The path of Love is one of—maybe the most—desired pathway. Each year the Tarot correspondence of the Lovers card to the astrological sign of Gemini invites us to walk this path through the Solsticetide, the time of the sun’s greatest light here in the Northern Hemisphere. In the outer world the abundance of flowers and profusion of green leaves mirror the beauty of the love we seek.

But the passage cards of the Tarot associated with this time take us to a different, scarier place. The Eight, Nine, and Ten of Swords are among the most distressing in the deck. In the Eight we are bound and blindfolded, barely able to step forward. In the Nine, we suffer nightmares. Finally, comes the Ten—the passage card of this new moon arriving on Sunday, June 14th at 10:53 pm, time zone converter —and we die.

Are these really the passages of Love?

They can certainly be examples of dysfunctional love. Especially when we remember that this suit connects us to the mind and thoughts which may not reflect reality. Here the mind locks us into our own self, which keeps us from the Other we seek to love. In the iconic Rider Waite Smith deck each of these cards features a person alone.

But these passage cards can also be initiations that through bringing us into the depths of Love—its nurturing waters and its dark mysteries—can teach us how to practice Love, even in times of challenge. The Eight and Nine of Swords offer lessons of trusting in Love’s existence even when we can’t see it or we fear the loss of its embrace.

The Ten of Swords might be the greatest test of trust because here we have to let Love go to shift into new form. We have to practice Renewing Love.

I’ve been contemplating Renewing Love for years. In 2016 I wrote about seeing unconditional love as a trap. Instead of believing we will reach and maintain a perfect, static state of Love, we’d be better served to take the ever-changing moon as our guide.

The moon teaches us about Renewing Love.

First, a new seed of Love is planted when the moon is re-born in darkness. This is where we spark the vision: we dream of the as yet unmet lover; seek a new friend; visit the animal shelter wanting to be chosen by a creature; imagine our baby born, or, if this is a love that has been through many cycles, a surprise, a forgiveness, an unexpected laugh opens a new door in an old relationship, which could be living or divine.

Then the light grows from crescent to quarter and beyond so you can see more clearly. Both beauty and challenge are revealed. Your love is made real and the being that contains this energy is exciting in their revelation of self. Of course, now you have to move from your internal vision into relating to another person. This requires adjustment, both to your vision and the reality of how you are together.

The full moon comes. The light is bliss inducing. Challenges and demands of the everyday can wait while you just let Love flow through you together.

Then the dark begins to stir, grows stronger, but it is not your enemy. It is true that here is where you have to give love away. You may turn from the cocoon of a relationship’s support to bring love to projects or others in need. A new relationship may be revealing rough edges so you turn to a friend for comfort. The silence of your teenager at the dinner table is hard but then you start talking to other moms or dads about being a parent. And all of this is Love disseminating. As it goes out into the world, Love ripples and increases. Love flows like water as the moon dissolves.

Then the few nights before the new moon are dark. The love relationship dies. This is the passage of the 10 of Swords. I believe it was James Wells who recounted hearing the Jungian analyst Marion Woodman say that her 50-year marriage lasted so long because it died 4 times.

In this phase, there may be a rift or a fight or a difference has to be acknowledged and laid down in the dark for healing. Something new will have to emerge in the next cycle for the relationship to continue to be the container for Love. Perhaps this relationship no longer serves and stepping away from it will allow Love to enter in a different way. Perhaps there is physical death and we must find our way to the Green Door of Death.

None of this ends Love. Because there is a flow of Love beyond our individual selves that can carry you into a new cycle when the time is right. You may have to wait in the dark longer than you expected, but Love waits with you. Here in the dark a relationship as it was is surrendered. Or you startle yourself by forgiving or being forgiven. You didn’t know you could be held so beautifully when that wave of Love comes toward you after your beloved dies. Or boundaries dissolve and you suddenly feel the Love of your ancestors flow like energy through your body. In this, you are awakened to Love in a new way.

How can we do this? This new moon walking the Path of the Lovers through the passage of the 10 of Swords invites us to move through like a Queen of Cups, which in the Shining Tribe Tarot is known as the Gift of Rivers.

There are many mentors in the Gift of Rivers. The flower who tells us to open fully in the moment when the light is right. The snake who sheds its skin when it no longer fits and continues on its way. The river itself flowing until a split is demanded. The bowl gathers and holds even the darkest waters.

