High Priestess
The High Priestess
I drank from the same cup the rest of them did and I laid in the dark to wait. In the quiet. You could feel everyone breathing and the draft through the windows was a calming wind blown in from another life. Where we were free to scratch in the dirt and talk to animals. A threshold in the room you could not see, inching closer and closer with each exhale. Inhale and hold.
And then the colors started. Plumose and faint, feathering around an aperture there in my mind. And as our curandero moved ghostly through the room, slowly tapping his drum like an infant’s heartbeat gathering strength, the colors grew brilliant, the fractal intensified until it was a gravity well and I was peering through my dilating porthole down into the way things are.
“You have no idea how deep it goes. . .” she whispered to me. “Tonight, I am going to show you. And you will never be the same.”
Cuidan, miran, todo, todo.
The tarot tells a story, all of them really: Young and naive adventurer begins his pilgrimage to nowhere. A baby is born sponge-brained and vulnerable. A woman sets out on a quest to realize her dream. Along the way, our adventurer encounters the world. The figures who will be help and hindrance, teacher and antagonist. Another way to see it: the adventurer becomes these figures on her path to enlightenment. It’s all the same. In parts of your life you are a Fool or you are basking in the Sun, in some other the Devil’s chain is looped around your neck. And you’ll circle back to these stations a thousand times before you die. I don’t make the rules.
See the High Priestess. Note the depth of her presence and surround. The fruited yoni of her backdrop, the yin and yang of her pillars. She is one face of the dark Mother. Subtle and mysterious. Indiscernible, perhaps. And she guards the entry—passively, through her being and not her action—to the vastness, the infinite. What is not too simple to comprehend, what is not too complex to say. She will not stop you from passing if you are willing to consult her book, a distillation of many wisdoms, but how many rough adventurers have tried to pierce those waters without considering what is known by the many who have gone before.
The strings of the healer’s guitar fretted to the soul. And the voice a diving bell we lower in inch by inch. And now every color is its own spirit, its own daemon. And you are learning that there is no thing that happened to you that does not exist in the body, each pain a metaphorical tumor, each mistake, and the size is how long it’s been and how tightly you’ve held it. No, no, yes. . .each pain is a whale, is a six foot tuna, a piranha, is a kraken slapping its abrasive tentacle on your deck. The deeper you are the looser the terms for there is no word to call it. And so every metaphor can be true at once. And the music itself—you can feel it grinding at the mass you’ve held deep in your ribcage. And the sparks that fly are the fragments of memories splintered free from time and so you’ll lie there on your tucket reliving what your father said to you two decades ago and feel the deep hurt of it and as it happens the mass is shrinking one shard at a time. Did you know to be free you have to feel everything?
There is an ocean inside of us. I did not create the metaphor, though my fingers worry over it in my pocket, keep it warm and loaded. The Magician’s work is never done. Whether you think in images or words these seem like things you’ve created. Scenes out the window, at least, of the vessel which you pilot. But look more closely. Trace how a thought begins and consider whether it is truly yours. You’ll see, I think, that it slips into existence all on its own. Like particles winking alive unbeckoned in a physicist’s vacuum. That is the unconscious speaking to you. That is sea creatures leaking into the boat from just below the surface on which you sail.
Some who work this same sacrament dress as sailors to lie in the dark. And they envision the room as an enormous schooner carrying them across the seas the High Priestess protects.
She showed me that there is a default setting in my heart. No, no, there is a stone between my shoulders and I’ve carried its weight for years. Born with it there and forever trying to heal over it. Each of this life’s tiny traumas sharpening its corners. You have one too. And it has a name, though our dictionary of feelings is so paltry, crude. This way you are and return to a week after glorious news, some months after the opposite. You are a sad person the way you are a mountain person, a desert person. You are longing or you are joyous, loving. You are full of humiliating rage. These are just words, they can barely even explain themselves.
And this aspect of you—adumbrated, older than words—trails through every moment of your life and it followed you through the umbilical cord of your mother, the flagellating tail of your father’s contribution. And it was in their lives too, pieces of it. And their mother’s and their father’s. There is no bottom to the mind.
She showed this to me and I said: yes, I see it. A map inside dense and entangled, that undiscovered country, flooded over with feeling and yet unprobed. She wanted me to accept it and I thought that would do the trick. That I could look away. And then, its image clear as an engraving on a tombstone, she helped me to fold it into a matted and fibrous wad. And she sank it into my stomach and she said: “now, my dear, it’s coming time for you to be rid of it”
It can be hard to say the word love. You pluck at it for the sentence and find its filament-thin roots have entangled themselves with everything. The High Priestess—they call her Pachamama, and abuela, the momma matrix most mysterious—will make you flinch and cower and whinge under it. You may try to hide from this love like a doctor cutting you open to piece you back together the way you could be. Like a parent locking their rampaging child in the closet to keep them from hurting themselves. Like a fearless teacher who asks of you always more. She will not be satisfied until you’ve mastered the sea.
Even after the end of the world there will be music. In the candlelight I watched the others play and hummed along though the stone in my stomach would not be ignored. The players were two in love and they chased each other’s fingers along the hang-pan, they whistled and hummed a rhythm, and it was as though this act hovered a translucent light between them. And in this, a light of music and—I can barely say it—I could see now what I’d been clenching, inside, with my tired fingers. How deep it ran through the generations that’d whittled me from the star-stuff.
And then, the music nearing its crescendo, she said “Now, let it go.”
What went into that bucket was black as ink—was tears and sweat and anger and self-pity, was the who I am that lies below the who I show. And I sat looking at this, smelling it, what had been in my stomach, and I felt her hand on my back. Rubbing. Consoling. “There, there,” she whispered. “It’s all okay. Welcome home.”