Death and Rebirth

My new tarot deck makes mention of how uncomfortable with are with death, how we just don't like to know about what happens to things after they die -- and speaks of Death as "the energy of endings", but always then the cycle of renewal that follows.

I took the Death card from all three of my tarot decks tonight and was amused to discover that all three are birds - a condor, a skeletal bird, and a phoenix.

From left to right - Animal Totem Tarot, Wild Unknown Tarot, and Shadowscapes Tarot

I've been thinking of death in the literal, physical sense a fair bit lately. My grandmother's illness has brought me to the stark realization that her passing quietly and unexpectedly in her sleep would be an incredible kindness versus the possible drawn-out spiral of losing herself to Alzheimer's disease. A coworker's mother also has terminal cancer, and was recently given 24 to 48 hours left, so we were comforting her as best we could while she was at work.

In the metaphorical sense, I'm learning that the death-renewal cycle need not always be painful. We come to expect that when there is an ending, there will be a rebirth, but it will be a bloody, painful, messy process, one that needs to be followed with gentle healing, picking up the pieces.

But what if Death is the healing? What if the tearing down, the cutting apart, the burning and walking away, is the recovery?

I spoke before of severing some facets of my life that were making me unhealthy, that were sickly and stagnant. So much anxiety, so much tension and stress and malaise bound up in so much, so many hours of my life spent on these things. Death brought me relief. The mighty end, that freed me of so much weight. We so often fear death, fear endings, and I think I was clinging, too, to things that no longer served - and that is what we say, isn't it? Those of us who perhaps got a Wiccan-ish flavour to our practice early on? "I release all that does not serve." We cling to our own ball and chain, afraid to drift away if we shed that weight.

I've been mentally healthier, calmer and happier, than I've been in years. My rebirth came as glorious renewal, cleared vision, new purpose and drive. Perhaps it was the timing, the needfulness of this cycle in my life, or perhaps it is all in how I chose to look at it?

Are there any facets of your life where Death and Renewal may restore your vigor and soul?

Stuck sideways between the metaphysical and the physical is our back yard. We saw it as full of potential when we bought this place. Why, put up a privacy fence, plant some flowers, and tada! Our own little paradise. The other thing Death is good at, is stripping us of our delusions.

Our back garden wall is home to a massive rat nest - so there went money, and effort, and no doubt more still - we will never likely be 100% free of them (we live next to a grocery store), but we're hoping to reduce their numbers to a point where the health risks of having so many so near are mitigated. And our beautiful gardens we had romantically planned to fill with flowers, are so soil-barren that I managed to put my foot through one to the near top of a rubber boot. I was afraid at first that I'd fallen into a rat warren, but after a lot of digging, shifting rock and stomping, we realized that the previous owner had tried to compensate for too little soil by piling up rocks in shoddy walls, and the soil has sunk and settled and eroded around these until chunks of the yard are actually hollow. He also left years worth of leaves to rot, so huge patches of the yard are so overgrown with dead grass and rotting leaves that the grass beneath choked and died. But several evenings of hard work, and we've bagged up piles of leaves and dead grass, dismantled shoddy rock walls and rebuilt some, and once the weather is consistent enough to set concrete, we'll be out with mortar taking all those stones (my gods this yard has so many damn rocks) and building proper walls and a fire pit, filling beds with top soil and bark mulch.

We've found an endless number of salamanders under all those leaves. We've been careful to relocate them to dark damp corners near the rocks we're not going to be disturbing. I adore them. (they are eastern red backs, if anyone wants to google)

Even after the work we've done, we have so much ahead of us - but each time we finish, the yard looks a little cleaner, a little greener, and it's a wonderful feeling.

Death in the end, is change. We can be subject to it, but we can create it, too. Choices I have made, with circumstances brought to me, have brought a great cycle around in my life. And now we are agents of renewal in our space, our bit of land, that we are working with love and commitment - like the condor in my tarot deck, we are clearing up the dead so the land can breathe.

It's a wonderful feeling.

(I'll be posting a video tomorrow night, of a tour of our yard Amy did a week ago - and me tracing her steps tonight to show how much we've accomplished.)

Tarot

I used to have a temperamental relationship with tarot decks. My first was a hand-me-down from my mother, who was into tarot cards back in the early 2000s but never did much with hers. They were decidedly hideous, I could never get them to "work" and they turned me off to tarot for quite awhile. I still have a hard time with traditional tarot decks, or decks with the traditional art style. I sometimes wonder if that first horridly ugly deck turned me off to them forevermore.

My second deck was a (in retrospect, no less hideous) "dragon tarot" I found for $15 at a local Chapters. I found I had ultimately the same difficulty with it - I seemed to have no connection to the deck, and trying to do readings was an excercise in futility.

I tried again with the more well-known Dragon Tarot, which is still pretty damn ugly. (Noticing a trend?) and had only moderately more luck.

The first deck I had that I spent a goodly amount of money on, and finally felt that connection with, is the Shadowscapes tarot. I love the art style, and I find the artist sneaky - a lot of the traditional symbolism of tarot is there, but she's hidden it in metaphor and used different ways of including it. It seems finding a deck "pretty" in some way, connecting to it artistically, is important to me. The symbolism and "traditional" measure of a deck is no good if I don't enjoy looking at it.

I have a second deck I was gifted from The Honey Badger, which is the Pagan Cats Tarot. I adore it, though I don't use it as often.

Through an interesting twist of fate, my friend ordered a deck called The Wild Unknown Tarot and ended up having a second one sent due to a shipping kerfuffle. Rather than have them pay to send the other back, she sent the money for the second deck (from me) so I could keep it.

So now I have another new deck I can't wait to use. It's almost the opposite in a lot of ways, to the Shadowscapes deck. Shadowscapes has a lot going on -  bright colours, complex images with tons of hidden bits and pieces to find. This deck is black and white with pops of colour, and very simple by comparison. I can't wait to get a feel for it.

Do you use tarot decks? Do you prefer traditional ones, or nontraditional? Bright and wild or simple?