading over Zoom (or Skype if your prefer). Read the full course description here: Tarot for Joy.

Writing Through Fear: Free Your Butterfly:  Several years ago on book tour for my poetry collection, November Butterfly, I taught small two-hour workshops on the theme of writing core stories. I’m very excited to now offer two full seven-week course for which we use poems in November Butterfly and writing prompts in the accompanying PDF I’ve since created, Thirteen Writing Prompts Based on the Power and Creativity of Iconic Women Designed to Help You Write New Work From Multiple Points of View.

The PDF pairs beautiful stills from November Butterfly’s poetry movies with each featured iconic woman, multiple writing prompts, and links to additional writings and sources. My goal is to help you connect to your own mentors and invite you to draw strength from the ways they faced challenges as you prepare to write your own core story.

Questions we take up in this class include:

Who inspired you when you were growing up? Who do you consider to be the lighthouse women in your personal orbit? What have you learned from them that will shed light on your own story?

During this seven-week session, we read poems and selected writings about Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Amelia Earhart, Jay DeFeo, The Three Oranges Fairytale, and Lolita as a springboard to help you engage with writing your own work. For more information, feel free to reply to this newsletter. This online class starts September 5, 2017. Here’s the full course description on my website, Writing Through Fear: Free Your Butterfly.

Second Saturdays: Poetry Draft, Craft, Submit!

My Second Saturday morning San Diego in-person poetry workshop is a great place to keep your poetry writing practice going in a supportive environment. Class runs from 10 am to noon at Liberty Station in the art gallery upstairs. We always have room for a few more writers if you’d like to join us. In September we write to the theme of Livestock and Pets. Just bring paper, pencil, and an open heart and you’ll come away with prompt worksheets and some sample targets for where you might consider submitting poems for publication. In October we write to the theme of Omens. 

Sign up here for 2nd Saturdays: Poetry Draft, Craft, Submit.

Tarot Dragonflies: Symbol Hunting for Joy on Election Day and January Classes

Artwork by Lisa Rizzo

Election results day, after delivering the children to school and pulling over to listen to Hillary’s concession speech, I walked beside the sea with my husband who took part of the morning off to be with me. In Hillary’s voice, I could hear the woven pain and promise when, near the end of her talk, she addressed women, young women, and little girls:

And to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.

Back at home, overcome with a sense of immoblization, I rested face-down on the floor in a stripe of sunlight. Gradually, the seed-bursting warmth returned me to my body, my now. I sat up and looked out the window. The sun, now blocked perfectly by the spine of a palm tree, gave off a pale silver blue halo that enveloped the spine of a second palm tree just four feet away from the first tree.

Between the two trunks, in twos and threes, dragonflies lazily looped and landed, their wings backlit. A pair flew down into the yard, resting on the dried tips of the Bird of Paradise plant. I thought of my friend Lisa, who I worked with last month as we created our personal cards for Tarot’s suit of air, often depicted as swords in traditional decks. Here was Lisa’s suit of dragonflies, dozens of them—coming in form—so kindly, so gently, as if to say wake up, you are not alone! Lisa’s dragonfly, at the top of this post, lovingly visits here with her blessing.

In addition to the Tarot/art visitation, I am so very grateful for the beautiful newsletters from artists, writers, and healers that came to my inbox last month. Though I lost the path to my own words, I took solace in their words of hope, their grapplings to understand and chart a course to action, and their struggles to consider avenues to bridge-mending and even thriving again.  In that spirit, I’m offering courses in the New Year hoping to give sanctuary to others looking for a way to take up the pen again.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Responding to the Election: In Election Blues: The Gift of Agency in Poetry, we will look at contemporary election/political climate poetry and write our own poems based on a range of prompts from election night experience to candidate expectations to letter poems to the next generation and more. This is a virtual write-in present-time class that will meet over Zoom starting Friday, January 6. For more information: Visit Election Blues: The Gift of Agency in Poetry.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Practicing Gratitude: In My Cup Runneth Over: The Tarot Suit of Cups, we will move sequentially through the Cups from Ace to Ten, one card per week, and write personal responses to the card to deepen our relationship to the Tarot and to encourage a sense of heart-based gratitude as we connect the cards to our experiences of joy. This too is a virtual, live, write-in-present-time class that will meet over Zoom starting Thursday, January 5. For more information: Visit My Cup Runneth Over: The Tarot Suit of Cups.

Artwork by Tania Pryputniewicz

Making Your Own Deck: I am continuing the Tarot Dreamers: Make Your Tarot Deck series that I’ve been offering this fall; we pick up with The High Priestess. These classes are designed for soul-seeking women looking to connect artistically with their inner symbol world. We combine writing and art in the service of creating Tarot-inspired vision cards that function as beautiful physical reminders of the joys, dreams, and desires within.

The High Priestess, sometimes known as the card signaling, “the journey homeward” or a “return to oneself,” will be the focal point of our vision card making, along with the four ways we experience the High Priestess as we go about our daily lives: Two of Cups (navigating exchanges of the heart between equals), Two of Wands  (balancing our will before action), Two of Disks (juggling projects and commitments to finance while staying spiritually aligned), and Two of Swords (working to maintain a peaceful and loving set of thoughts in relation to ourselves so we can thrive internally as well as externally). For more information: Visit Tarot Dreamers: The High Priestess

In-Person Monthly Themed Poetry Workshop continues at San Diego Writers, Ink. January's theme is Outer Space. Come out and join us; we are a lovely, intimate circle of poets and welcome a few more bodies for sure. Sign up here:

Tania's First Tuesdays Theme Set Go Class

Additional Links of interest:

Artwork and Photo Credits: As noted by caption: by Lisa Rizzo and Robyn Beattie

A beautiful post my co-blogger at Tarot for Two, Mary Allen: The Lovers and the 2016 Election.