But my eye is always drawn back to the fish-headed woman. She is a human body with wisdom that flows from this physical reality. But she is not just human. She is also fish. Her consciousness is watery and her fisheyes attune her to emotions, intuitive knowing, and deep mystery. She accepts them all.

She integrates the wisdom of the body and the consciousness of the flow. When we follow her lead, this integration assists us in moving through the 10 of Swords passage by bringing additional perspectives to the Sword’s reliance on the mind and intellectual approach.

The fish-headed woman looks strange. She invites us to be strange. Just our daring to let Love die may look strange to some. What we do to care for our bodies through the death passage may not be what others would do. Our emotions expressed may make others uncomfortable. But we follow the fish headed woman in what deck creator Rachel Pollack names as a dance. Rachel begins her write up of this card with a poem:

Dance, dance

In the coolness of the night.

Drink deeply

From the holy splendor.

This is the gift more precious than any,

The fountain of love.

The fish-headed woman trusts the flow of this fountain of Love and she invites us to as well.

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.

CULTIVATE: How do I cultivate Renewing Love?

FORM: What form can my Renewing Love most powerfully take at this time?

CHANGE: How will I be changed by embracing my Renewing Love?

I do offer this as an e-reading in my collaborative intuitive 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 do these readings on Mondays and Saturdays.

Cure for Your Country Bombing Another

 

Collect rainwater the morning after your bombs are dropped.

If there is no rain you may cry into the bowl

even if you have dry eye from not blinking.

 

Learn the name of someone killed by your bomb.

Write their letters on your palm.

Now they are part of your future.

 

Learn the name of someone still living 

amidst the rubble of your bombs.

Write their letters on your palm.

Cup your ear with this hand 

and listen: What do they want?

 

Look for a snake

to teach you the secret of shedding.

Do not flinch when snake’s red tongue 

flicks in your ear.

 

Gather fallen petals from tree or stem

and red berries, soft and ripe.

Place them in the rain water.

Then with your hands 

rip and crush.

Use no tools 

only your fingers.

Let them be blooded.

 

When the mix is made 

walk to a gash in the earth 

and place the paste

in the wound saying out loud 

 

May the Earth shapeshift this violence.

May the Earth shapeshift this violence.

May the Earth shapeshift this violence.

 

May my heart, my voice, my hands be strengthened to end this killing.

May my heart, my voice, my hands be strengthened to end this killing.

May my heart, my voice, my hands be strengthened to end this killing.

 

May the Earth’s power fill us and our dreams of being free.

May the Earth’s power fill us and our dreams of being free.

May the Earth’s power fill us and our dreams of being free.

 

Within 48 hours join with others knocking down the country’s pillars from which the bombs are launched or the cure will fail and you will have to start from scratch. 

 

Notes – 

On Cures: 

• In Cures of Ireland: A Treasury of Irish Folk Remedies, Cecily Gilligan describes cures made by everyday people that meet mundane individual needs: cough and arthritis, burns and infection, the bones of humans and animals, and the like. 
• Cures are passed down through the generations often in a pattern of women passing to men and men to women and so on. 
• Nine, seven, five, and especially three are important numbers for creating patterns of prayers or days to make cures.
• The patterns must be completed for the cure to work.

On Counties Bombed by my Country, the USA:

• The definitive list of countries we’ve directly bombed seems not to exist. The Google AI Overview lists 19 countries, highlighting Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Vietnam. But Iran isn’t on the list. I created this cure in June 2025. We were bombing Iran then. List or no, I know it happened. Habibe Jafarian was on my hand and in my ear.

• What about indirect bombings? The US is the world’s largest arms dealer. Where is the list of bombs we have sent out into the world? More missing evidence. And maybe nobody knows. Too many witnesses dead.

On Names to Write on Your Hand / 2026:

• Hana Dehqani, eight years old, is the first name on a list of 61 mostly children killed in what is being widely reported as a US double tap strike on a girls school in Minab, Iran. Read all their names. They are part of your future.
• Listen to Narges Mohammadi, Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee, Verisheh Moradi, Sakineh Parvaneh, and Reyhaneh Ansarinejad. They are woman activists jailed in Iran who in June 2025 issues a statement saying that foreign powers will not liberate Iran. I learned about them Dr. Mara Dodge at an April 13, 2026 presentation. Write one of their names on your palm.

