At a first glance, this image shows us traveling the moonth with a sense of adventure. It could be a great card to set off on a summer vacation. The colorful trees and jaunty stride of the person walking through the card fits that meaning—and haven’t we had enough of the intensity of life today?

But intensity hasn’t had enough of us. Heat. Fires. Sudden political shifts that change the story we thought we were stuck in (the full moon post was quite prescient!). Smoldering wars rising to flame.

These are not isolated incidents, but part of a larger pattern to be seen. And when we do see it, we know we live in times of upheaval and chaos as a society, as a planet—even if we individually get a break every once in a while to recharge ourselves—and how we work with this great change will determine the direction it takes.

That larger perspective is there in the Six of Trees, if we take a closer look. Buried in the land is a snake, the face of an owl, and geometric shapes. Deck creator Rachel Pollack says they are the “forms and symbols of the underworld.” The trees have eyes that seem to be opened in startle. Looking at the world these days is a startling experience.

So despite it being summer vacation time here in the Northern Hemisphere, this new moon reminds us to keep our eyes open to the fullness of life. To see the beauty and adventure while not ignoring the chaos and upheaval. To do that requires a special kind of strength, the kind we see in the Tarot’s Strength card, our path of the moonth.

The name clearly states the card’s meaning – no enigma here – but the iconic image of a woman tenderly holding open a lion’s mouth invites us into a deeper exploration of what constitutes true strength.

When I do Tarot sessions or e-readings, I often start with the prompt of: What aspect or detail of the image most captures your attention? As I consider the current lunar patterns, I am most captivated by the lion, the open mouth, teeth, and tongue. And find myself pondering the lion as both an inner and an outer force.Outer lions are dangerous. Lions in nature are territorial, keen hunters, and known to even kill humans. A lion is not to be trifled with. Looking into a lion’s mouth is recognizing danger – and not looking away.

There are many outer lions in our collective life. The autocrats. The supremacists. The war makers. The rights takers. They are in our news feeds every day (every hour on the cable news!). While they may be far away from us or not part of our daily lives, the actions they take and the policies they make impact our everyday. To ignore them is dangerous. We need to work with the reality of their existence while not giving in to the story they are trying to trap us in.

But as we walk amidst these outer lions, our inner lions move with us – and invite us to their power. 

The inner lions give us the courage to persist in necessary work, to care in difficult situations, to be the voice that people don’t want to hear, to persist against the odds.

Among these inner lions are a commitment to values, heeding the call of the soul, caring for others, and devotion to the Divine. They are quieter lions than aggression, force, and dominance. But these inner lions can be powerful companions when we consistently tend and gently nurture them.

In the Shining Tribe Tarot, just the lion appears standing before a Tree of Life to guide us. Rachel Pollack writes in the companion guide that this lion shows us “the strength that comes from the harmony with life.” This card counsels us to connect “our own actions and feelings to spiritual sources.” The Shining Tribe shows us a fierce and powerful inner lion that can move us along on the journey of life.

 And perhaps this is what keeps our Six of Tree’s figure appearing so jaunty on the journey. Instead of ignoring the underworld reality or the startle of the trees, this traveler takes that energy inside, mixes it within and uses it to move forward. The underworld can be scary because it is unfamiliar, but the ancestors are there sending their support to us. There is a lot of energy in the startle—it is as wild as a lion—but that can become fuel for the journey.

When we take this approach to the journey, we can become Speakers of Trees, the wisdom workers of fire’s energy. 

