May 2004

Tarot Death Card

by Joanna Powell Colbert on May 25, 2004 · 16 comments

in Art, Living Mythically, Tarot

I just finished and uploaded my Death card. The inspiration for it came one day last year when I was wandering around the island with my young nature studies mentor, Nikki. As we were noticing caterpillars practicing the art of camouflage and the yarrow just beginning to bloom, we came across a dead juvenile heron. Someone had laid it out in an old decaying wooden dinghy in a meadow across the road from the beach. The boat had elderberry, grasses and blackberry vines growing up through it. Someone had also laid out two deer bones next to the heron, one with the hoof attached. We added cedar and yarrow and spent quite a bit of time praying and musing on the Death goddess, on that bright spring morning. There were spiders and ants crawling on the body, and overhead an eagle circled.

We both knew we had entered sacred space and were in the presence of Lady Death. And I realized I had been given the image for my Death card. Heron, the guardian, so sacred to me, laid to rest in a boat on the west side of the island, facing the Otherworld and ready to sail away — the mythic resonances still give me the shivers.

One year later, the body of the heron is still there. I don’t know who left it there or why, although I do believe they were honoring the spirit of Great Blue Heron. The neighborhood kids know it’s there — lots of people do — and yet no one has disturbed it. I feel very grateful for that.

This is one of those cards that draws me, rather than the other way around. The imagery that I chose is pretty much just as I experienced it that day. I added the mast and torn sail, ropes, floats and nets because I worried that the boat didn’t “read” as a boat without them — since I cropped the image, it could have been an old shack or anything, not necessarily a boat. I changed the eagle to a turkey vulture, for added symbolism, and added the sparkles on the water.

As I was meditating on the image and writing about it, I realized that the mast and sail formed a cross, which was unintentional but may be significant to some who see the card. I also realized that the coiled ropes look like snakes, that ubiquitous symbol of transformation, death and rebirth. The nets and floats suggest fishermen and fish, with all the attendant symbolism of the wounded Fisher King, the death and rebirth cycle of salmon, and the practice of using fish as fertilizer. My friend DragonSong came by as I was finishing up the image and mentioned that the floats suggested large eggs or pregnant bellies to her — something I definitely did not think of! I love the way that different people find what they need in Tarot images.

What do you see in this Death card?

{ 16 comments }

Lady Death

by Joanna Powell Colbert on May 20, 2004 · 2 comments

in Death & Dying, Living Mythically, Spirituality, Tarot

The Death card is currently on my drawing table, and as I work on composition and color and symbolic details, I’ve been thinking about my relationship with Lady Death.

The Death card in Tarot decks is one of those cards that always gets a bad rap in the mainstream media or in popular culture. Whenever it appears, it’s met with a sense of foreboding and fear. Remember when the snipers in Maryland left a Death card at the scene of one of their crimes? It even made the cover of Time magazine, if I remember correctly, in a rather lurid layout. Of course it turned out that the snipers really had nothing to do with Tarot — they apparently left the card because they knew it would frighten people, not because they had any affinity for, or knowledge of, Tarot. After they were apprehended, all references to the card seemed to drop out of the news stories. Reporters only focused on sensationalizing the Tarot Death card when they didn’t have anything more concrete to write about.

The Death card in a Tarot deck is one of my “touchstone” cards. I’m always curious to see how an artist interprets the edge of death and rebirth that this card implies. I tend to like the ones that don’t shy away from portraying how grim and final death can be, like the raven whose beak drips blood in the Greenwood Tarot. I don’t like the airy-fairy Death cards that show only rebirth or regeneration. You just don’t get one without the other. I think my favorite Death card is from the Motherpeace deck, which depicts a snake shedding its skin as it slithers through two trees, a skeleton nearby — truly a perfect graphic icon of death and rebirth. What is dead, is dead, and is left behind. What is new emerges, and moves on.

About ten years ago, I wrote an article for The Beltane Papers called “Dancing with Lady Death.” In it, I attempted to understand why Death had been such a strong presence in my life. Over a period of 25 years, I experienced four near-death experiences from illnesses myself, the death of my first boyfriend at age 18 in 1970, my mother’s death in 1984, my son’s death at age 15 in 1990, and my friend Helen’s slow death from breast cancer in 1994.

It’s been a long time since I’ve reread that article, and I’m not even sure that I want to. I’m very grateful that Lady Death has left me alone for the past ten years. And yet She still walks close by, as my father approaches his 89th birthday.

And She walks close by, in the knowledge that sudden unexpected death, or slow death by illness, can happen at any time to turn our ordered lives upside down.