Actions to Take:

• Call your legislators and tell them you are done the United States and Israel spending our dollars and sending our bombs to kill children and their parents.
• Connect with a local group. In Massachusetts? Check out Massachusetts Peace Action (MAPA).

The height of this moonth’s cycle comes with the full moon arriving overnight Saturday, May 30th, to Sunday, May 31st, (exact at 4:44 am ET on Sunday, time zone converter) and offers a revelation about how the lunar energies initiated on the May 16th new moon are developing. This new moon, guided by its association with Tradition (the Shining Tribe Tarot’s version of the Hierophant), invited us to let ancient traditions birth the new. 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 Sagittarius which corresponds to the Tarot’s Temperance, the 14th Major Arcana card.

The wisdom figure most commonly depicted on this card is an angel holding a cup or some kind of vessel in each hand while pouring liquid between the cups. Through color symbolism (a dark and light or red and blue cups) or the angel’s stance (standing with one foot in water and one on land), we viewers of the card are guided to recognize an integration of what is seemingly opposite or disparate.

The expression of the angel is focused, possibly serene, certainly determined.

This morning I woke up thinking about another angel: the angel of history. This angel might be a twin to Temperance but is fraternal, not identical. They both exist in the flow of time but can interact with the flow differently.

The angel of history is a figure in the essay On the Concept of History, the last work of the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin written in 1940 as he attempted to escape the Nazis advance through Europe.

It is a short work but dense and while philosophy is not my field, because the angel of history is inspired by an image, Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, I draw upon my Tarot training as imagist to offer these musings focused on this figure. Also, Benjamin was interested in the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism seems to inform his work. These are also influences of the Tarot.

In the 9th part of his essay Benjamin introduces the image and the idea:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Benjamin’s angel witnesses history’s patterns and sees them as part of something bigger. The problems of his times and ours and the times before us both are not strange anomalies but continuations. So, the Nazi’s deadly final solution for the Jews in Europe or the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capital or the October 7th Hamas attack followed by the 663 days of war on Gaza are not isolated aberrations. They are a single catastrophe; they are connected back through history to the events that created poisoned seed with sour seed upon seed stretching back through time. Because victors write history they leave out the connections. They erase from the record those who were conquered. They vilify those who resisted.

Benjamin critiques those who are shocked at Fascism’s abuses, those who wonder how Fascism could rise within the progress of the 20th century. I hear an echo of this when we in the US, say that our current atrocities–concentration camps for immigrants, Jim Crow’s return with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, reproductive rights for women rolled back–are “not American” when they are central to the catastrophe of our history.

Politicians may invoke this the most. They want us to believe in the possibility of progress and to trust that they are the ones who can deliver it to us. But Benjamin names progress as the storm that keeps hurling the angel of history from catastrophic past into catastrophic future.

Benjamin continues his essay exploring philosophical concepts of history (sometimes his language loses me), but I want to stop at this line of his: The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.

The angel of history may be constantly blown back, but there is an angel who can plant themselves in the moment alongside the dead, working toward wholeness, tending what’s smashed: the Tarot’s Temperance angel.

Temperance is intimate with Death, follows this archetype in the numbering of the Major Arcana. Comfortable with seeming opposites, the Temperance angel is not afraid to bring the dead to the living.

With the dead delivered back into our presence we can seek their counsel for how to be with catastrophe. They made their way through their own catastrophes while living. No doubt they developed seeds of solutions and remedies for repair while living and if we would incline our ear toward them, they could share with us this wisdom. Also, having been in Death their understanding of past catastrophes and their role in them is expanded in ways we earth bound ones can’t really know but still could benefit from receiving whether through conscious understanding or trusting in an energetic flow. The dead want us to be free, to be whole, to be healed.

Will the dead give us the solution we want? No, looking for one quick fix leads to the false progress that blows back the angel of history and fills the mouth of our leaders with false promises.

The work of wholeness is more complex. We need to balance the dead’s desire for our freedom with the Devil’s mission to entrap us.