In this image, I see the heart of the tree being at the throat so all that is spoken of comes through this muscle. Inspired by this expressive heart and a line from the poet Joy Harjo—Here there is a singing tree— I’ve been considering the trees and what they are going through in this time of climate chaos. It’s inspired a poem.

singing trees

trees become fire in the west
ravenous spark
fed by heat and tinder
takes its life into its own hands
makes lightning from within—
white strikes scorch
orange’s wavering walls

trees speak rain in the east
echo of yesterday’s deluge
in today’s dripping leaves,
fallen drops float
on swollen surfaces
without a root
to hold on to

trees return to the earth
rotted roots release
and the trunk goes down
to its needle bed
in the old forest
so alive
with death

trees raised in the air
there they make our breath,
sing lives into our lungs
so we can run from this day
into the next and beyond
ever filled with
that surprise:
their song

the crack and the weep of it
the last aspirations
swelling our throats
with these songs howling healing
for the trees–and ourselves

So even though we live in startling times, may you find the strength to sing. And in your singing gather out of all the broken and beautiful parts of your life and our world something beautiful because it is truthful. You may need strength to face the necessary beauty of these times, but the fullness of your song is needed for the healing for the Whole.

In the US we need all the voices singing for an election outcome that protects trees and freedom as well as steadies our multiracial democracy. There are 93 days left to make sure we send a clear message about the future we want to move toward. 

There are lots of ways to be involved. If you are ready to work directly for a political party, campaigning for Kamala Harris actually, suddenly, surprisingly seems like it could even be fun as we work toward freedom. If the Democrats haven’t earned your vote yet, you can work with other groups focused on the elections. I, for example, phone and text bank with Working Families Party that, rather than running as a 3rd party candidate with little chance of winning, endorses candidates for local and national offices who are aligned with progressive values. Or ensure that elections happen by being a poll worker (there is a shortage) or curing ballots to make sure all votes are counted. The outer lions are roaring so we need a really loud song. We can do it, if we all show up singing!

REFLECTION QUESTIONS / READING FOR THE MOONTH

These questions are offered for reflection and to spark practice throughout the moonth. Pulling Tarot and oracle cards in connection to these questions is appropriate, but not absolutely necessary. You might carry a question with you on a walk for example and observe what is happening in the natural world as a way to find insight into the answer to the question.

SEEING: What is most important to open my eyes to as I travel through this moonth?

STRENGTH: How to connect my actions with spiritual sources as I respond to what I see?

HEART: What message can I then bring from my heart to offer to the world? 

I do offer this as an e-reading in my collaborative initiative format for $32.  Sign up with Pay Pal or email me about sending a check. I am off to Omega for my week of teaching and gathering with the Tarot tribe. I start working on any e-reading requests on Monday, August 12th.

Note: If you’d like to learn more about the Shining Tribe, you are invited to follow along in the Shining Tribe Exploratorium and if you want to go deeper, join us for our monthly interactive sessions. 

For the second full moon in a row the lunar light calls us to an encounter with the Devil. 

Ecstatic in our renewed love, we set out in our Chariots at the new moon. Love—in one or more of its many forms: for partners, friends, planet, strangers under attack—may have expanded our vision of the possible, of the place that we want to go. Drawing upon the traditional Tarot guidance of gathering our will to move forward toward our commitments, dreams, and visions, we set off.

But now The Devil—again—stands in our way. 

What expletive would you like to utter?

As I ponder this disruption to what seemed like positive—even perfect—movement, lots of possibilities for Devil lessons are coming to mind. I am going to focus on two seemingly opposite lessons to integrate: dangers of individual will and a rejection of powerlessness. 

As I mentioned above, the Tarot tradition ascribes to the Chariot the exercise of will. Will is vital for forward movement. A belief that something is possible and the gathering of resources to make the possible real birth great and necessary things into our world from new rights (yes, universal suffrage for women and the formerly enslaved) to amazing technologies (hello, handheld computer that is my phone) to medical breakthroughs (thank you, COVID vaccines arriving in record time).

But untempered willful energy becomes dangerous energy. This is the energy of those pursuing a goal who forget to check if conditions have changed, who ignore the warnings of their conscience, or who just follow orders even when unjust. This is the energy of the leader who believes that they alone have the solution and refuse to listen to other perspectives and may even demonize those who question them.  You may be noting these Devils in our politics today and possibly in your personal life getting in the way of your Chariot.

One of the greatest balances to individual will run amok is collective will. 