An excerpt from an inspiring interview with Tarot Deck Maker and Jazz Musician Art Lande of the Art Tarot:

We are really talking about your singing self. Let’s sing: something simple, like you would sing when you were two years old. We will sing together and we will listen together. What is honesty? What is innocence? What is resonance? It is something we feel, know in our hearts. Innocence, resonance, and looking at the heart of the matter together—whatever it is—we are all teachers and learners. And all the divisions, right vs. wrong, are heartbreaking. We’re all the same: We all want to be moved to the core.

Read rest of interview here: The Art Tarot.

The Changing of the Chariots

Photo by Robyn Beattie

This week preparing to teach Wheel of Archetypal Selves: The Many Faces of Change, (for which we start off with the Chariot card) I came across an entry about the Chariot I’d written four years ago before Mary Allen and I started posting our monthly Tarot writings at Tarot for Two. I was so pleased to see that the Chariot card, back then, helped me consider the transition from “at-home mom” to “at home on-line teaching mom.” 

With gratitude, I find that four years later, my Chariot has changed; I’m no longer teaching my beloved Transformative Blogging classes but was transformed by teaching them and brought to a time and place in which I can fully devote my attention to my Wheel of Archetypal Tarot Writing classes I so love to teach. I offer this bit of Chariot process writing in hopes that it inspire you to consider your own Chariot and threshold you long to cross.

If you love writing, and the Tarot, consider joining us (last weekend to sign up—we start Monday April 11 and have a great class forming as we speak): Wheel of Archetypal Selves: The Many Faces of Change.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

The Chariot: “Out of Relationship and into Work” (from 2012)

Paul Fenton Smith writes regarding the Chariot: “You are learning that courage is a combination of commitment and doubt;” the MotherPeace guide book addresses the charioteer as: “one who can move out of relationship and into work.”

In the Rider-Waite-Smith image, I’m attracted to the feminine male with his orange gold lined long locks of hairs cascading over his shoulders, each shoulder bearing the blue upturned faces of two crescent moons—one smiling, one frowning. I’m attracted to his broad chest with its mesh undergarment covered in some kind of ribbed shield with its glowing square of light over the heart, center, which an earlier source told me connects him to the Empress, though its white brings to mind for me more the energy of the High Priestess. I’m attracted to his stance, his confident posture, a belt askew nonchalantly across his hips bearing the symbols of astrology, Pisces, the Moon, Uranus. I like his silvery blue sleeve cuffs for their dramatic flair, webbed, reminding me of the sea and his star shroud above him and the green wreathe of leaves, so natural, he wears on top of his star tipped crown. I feel he is capable, confident, prepared, temporarily resting before the chariot itself moves out into the streets.

Now compare this charioteer to the Thoth version. I love this charioteer too, but for opposite reasons. Not a single inch of this charioteer’s skin is bared—he is entirely sheathed in gold armor, not even his eyes or lips visible beneath his helmet. So with no human face to connect with, I am pulled in by the blue orbit of rings behind his chariot, the inescapable nested ring of red that doubles as a cape and his chamber, the pair of red wheels and that centrifugal red in his lap, his legs crossed. He is definitely a step less prepared for motion than his Rider-Waite-Smith twin, for his legs are folded in front of him in the seat of contemplation. Why the blue and red spinning disk in his lap? Like the alchemical cup, peered into, is this the chalice in his lap? Maybe he realizes the gift of incarnation, the birth room behind him, the lives he might touch represented in the blue and red in his own cup. I believe he will proceed with care, but he’ll need to take off his mask before he can see.

When the card fell for me, I felt assured that I was being given support to move forward in my transition from the home and hearth to the homes and hearths of others via the quiet venue of teaching women writers on-line. Multiple avenues and chariots and charioteers exist; time to stop stopping myself. My husband’s ideas of how I should earn, coupled with my own, may have hemmed me in to this bronze/gold suit of armor, to wait it out.

I’m living Fenton’s quote, “Courage is a combination of commitment and doubt,” for as I step out to teach, I find I am making the map as I go, that making a mask I asked my Transformative Blogging students to make cracks open hidden territory in my body, making room for more of my soul.

I doubt, I assign, I do the work beside my students and when the month is done, on my piano sits a silver and blue face with its silver star at the third eye, welcoming me to keep writing and teaching in the circumference of the orbit of home, for there are still children to raise, still a husband to project onto and tease apart what is mine and what is not.

If I can remember the two charioteers as I go, I can either don my webbed shirt of mail and let the sun fall on my face as I enter my day or I can in fact take days in-between to retreat into my golden armour and contemplate how I want to spend my blood, my hours, my time, my love, and ponder what exactly I convey to my children rushing to and from. As always there remains the need to balance their needs with mine, to stop to have tea with my daughter when I can, moving “out of relationship and into work”, but kindly, without abandoning.

Related link:

Mary Allen writes about her experience of the Chariot card at Tarot for Two:

The Chariot and the Knight of Swords

New Tarot Tuesday prompts for you:

The Fairy Godfather or the Nine of Cups

Rainbow Blessings or the Ten of Cups

Podcast: Ren Powell asked me some lovely questions regarding poetry here; discussion includes my growing relationship to writing and Tarot as well:

This Choice, Tania Pryputniewicz

Other podcasts in this series:

This Choice, Molly Gaudry on poetry, "power nouns," "lists," "sonic play," roller derby

Photos by my poetry movie collaborator Robyn Beattie with exception of photo of the cards. Tarot cards pictured are from Thoth, Shadow of Oz, Daughters of Moon, Rider Waite Smith, and Basque Decks.