May 30: Let Your Wings Dry
By Sophie Strand
The night sky is elephant-skin blue, stippled with stars. The ground underfoot plush with moss and peat. Wild thyme, crushed, releases a bright yellow smell. You nearly mistake the giant sycamore for a muscular white snake, twisting towards the moon. But as you stop and place a hand to its flaking bark, you spot something in the branches. An ibis? A butterfly, blue with black-fringed wings?
Welcome to the Star card.
In variations of the tarot going back to Bonifacio Bembo’s original illustrations, we see a figure (man or woman, depending on the deck) with two vessels, pouring water into a pool with one hand and water into fertile, welcoming earth with the other. One foot rests in the shallows, and the other slips into the dirt and wild grasses of the landscape. Typically, the figure is naked, circled by seven stars, a fact that calls to mind the seven chakras for some tarot readers. An ibis or a butterfly rests in the foliage of a distant tree. The scene is tranquil but dynamic. Energy moves within a closed circuit. Water flows into water.
Classically, the card is related to healing. The woman pictured pours “cleansing waters” over wounds. But in a culture where healing is disregarded in favor of speed and progress, that healing becomes much harder to accept. Women receive scant maternity leave. Unable to pay for health care, people slap bandages on mortal wounds, desperately fearing emergency-room bills. Others ignore the fire alarms screaming in their own bodies and show up to work, day after day, until they keel over and die. This isn’t to mention the spiritual and psychological wounding from centuries of patriarchal domination, colonization, genocide, and ecocide. [...]
Deep ragged wounds cannot be immediately stitched closed. If they are closed without healing from inside outward, they can putrefy and cause sepsis. Instead, they must be kept clean and open, with muscle and tissue reknitting from the bottom up until finally smoothing into a scar. This is not a quick fix. It is a long, careful process. [...] It has to happen from the roots.
When we pull the Star card, it offers the patience needed to let a wound heal from the bottom up. The body and the psyche’s pace is distinctly opposed to the culture’s suicidal sprinting. I think the Star card is a card of healing, but it is the deep healing that cannot be rushed. I think of the powerful advice from John O’Donohue in his poem “for the Interim Time”:
What is being transfigured here is your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.
At its core, healing is transformation. Broken skin grows new cells. Bones melt into new shapes. A scar creates a striking rosy tattoo, a silkier texture. A body that has been through illness understands its shape, its limitations, its pleasure, with an almost excruciating precision. Likewise, emotional and psychological healing helps us shed old patterns and coping mechanisms, emerging into a vital, new self. But as O’Donohue writes, “It is difficult and slow to become new.”
Here, let us think of the dragonfly’s metamorphosis. This is not the simple caterpillar to cocoon to butterfly. No. The dragonfly’s transformation is agonizingly slow. A prolarva bursts from its egg, searches for water, then hatches and molts. But this is just the beginning of the journey. The larva will hatch and molt another five to fourteen times, sometimes spending up to five years in the process of becoming. Finally, after having shed not one version of itself, but many, the larva crawls into shallower water, poking its head up and slowly tasting air. It breathes for the first time under cover of darkness. When it has literally caught its breath, it drags its wet body onto land, climbing up a flower stalk or hardy blade of grass where it can rest. When it has secured itself, it totally redistributes the liquid of its body, beginning to push out of itself. Once out of the “exuvia” of shed skin, the slimy, shiny dragonfly waits for its legs to harden and its wings to dry. The emergence process takes up to three hours, usually timed for the early morning.
The Star card welcomes us into the murky waters of slow transformative healing. As men try to attend to the wounds of patriarchy, the wounds they have inflicted on others and on themselves, the roles they are trying to shed, the roles they are trying to expand into, it is important to remember that real healing cannot be rushed. [...] Put one foot in the water and keep the other firmly planted in the dirt. Feel your bothness. The movement and slipperiness of the water. The steady, resilient mycelial intelligence of the soil between your toes. The dominant culture would have us believe that healing must be bought. [...] It is important to remember that the natural world has always been our chrysalis. It has always been our transformative medicine.