While collective will might be a beautiful vision—remember the rights, technologies and medical breakthroughs above—getting to it is more often a messy process. Because each individual in the collective first brings their singular ideas about how to move forward. And even when a vision is shared, perspectives and strategies for getting there can be wildly different.

Coming to agreement about shared perspectives and strategies requires that individuals surrender some of their personal will to the collective will in order for the pathway forward to become clear. This is what the (helpful) Devil interrupts when we are focused only on the movement of our own Chariot. And this is a necessary gift because from the birthing of a baby to the creation of art to the politics that shape our world, we don’t do anything alone.

And together we are more powerful.

Really? The Devil is asking me to pause and examine that statement. This Devil is wearing the mask of the controller. This Devil wants me to doubt this collective power.

Because there are many places where collective will is concentrated, but we can’t breakthrough to reach the Chariot vision. Just a few examples:

~ Two-thirds of voters in the US want a ceasefire and de-escalation of violence in Gaza. I don’t have a global stat but I would think it is at least that.
~ Fifty-six percent of U.S. adults want stricter gun control.
~ At the start of the year, people in the US didn’t want a rematch of Biden and Trump for the presidential election.

Still, we seem stuck with these realities. Willful individuals and entities unaccountable to the collective hold them in place. We can’t break through. Or rather The Devil wants us to believe that we can’t break through. The Devil doesn’t want us to realize our power.

We may stamp our feet in frustration thinking about our power in situations such as the above. We may have been pulling all the levers of power that we know for months or years to no avail. We may start to believe the story the controlling Devil whispering in our ear: “There is no use. Just give up.” We begin to believe in our powerlessness. And from a systemic point of view, our powerlessness may have some truth to it.

But we are never totally powerless. Our power may be only internal. But our thoughts and our imagination, what swirls inside our body and soul, this is our reservoir of power to draw upon—even when the controlling Devil has us in their grip.

I am reminded of a powerful yielder of this internal power: Robert Desnos, the French surrealist poet, who in the 1940s was arrested by the Nazis for his work with the Resistance.

One day in the concentration camp, he was loaded along with a bunch of men into the truck that went out each day but from which no one ever returned—its destination was the gas chambers. Both guards and prisoners were silent.  Death was inevitable.  But when the men were being loaded off the truck, Robert Desnos grabbed the hand of one man and read his palm.  Using the stream of consciousness gift of a surrealist poet (because I don’t believe he was a palm reader), he began to tell the man of his long life and the children to come.  He read other palms showing great futures for his fellow prisoners and the guards began to wonder.  The mood changed. It was enough for the guards to shrug and load everyone back on the truck that returned to the camp. The prisoners survived the day.

In the camp, Desnos was utterly without external power but in a moment of extremity he drew forth his great internal power: the ability to tell a different story.  

And the different story changed reality. The controlling Devil lost that day. A Chariot headed in one deadly direction changed course.

This is a story that thrills me even as I have to temper my elation by telling you the end of Robert Desnos’ story: He died of typhus a few days after the liberation of his camp.  The larger circumstances of his life closed in on him.  His individual will was extinguished and his voice went quiet.

But what of his impact on the collective? What came of his joining hands together to make a different story (he couldn’t have told the future without taking the hands of the others)? I  can’t say for sure. I have heard this account only from the writer Susan Griffin who doesn’t tell of the fate of the others in the truck. But surely some survived and perhaps inspired by their palm readings believed they could have a better life, find love, have children.  Their lives then entwined and rippled with his life, his will, his story even after his death.

Robert Desnos shows us that even in the most extreme situations we still can tell a different story.

We may not know the impact of our story. May not see our results as dramatically as Desnos. But we can know that the telling of our story is the claiming of our power.

Our encounters with The Devil test us and in that testing remind us that it is in the complex mixing of our personal stories and collective will that we will find a way forward. Not directly, perhaps not smoothly, almost certainly not immediately, but a way exists for us to move together, in power. In the cycle of the Tarot that way forward from The Devil takes us through further upheaval and shifting light and dark, but culminates with the World dancer embracing the call of the soul. And then it all begins again.

