Wider Than What Hurts

From the Dark Goddess Tarot, the Hag of Air (King of Swords); from the Tattwa Cards, Water/Seed of Fire:

Dhumavati ("the smoky one") is a widowed Hindu goddess associated with all things considered inauspicious. Though she personifies the dark side of life, Dhumavati is included as one of the ten wisdom goddesses. When life is full of sorrow, frustration and pain, she tells us to embrace life rather than curse it, to maintain a wide perspective. As Mark Nepo reminds us, "When we narrow our focus, the problem seems everything." Water/Seed of Fire is a combination of opposites, thus its key phrase 'creative tension.' Is it possible for two things to be true, that life is full of joy as well as suffering? Nepo's advice is helpful: "In actuality, misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter."

Softening Hardness

From the Dark Goddess Tarot, the Siren of Earth (Knight of Pentacles); from the Tattwa Cards: Water > Seed of Fire:

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place. –Mark Twain

          Baubo, the Greek goddess of bawdy belly laughs, shows how to move forward without aggression. Her sexual levity (never used at another's expense) took the unyielding rigidity out of those she entertained. The tattwa card, with the key phrase of 'creative tension,' parallels this rigidity. Such tension is a result of the gap between our vision and reality. It reminds me of a water drop: water molecules on the surface contract and the drop behaves as if its surface were covered with a stretched elastic membrane. Likewise, we can contract and cut ourselves off when our creative ideas don't flow with the rest of the world. Yet as Baubo encourages, we can build a bridge between reality and our vision if we'll let humor and playfulness release our tension and soften our fixed demands.

Sober Up

From the Dark Goddess Tarot, the Seven of Water (Cups); from the Tattwas Cards, Water - Seed of Fire:

          Maeve, the Irish goddess of intoxication, has a name linked to 'mead.' One of the Five Precepts of Buddhism is "I vow not to intoxicate body or mind, but to cultivate a mind that sees clearly." Obviously, we can intoxicate ourselves through more than just alcohol or drugs - anger, depression or fear can do the job as well. I came across a quote by Tibetan scholar and teacher Robert Thurman the other day that sounds like he is talking about substance abuse unless you know the context (he was referring to anger): "It's something that people think is helping them because it gives them a momentary relief from something else. But actually, it's leading them into a worse and worse place where they're getting more and more dependent and less and less free." The Water: Seed of Fire card refers to a sort of fatal attraction. It's easy to see how we can intoxicate ourselves emotionally and envision it as proactive behavior. Yet discernment will show us that the problem is not the problem, but how we think about the problem. Time to sober up and get a clearer view of things.