The Devil, too, is an angel and follows Temperance in the flow of the Tarot. Often identified as Lucifer, his name means light bringer, but the Devil’s light is only illuminated in darkness. The catastrophes of history are the Devil’s darkness. They are huge and heavy, great chains we’ve inherited. It would be easier to lose ourselves in The Devil’s temptations: to soothe ourselves with binge watching TV, spiritual practices that let us bypass oppression and suffering, or lap up a whole carton of ice cream. But the Devil’s dark opens a different way. Our eyes can grow accustomed to a different light and without a burning glare we can see catastrophe’s truth in our history. Without other eyes watching, we can grieve, make apologies, can take in our own pain and the pain of others. Maybe we fall apart for a while here. It’s fine. The dark becomes a cauldron of release.

In this time of the full moon, the Temperance angel invites us to join them in standing between the freedom offered by the dead and Devil’s trap turned cauldron of release. To remain standing here, instead of being blown into a future of repeating catastrophe is hard work. We see this on the determined faces of Temperance angels. We might call it alchemical–Alchemy is sometimes a name given to Temperance–in that we are moving the lead of history’s catastrophe through a process that will transform.

Because Temperance works with and accepts opposing forces what is created is not totally new, but an integration of its constituent parts. The catastrophe of history is still there–the truth of its hold is part of the healing–but, combined with the dead’s desire for our freedom and a new ability to see in the dark, the future is not something we are blown into but something we can influence by aligning with mundane and spiritual forces. As we are walking Tradition’s path this moonth and beginning our elemental journey toward the Summer Solstice, we might reach out to the wisdom of rocks or connect with the power of place to find our way into this alignment.

To gather wisdom under this moonth’s full moon, you can engage with one, some, or all of these practices:

• Moon bathe by sitting or lying under a window or outside on the ground. Feel the unique strength of the moon’s light. Let go of your thoughts and soak in the glow.
• 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 changed? (If you haven’t done a moonthly reading yet, feel free to do this one.)
• Bring out Temperance and new moon-connected Hierophant / Tradition card 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.
• Contemplate questions inspired such as: What seemingly opposite forces are active in my life? How could I integrate them? What support do my beloved dead offer for integration? How can I open my eyes to see in new ways? Where am I standing in the flow of history? What is history asking of me? How can I have the courage to face what history asks of me? What can be born of my hard work to integrate and heal? You can, of course, pull cards in response to these questions.

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 June 11th, offer your gift to the world.

The arrival of the new moon stamps the moonth with an initiating energy that shifts and develops through a cycle of growth, fullness, and descent. Each moonth I look to the Tarot’s astrological correspondences for the new moon to find 3 Tarot cards (a Major showing us the path, a numbered Minor showing us our passage and practice, and a court/people card showing us the posture to take on the path) to guide musings on soul tending, selection of prompts for personal/spiritual practice, and creation of a moonthly reading. The reading can be done any time, but ideally between the new and full moons. Revisit the cards you pull periodically up until the next lunation to gain new insight as the light changes.

This moonth we are invited to walk the path and receive the wisdom of what is most commonly named as The Hierophant, the Major Arcana’s 5th card associated with the new moon arriving on Saturday, the 16th (exact at 4 pm ET, time zone converter). Hierophants are teachers of, and conduits for, the Greater Than.

In the earliest Tarots and the iconic Rider Waite Smith, the Hierophant’s central figure is a Pope of the Catholic Church who, since St. Peter in the first century CE, has led the institution upholding its doctrines and teachings.

The Shining Tribe Tarot, however, invites us into a more ancient understanding of this archetype. The 5th Major Arcana card is renamed Tradition and gives us an image without human figures but rather a circle of rocks. Rachel Pollack, the deck creator, names the rocks as embodied Spirits who meet to uphold the world. She based the image on real rocks she saw at the edge of the Dead Sea but thought her seeing of Spirits within them as a fantasy.

Contemplating the card, I am called to think back millions of years ago to the time before institutions and writing existed, to the time when our furthest back ancestors had only the Earth as their teacher of the Greater Than. The seasons, the plants, the animals, and, yes, the rocks all must have been their Hierophants. Without written ways to pass on knowledge between people and generations I imagine them continually discovering anew the power of the Earth and the Greater Than. Over and over again they approached life with new eyes and fresh awe.

They perceived differently than we moderns. Perhaps with their awe attuned eyes they always saw the Spirit in the Earth, knew Earth as full of Spirit. Then Rachel’s vision of Tradition’s council of rocks gathered to protect the Earth is true, not a fantasy.