To encourage a revelation on these themes as we continue through this moonthly cycle, you are invited to one, some, or all of these practices:

~ Moon bathe by sitting or lying under a window or outside on the ground. Let go of your thoughts and soak in the light.

~ Take out any reading or your reflections from the new moon and look at them in a new light. How does your understanding of the cards shift now that time has passed and light has shifted? (If you haven’t done a reading yet, no problem, just do it now under the light of the full moon. You can try the one from the new moon.)

~ Bring out your Chariot and your Devil cards from your Tarot deck and connect them to your new moon reading / reflections. You could place/imagine these cards on either side of your reading or above and below, and then look at how they add meaning into the story your original cards offered you.

~ Reflect on questions such as: Which Devil are you dancing with: the helpful illuminator or the disempowering controller? What of your individual will might you shift to contribute to an effort of collective will? What story can you powerfully contribute to the collective right now? What direction to go in? What power is the Devil encounter calling up from within me? You could, of course, pull cards as responses to any of these questions. You may want to engage in Visio Divina to find the layers of wisdom within the cards.

When you are done, remember to offer gratitude for what you have received. Consider what gift you now want to return to the world. Pulling a card for guidance on the gift is always a fine thing to do. In the coming weeks and before the moon returns to dark around August 2nd offer your gift to the world.

As you may remember, not only is this the first of two full moons in a row associated with the Devil, but also we are in a year that began and will end with Devil new moons. You may want to find some supports for checking in on what the Devil as a trickster teachers wants to offer you by attending to these moons, bringing out the Devil card in your deck regularly for check ins, and or have a periodic (weekly, monthly, at Winter Solstice) reflection/journaling on what is bedeviling you and what lesson might it be trying to offer you as another kind of angel.

It is easy to make the connection to abundance looking at the images offered by artists for the Three of Cups. In the iconic Rider Waite Smith deck, Pamela Coleman Smith shows three women with cups seemingly of celebration lifted as they dance in a field filled with flowers, fruits, and vegetables.

Tarot author and artisan T.Susan Chang in her wonderful 36 Secrets muses on this image and makes an interesting connection between abundance and scarcity. Writing about a “scarcity mindset,” Chang recounts her understanding of this term she first encountered in the 1990s:

[It] had to do with thinking life is a zero-sum game, a competition of scarce resources. You can’t afford to be generous when the stakes are your own survival! The attitude needless to say is a recipe for human misery. But what is the antidote. Perhaps it is the “abundance mindset”—the sense that there is more than enough for everyone.

And the Three of Cups—titled the Lord of Abundance by the esotericists—is the perfect illustration of that mindset.

a 1909 card scanned by Holly Voley and retrieved from Sacred Texts. Deck available from US Games

An actual event—a Three of Cups reversed story—becomes an organizing metaphor for the book: the draining and destruction of the Oak Park Pool in Montgomery, Alabama in 1959. McGhee describes:

The [city] council decided to drain the pool rather than share it with their Black neighbors. Of course, the decision meant that white families lost a public resource as well. … Uncomprehending white children cried as city contractors poured cement into the pool, paved it over, seeded it with grass that was green by the time summer came along again. To defy desegregation, Montgomery would go on to close every single public park and padlock the doors of the community center. … The entire public park system would stay closed for over a decade. Even after they reopened, they never rebuilt the pool.

As evocative as a Tarot image, this story vividly illustrates racism’s blanketing harm. In the book, McGhee takes us through cases drawn from public education, housing, health care, voting rights, and environmental policy to show how racism degrades quality of life for all. But McGhee does not just leave us “high and dry” in that drained pool. She invites everyone to be part of creating what she calls the Solidarity Dividend through participating in campaigns like the Fight for $15 (as a minimum wage for all workers), union drives, working for voting rights, or welcoming immigrants to communities needing revitalization.

