Solve et Coagula

~The Tower card from The Thoth Tarot
(via rowantarot.blogspot.com)

May I open to receive the Key of The Tower

The Lord of the Hosts of the Mighty

The Temple of The Cosmos

May I be strong enough

To digest your teaching

Another round of

Solve Et Coagula

At my door

Lightning Flash

Recognition

Destabilization

Transmuting Vibration

The Activating and Exciting Intelligence

From Vision to Symbol

Help me, oh quaking girder

Help me to have the courage

To embody your terrifying charge

I still do not understand

Why you rest in my center

Why your imprint and constant reformation

Shakes me to my core

From within

Over and over again, oh Tower

You have decimated me

Decimated…and reformed

And I stand here with you, again, now

What more can I release?

Which skins are you tearing away?

What false perceptions are you uncovering?

Oh Voice, oh Sacred Mouth

What will your vibrations reveal?

Ripping through my entire being

I know You

I stand, shaking, ready for your destruction

While conversely, asking for your blessing

To help me hold onto my essence

To survive that which you oddly seek to destroy

By nourishing

May I open to receive the Key of The Tower

The Lord of the Hosts of the Mighty

The Temple of The Cosmos

May I be strong enough

To digest your teaching

Another round of Solve Et Coagula at my door

Hold me

While you disintegrate the obsolete

Into smoking shards of dust

While you call forth my New World

That which illuminates the Deep Realities

And demands them

Into shimmering, radiant, and walking

Form

Featured

The Cage

An option:

Instead of letting the Tower

Make you want to join in the destruction

To escape the pain

To escape the body

To escape The Cage

You might try

Going into it

Going inside it

For the gift

It is waiting for you

Nonetheless

It may feel heavy now

The task, unbearable

You may want to return

To a previous ecstatic experience

Wishing, pining

For a time where you didn’t have to

Feel

So much

An option:

To stay here, in the body

With the struggle,

To find

The gift

It is waiting for you,

Nonetheless

In the cool darkness,

Pulsing

Wanting you to look inside the fire

Inside the drama

Inside the discomfort

It is waiting there

In The Cage

An option:

Let yourself feel

The surface of the cage bars

Do not be fooled

That they will burn you

Gain courage by doing this

Then lean over the edge

Look down

Like a child

Into the center of the fire

Into the center of this body

Into the center

Of The Cage

Reach out

For the silky ribbon’s edge

Keep coming back, getting present

Slowly pulling

Allowing, opening

Bit by bit

It is cool and dark inside

It is waiting nonetheless

Keep coming back

Keep going in

Do not let

The fire fool you

An option:

Instead of letting the Tower

Make you want to join in the destruction

To escape the pain

To escape the body

To escape The Cage

You might try

Going into it

Going inside it

For the gift

For the message

For the teachers

Of The Cage

It’s just an option

~image from The Tarot of The Spirit by Pamela and Joyce Eakins

The Tower

She built a Tower

Of someone with no needs

Of someone with no voice

Of someone with clouds and confusion

Keeping her wandering and lost

Of someone, who simply

Wasn’t there

The Tower kept her doubting

Of what she felt, what she saw, what she heard

Echoes and wraiths chanting

You can’t really think that you know

You can’t really think that you need

You can’t really think that you want

You can’t really think

That you’re real

This Tower shamed her inkling, calling it projection

This Tower shamed her receptivity, calling it emptiness

This Tower shamed her process

Of feeling the way through, a body’s knowing, calling it lack of vision

This Tower shamed her power of presence,

The release of personal desire and drive, calling it

Impotence

Now somehow, the bricks, they started to crumble

Likely through diligent mirrors, hard-working gnawers

And the uncontrollable effectiveness

Of the electric bolt blowing

The top of her pretty Tower

All those perfect bricks

Crumbling

Tumbling

Falling

Down

Falling

No stranger to the process was she

In fact she’d stayed in successive destructions

Watching her flesh dissolve along with the skin of her worlds

This time, however

She realized she did not want to vanish

This time

She realized she could jump

And watch the massive dismemberment

Of a Tower needed no more

She could watch it, standing

On loamy, fresh earth

Planting seeds with the electric fertility

Reveling in the rumbling

Shaking through her tissues

Allowing herself to be

As it all

Came crashing

Down

Standing there

At the burning edges of her old realities

Looking down and onto a great mystery

A great risk

Not knowing

Never knowing

If she’d survive the fall

This time, however

She knew it had to be different

And stepping off the dissolving parapet

She dove

Laughing

Finally laughing

From her Tower

Of no more

CPU

The swirlings have begun again

The ancestors, knocking

The babies, crying

The choices, beckoning

The holographic realizations, expanding

The foundations, crumbling

The blazing electrical rerouting, destroying

I keep freezing

This CPU, once able to conduct

What flows through me

Is breaking, again

The terror of its outmoded form

Dissolving

Although timely

Haunts my days

Beckoned, once again

To step into new clothes, new understanding

New wakings, new dyings

These circuit boards are blitzing out

Frequent blankness

Random shut downs

Booting issues

All of these apply

To this slowly failing

Outmoded processing unit

If you calculate the ancestors

That may be waiting to download

Waiting for the seventh son of a seventh son

To finally heal the lines

It doesn’t take that long

To get into the thousands

Thousands waiting

Thousands hovering

Thousands begging

For the one to receive

Thousands of wounds

Thousands of traumas

Thousands of wisdoms

Thousands

This CPU once had blocking features

To not feel it all, throbbing

But the last upgrade

Advertised the removal of this feature

As a bonus

“Now including ancestral awareness”

I feel them

All

Waiting

Thousands

Waiting

Thousands

Wanting

Thousands

Hoping

That I will finally see

That I will carry the essence, magick

The whole of the bloodline sparkle

Clear the misunderstandings

Heal the torn fibers

Alchemize the great and pulsing mass

Into the once true beauty of the well ones

No pressure, eh?