With Tradition as our Hierophant, the Earth is our teacher and conduit for the Greater Than. Adhering to this understanding may take us outside of established religious traditions—or not. We might stay within a tradition and bring the Earth perspective into it. In this way we would be returning a tradition to its origins as so many—all if you go back far enough, I would guess—grew from the earthly. And the mystical strains of traditions can offer us back earth-honoring practices preserved through the ages. When we tend these connections, we invoke the circle at the center of the Tradition card.

If you can’t stay within established religious traditions—I myself have tried and failed—then the Earth can be your Hierophant. The Earth is a loving guide giving us the abundance of life, but Earth is also a teacher of limits. In these times, we are being offered intense lessons about limits to our modern lifestyles through the chaos of a changing climate. Flood and fire, tornado and drought are prophets to which we are called to answer.

How can we answer these prophets? How can we respond to the Earth?

The Knower of Birds is our guide to emulate on Tradition’s path. Their way on the path is one where feet are firmly planted on the literal earth even while opening to the spiritual and the formless Greater Than.

The Knower’s feet pass over ground that is marked with mostly tracks of mammals and birds but also a few symbols. About this image, Rachel writes of how the tracks of creatures observed and noted as having patterns evolved into divination. The markings and the patterns that appeared over and over again became symbols. Writing itself, she posits, may have evolved to pass on meanings for divination.

The few symbols on the earth are mirrored in the sky and new ones float there, too. The Spirit world it seems is filled with symbols, and if we would open up to receive them, they could help us live our lives, to move with the help of the greater patterns. Two rays—one from the left and one from the right—enter into the head of the Knower showing their ability to perceive and welcome this form of communication from the Greater Than

The Knower of Birds stands between worlds drawing guidance and power from both. This brings us back to how to respond to our prophets of climate change.

Because climate chaos is human made, we need to take action within our human systems. To make the impacts that are necessary to address the scale of the problem, we need to join with others to shift systems and institutions. Just as the ground on the Knower of Birds is filled with different kinds of tracks, different approaches and strategies are needed to create an ecology of change making. If you are a fiery type, join a direct-action group. If you are patient and meticulous, follow a policy-oriented group. Creative? Create art that moves people to understand the urgency of now. Not afraid to talk about the money needed to do the work? Be a fundraiser. Everyone is needed.

Along with the tangible action, we who seek to emulate the Knower of Birds on the path of Tradition can call upon the Spirits who uphold the World to guide and aid us. We can ask them to look with compassion upon their “troubled children” and put their energy and power behind our actions to turn back climate chaos. We might do this work through prayer or ritual. May seek guidance from divination. We can wisdom wander or make a pilgrimage and listen to the voices of the Spirit in the Earth. We can report back to our groups and gatherings the messages we receive. Rachel says that when the Knower of Birds appears we may have psychic visions and also the ability to communicate them clearly.

Will we make it?

Our passage card this moonth, the 7 of Stones, does not forecast victory or defeat, but lets us know that the only way out is through and into the new.

The toad in the foreground resembles a woman squatting in the birth position. The rainbow-colored ribbons are inspired by a medallion that Indian women place over their birthing beds. These real natural phenomena have taken on symbolic meaning. Archeologist Marja Gumbutas identified the toad as an epiphany of the Goddess from Old European culture. The colors of the rainbow ribbons are the same as the colors of the seven chakras of Hindu and Buddhist tradition.

Earth and Spirit are integrated in this image invoking the birthing process. Our passage this moonth—and in this time of dramatic change—is one of birthing. We are in hard labor and being called upon to push. While we are pushing it may seem like this will never end, but we have no choice but to push.

And we may well be further along than we think. The number 7—and so all the cards associated with it—are odd pauses. In the 7, we can feel like nothing is happening because we are at a moment of tension. But if we work with the tension, we will move through. At 7, we have already done so much work. The new is not as far away as it may seem. Gather energy from the Earth, call upon the Spirits for their support, and keep pushing toward the birth. This is how we will make it.

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.

EARTH: What teaching is the Earth offering me this moonth?

SPIRIT: What message is coming from Spirit to me this moonth?

BIRTH: What will integrating the teaching of Earth and the message of Spirit birth within me?

I do offer this as an e-reading in my collaborative intuitive 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.