In a now upright Three of Cups story, McGhee brings us to Lewiston, a struggling former mill town, in Maine, the whitest state in the country. Starting in the 1990s African refugees began finding their way to this quiet small city with low rents and starting their own small businesses to revitalize the downtown.

Cecile Thornton, a white Mainer from a Franco-American family who had all moved away, encountered her African neighbors when she sought to break through isolation by reclaiming her ancestral language. When she couldn’t find anyone interested in practicing their French at the Franco Center, she was pointed toward the French Club in Hillview, a subsidized housing complex.

She was surprised to find herself the only white person there, but gratefully began a conversation with Edho, a French speaking refugee from the Congo. Over the next year, Cecile studied and improved her French under the tutelage of her African neighbors. They became her community. Today she volunteers to help asylum seekers. Each brings their skills to help the other and the lives of all are improved.

This story makes me think of a particular Three of Cups: the one from the Numinous Tarot where the three celebrants are actually pouring out their cups of different colors into a well or maybe it’s a magical cauldron. As they do, their mixing liquids take on a new hue and are filled with stars. An illuminating flame seems to rise from the shared waters. The sharing of their abundance is creating something even greater. The pool is full to overflowing!

In the Rider Waite Smith version of the Chariot, the Charioteer is looking toward that destination, but we, the viewers, see only what is being left behind: a walled city.

McGhee ends her book with:

Since our country’s founding, we have not allowed our diversity to be our superpower, and the result is that the United States is not more than the sum of its disparate parts. But it could be. And if it were, all of us would prosper. In short, we must emerge from this crisis in our republic with a new birth of freedom, rooted in the knowledge that we are so much more when the “We” in “We the People” is not some of us, but all of us. We are greater than, and greater for, the sum of us.

Yes, this is what we could be if we would get in our Chariots and ride toward that vision.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS / READING FOR THE MOONTH

These questions are offered for reflection and to spark practice throughout the moonth. Pulling Tarot and oracle cards in connection to these questions is appropriate, but not absolutely necessary. You might carry a question with you on a walk for example and observe what is happening in the natural world as a way to find insight into the answer to the question.

ABUNDANCE: What is abundant in my life that it would be beneficial to share?

VISION: What can become real when my abundance is shared? 

I do offer this as an e-reading in my collaborative initiative format for $32.  Sign up with Pay Pal or email me about sending a check. When I receive notification, I’ll be in touch to let you know about when to expect to receive your reading by email. I generally have openings to do these readings on Mondays and Saturdays

The height of this moonth’s cycle comes with the full moon arriving that day after the Solstice on Friday, June 21 (exact at 9:08 pm ET, time zone converter), and offers a revelation about how the lunar energies initiated on the June 6th new moon are developing. The new moon, guided by its association with The Lovers, invited us to have the courage to love. Out of the full moon revelation about this developing energy, we are issued an invitation to return a gift to the world in the final weeks of the lunar cycle.  

The exact moment of the moon’s fullness comes in the sign of Capricorn associated with the Tarot’s Devil. Along with Death and the Tower, the Devil is a most feared card in the Tarot pack.

But the Devil is really just a different kind of angel. 

Although the Devil has been imbued with great powers and saddled with all the evil in the Christian worldview, the Devil’s qualities vary across cultures. There is no parallel figure in the Celtic tradition, for example. Though the horned god Cernunnos may have inspired some of the Devil’s iconography, his significance as a god of fertility, life, animals, wealth, and the underworld is vastly different from the Christian Devil.

Neither is there a Devil figure in most traditional African religions rather, as Courtney Alexander writes in the DustIIOnyx guidebook, “humans and deities alike choose whether to navigate the world from a negative or positive disposition.”

The Jewish tradition offers yet another face of the Devil we can see in the Raziel Tarot created by Rachel Pollack and Robert Place. The Devil here is more akin to a trickster and can be tricked himself. In Judaism, Rachel writes, “No great Devil holds the soul of all humanity in its grip.”