When someone that you love dies, or when you are close to death yourself, the Otherworld opens up to you (or at least it can, if you don’t shut it down). For a time, you walk that edge between this world and the Other one. You see farther and more clearly. There’s no fuzziness about what is important and what is not. Phrases that have only been sentimental cliches in the past suddenly take on the weight of truth — cherish each day, don’t sweat the small stuff, nothing really matters but Love.

These are the gifts of Lady Death.

{ 2 comments }

Let Creativity Come First!

by Joanna Powell Colbert on May 17, 2004 · 0 comments

in Uncategorized

I’ve spent the last week getting caught up on personal business, doing work for clients, doing volunteer work for the two land trusts on the island, and working in the garden — trying to keep the mints, chamomile, thistles and horsetail from taking over the world. By Saturday afternoon, I was feeling pretty cranky because a whole week had gone by with very little time spent on artwork or writing. I have a full life, and I love each part of it, but this week I’ve got to switch those priorities around.

My mantra for the Taurus New Moon: Let Creativity Come First!

{ 0 comments }

Ravens and Froggies and Butterflies, oh my!

by Joanna Powell Colbert on May 9, 2004 · 0 comments

in Community, Nature

I caught a ride into town yesterday to go see our town’s first Procession of the Species — a parade of folks dressed up like animals and plants, celebrating the natural world. Down in Olympia, they’ve been doing the Procession for ten years, and now thousands show up for the event. I’m glad to have been here for the beginning of ours, and I’m already plotting my costume for next year!

It was so much fun to see friends and neighbors all decked out in sparkles and spangles and costumes made from recycled materials. There was a huge Raven riding a bicycle. His costume was made from black garbage bags, and he even had the Sun in his beak (which I think was a brass colored shower ring of some sort). There were many butterflies and lots of fish and quite a few sea turtles. My friend Michele, who raises sheep here on the island, was dressed as — what else? — a sheep. My other friend Betsy was dressed all in white, wearing a giant hat that appeared to be an amanita muscaria mushroom. That drew a few chuckles. And behind her, she towed a ten-foot-long banana slug. Now that is definitely Northwest! Maija walked along pushing a cart full of living bamboo, and holding sticks with paper butterflies attached to the end. “I’m a Nature Preserve!” she giggled. After arriving at the Marine Heritage center, the crowd of 500 or so danced and drummed along with a marimba band. Babies laughed, dogs barked, people grinned, and the world just got a little bit more colorful.

I gotta admit, I do love this town.

{ 0 comments }

The Wheel

by Joanna Powell Colbert on May 9, 2004 · 4 comments

in Tarot

Yesterday I finished my Wheel of Fortune card, which I’ve renamed, simply, the Wheel. In it, I show the seasonal wheel of the solar year as represented by a bigleaf maple tree in each season, the monthly lunar wheel with its eight phases, and the wheel of the zodiac surrounding those. If you’ve studied your solar and lunar cycles, you know that each of the eight moon phases corresponds to one of the eight holy-days of the solar year, and these are placed correctly on my Wheel card. The zodiac signs are in the right places too. For example, the Dark/New Moon corresponds to Winter Solstice, the darkest night of the year when the sun begins to wax once more. Winter Solstice occurs when the sun moves into the sign of Capricorn, and so these three — Dark/New Moon, Winter Tree, and sign of Capricorn — all line up on the card, and so on around the wheel. The cross-quarter days don’t have a tree on the card, but they are suggested by the “inbetween” moon phases — the Crescent Moon corresponds to Imbolc (Candlemas), the Gibbous Moon to Beltane, the Disseminating Moon to Lammas and the Balsamic Moon to Samhain (Hallowmas).

Implicit in these wheels is the idea that Nature Herself teaches us that all of life moves in a cycle, from birth to growth to fullness to release and death, and back to rebirth once again. Every point on the wheel is equal in importance, the dark and waning just as important as light and fullness.

I surrounded the wheel with a circle of prayer beads, inspired by Lunaea’s Goddess rosaries. Just as I believe that our future is not set in stone, but is malleable according to the choices that we make and our alignment with Spirit (God/dess), I also believe that prayer and magic can affect the turning of our own personal wheels. And so we see butterflies, those time-honored symbols of the soul, breaking free of the Wheel. There is a bit of Mystery here, is there not?

{ 4 comments }

The First of May

May 1, 2004

The fair maid who, the first of May Goes to the fields at break of day And washes in dew from the hawthorn tree Will ever after handsome be. – Mother Goose, as quoted on School of the Seasons Early this morning I rose, as I do each Beltane morning, and washed my face in [...]

Read the full article →