When I pulled the Ten of Air this morning, I heard Ruth Barrett’s voice inside my head, singing this chant:
“Go to the very edge, where the old world ends
And something else begins,
Something else begins.”
Ah, such a perfect tune for this Dark Night of the Year.
All the Gaian Ten’s are cards of endings, with an implicit new beginning just around the corner, out of sight. The Ten cards are related to the Wheel (Major #10) with its themes of cycles, flux and transition.
“Canada geese fly in a V-formation during the fall migration. We can almost hear the chorus of honking. The familiar sight of geese flying south for the winter never fails to tug at our hearts, bringing a sense of impermanence and longing. In European tales of the Wild Hunt, it was said that flocks of wild geese or swans embodied the souls of the dead who flew through the winter night sky.” (From the Gaian Tarot companion book)
Since I’ve been meditating quite a bit on the ancestors this All Hallows season, I’m quite taken with the idea that flocks of wild geese were thought to embody the souls of the dead. Now, when I see them (or the wild swans that will soon be arriving in our fields to herald the coming winter), I think of them as metaphorical ancestors, flying from one world to the next.
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