 So, what happens when the Lovers encounter these various aspects of the Devil?

They may be tricked in some way or invited to examine their motivations. They may be led more deeply into the animal part of themselves, those earthy, physical, sensual aspects of their being. Their most shadowy, hungry, broken parts of themselves may surface, perhaps even be active in addictions, compulsions, or inertia.

If the Lovers meet and move through—rather than ignore or stay stuck in— what the Devil is leading them toward, there may be difficulty along the way but a reward is waiting: a renewing love that like the moon is born, grows, dies, but then returns. 

The Devil is a collaborator not an opponent on the path of renewing love. Because this wisdom figure shakes up our love and tosses it back to us in a different form. Our hearts may even break during an encounter with the Devil, but the breaking has the potential to expand us, to make us even more loving.

Nature writer Gretel Ehrlich, in her meditation on how the heating up of our climate is eliminating cultures of cold, speaks to this healing possibility of the broken open heart; “We don’t look because heartbreak might imply failure.  But the opposite is true.  A broken heart is an open heart, like a flower unfolding from its calyx, the one nourishing the other.”  When we take a long, loving look at our broken hearts, we open ourselves to both what is unsettling and what is most needed.

And this is how devils can be our angels. They are not sweet beings of light, but powers of shadow and the dark of the earth, our home of limits and of breaking.

I have found that turning over an intense card can sometimes be a relief because it mirrors back what I am experiencing. I see it and think, “I am not crazy. Things are bad.” I also feel a little less alone, “Well at least the Devil is with me in this!” In these times when the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people are being chipped—sometimes gouged—away; when US tax dollars pay for bombs killing so many people—so many children—in Gaza; and when climate change brings us raging forest fires, heat domes, and food-drowning floods it is right to say things are bad and let our hearts break.

Our hearts may be what breaks but this actually allows the love to flow out even more. It can flow to people we know and those that we don’t. It can flow to the trees and the air. It can flow into our hands to pick up the work of repair.

After an encounter with The Devil we don’t take love for granted. When we go all the way through the experience, we grow, and in this way the Devil guides us in tending not just our own souls but the soul of the Whole that we share with so many others.

To encourage a revelation on these themes as we continue through this moonthly cycle, you are invited to one, some, or all of these practices:

~ Moon bathe by sitting or lying under a window or outside on the ground. Let go of your thoughts and soak in the light.

~ Take out any reading or your reflections from the new moon and look at them in a new light. How does your understanding of the cards shift now that time has passed and light has shifted? (If you haven’t done a reading yet, no problem, just do it now under the light of the full moon. You can try the one from the new moon.)

~ Bring out your Lovers and your Devil cards from your Tarot deck and connect them to your new moon reading / reflections. You could place/imagine these cards on either side of your reading or above and below, and then look at how they add meaning into the story your original cards offered you.

~ Reflect on questions such as: What aspect of the Devil is active in my life (trickery, shadow, addictive behavior, etc.)? What is this Devil trying to teach me about love? Where in my life am I complacent about love? How can I break out of that complacency? What does my sensual self want me to know about love? How to embrace this part of myself? You could, of course, pull cards as responses to any of these questions. You may want to engage in Visio Divina to find the layers of wisdom within the cards.

When you are done, remember to offer gratitude for what you have received. Consider what gift you now want to return to the world. Pulling a card for guidance on the gift is always a fine thing to do. In the coming weeks and before the moon returns to dark around July 4th offer your gift to the world.

To note, this is the first of two full moons in a row associated with the Devil in a year that began and will end with Devil new moons. The Devil calls our attention! You may want to find some supports for checking in on what the Devil as a trickster teachers wants to offer you by attending to these moons, bringing out the Devil card in your deck regularly for check ins, and or have a periodic (weekly, monthly, here at Summer Solstice and then at Winter Solstice) reflection/journaling on what is bedeviling you and what lesson might it be trying to offer you as another kind of angel.