Perhaps it is only I that imagines

But regardless

I can feel the throbbing

I can feel the freezing

I can feel the increasing rate of blips

Occurring in my way of going about it all

I can feel

This circuit board failing

Heavy and pathways jagged

If only by my imagined load

But still it’s real

From the four to the five

And hopefully, eventually

To the six

The old ways of holding

Are breaking down

I’ve been here before

Oh, sacred Tower

Oh sacred Nigredo

I know the downward spiral

The unraveling to a new beginning

It used to cause great upheaval

It used to cause me to run

Sanity imploding

Holding onto to mere threadlines

Doing extreme things

To get something bigger to contain me

Not knowing what was happening

The institution was the only safe place

I can understand now

Why I, and many

Keep returning

But lately, although shaken

I no longer scurry

It’s almost routine

I feel it coming, know what’s happening

And a switch called surrender

A switch called opening

A switch called receiving and curiousity

And an especially helpful feature called

Peaceful

Floating

In the Great

Abyss

Automatically it starts running

Holding me through

As this CPU falters

I realize the coming

Of the hand of a larger technician, replacing

I do my best

To settle back

To switch on the trust mode

Floating in that hollow unknown

As the new

And the old

Circuitry

Lifts and settles

One more time

To ready me

To carry

The thousand watt currents

Of the waiting

Ancient future

The Final Proof Reveal…Food Memories!!!

Hello amazing people. I hope this reaches you and your loved ones in a well place…so much going on these days. I send my love out to you.

I am so grateful to have this outlet to share this process. Thanks for tuning in with me. Especially anyone who has followed my journey from the beginning, to finally seeing this completion.

So. I finally received my proof copy in the mail. I waited two days to open it, nervous. Nervous it would look bad again, requiring another round of fluffing. Nervous it would look good, requiring me to finally push the publish button. Despite my quaking, this morning I drew a tarot card and decided to dive in. Here’s what happened.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image1-1.jpg — Nine of Pentacles and the waiting package

The first card I draw is the Nine of Pentacles. A lovely lady in her fruitful, peaceful and protected garden. She is admiring the completion of a physical creation. This gives me solace as my hands shake whilst ripping the package open. I certainly want to have the calm, full of gratitude kind of aura this lady has, but all I am is nervous! My breath shallow, I slowly lift the copy out of it’s package…would this copy be the one that urges me to finally release it into the world?

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image2.jpg — The front of the final proof, and Tower/Fire cards…yow!

The first view is of the front cover. I chose to change the arrangement of the picture and title so I could use a different template for the back cover. It isn’t the most amazing arrangement, but it ain’t half bad. I kind of like it, actually. I also chose to switch to a glossy finish, which looks classy too. I’m kind of feeling more like that lady in the garden now. I flip through the inside, I really like the look of the formatting. I really like it. I feel…gulp…it is time to decide to be done. To press print.

I am drawn to choose two more cards now that the worst part is over…ones that exemplify my next step with the book. I choose the Tower and the Knight of Wands. Double gulp!

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image3.jpg — The back cover and looming presence of the initiation cards

Satisfied with the front and inner matter, though a little nervous about the nature of these cards, I turn the book over to inspect the back. I like this view a lot. I included a picture and a little bio here and it looks nicely spaced out. Triple gulp…I think it really is ready.

But what of the cards? The Tower, showing a lightning bolt decimating a structure, ablaze and people jumping out of it, is not exactly the warm and fuzzy nature of the Nine of Pentacles above. A peaceful garden it is not. And the Brother of Fire, he’s also not just sitting around being grateful. He’s moving quickly, aiming towards his goal with passion and determination.

What this means to me is that in the course of just a few minutes–before opening the package to now holding the final proof in my hands and writing about it–I have gone from a safe, contemplative place to one of readiness for a powerfully transformative stage in my creative process. One that requires strong and determined action on my part. One that requires the risking of heading into major foundation shaking. Often the Tower card might indicate to not do a thing, but coupled with the Brother of Fire, it feels like it is saying, “Yes this will totally rearrange you, to hit publish and release this into the world…but you must! You must! We must! Let us ride into the fire and be transformed!”

I think I just might be crazy enough to follow that guidance. By the next time I blog, I very well may have pressed “Publish” and have Towerish experiences to report to you. For now, I am sharing these images with you, shaking in my boots but also feeling the Brother of Fire within me. I do believe I am about to ride into the Fire.

*Nine of Pentacles from the Golden Universal Tarot by Roberto De Angelis; Tower and Brother of Fire from the Tarot of The Spirit by Pamela Eakins.