Tarot Tuesday: The Five of Disks

Old-growth tree-heart bared

Ladder through concentric rings

Body listening

Living my Four of Disks week, I thought about the Thoth deck’s power image of the moat surrounding a simple castle structure with four square turrets, or towers. I thought about the question: Where does the sun of your personal power shine?

And the answer manifested as a walk in the sculpture garden near my father’s house where I climbed up a ladder into the upper mushroom cap of a miniature tower house made by Bruce Johnson. There’s nothing quite like a Bruce Johnson, nothing quite like his massive sections of his salvaged old growth redwood tree trunks sheathed in layers of hammered copper.

Robyn and I climbed the ladder and up into the cap, sitting across from one another over the open wheel of the floor, our palms against the cool copper floor, looking out at the tiny yellow daisies below on the grounds through windows the size of a large match box.

That night as I fell asleep, I could still feel the dimpled copper, what it felt like when I leaned my face against the wall, and the heavy certainty of gravity pulling on my body as I climbed back down, the heavy certainty of the exposed heart of the redwood trunk surrounding the ladder.

Certainly the houses of art, tangible, I love, as much as the Poetry House Johnson made that used to be up at Paradise Ridge until it was vandalized. The other houses where the sun of personal power shines for me are the houses of words, online, where I work, day by day, little by little, including this one.

Tarot Tuesday: The Five of Disks

Fives can be about friction or sparring, internally or externally, and thus can be also about anxiety or projected conflicts or plain old worry. Five of disks, then refers to friction, fear or shifting of disks: objects, wealth, the body. In the Thoth deck, this card is labeled simply, “worry” though beneath the shifting disks we see a benevolent gold light present and coming up or down through the “ceiling” or “floor.”

When we look at the Rider Waite Smith deck, we can position ourselves within the card: Are we out in the snow, begging outside the church? Are we inside, enjoying the light, gazing back out of the stained glass windows?

Consider your current state of mind in relation to your material well being. Roof over head? Fear of not being able to keep roof over head? Are you metaphorically somehow exposed to the elements?

How can you position yourself to best allow the sun itself, the light of the church or your spiritual understanding fill you? Make a list of the shelters and material comforts available to you, including those temporarily available to you. Where might you take refuge, in which manner of company find loving companionship, if in need? Which companions of heart shore up your internal sense of abundance? Spend some time in the free gold of the sun, basking in its light.

Feel free to respond in comments here or to join the conversation at Tarot Tuesday’s Facebook page to share your word or image response.

Photos are by my poetry movie collaborator Robyn Beattie, with the exception of this one of the view from the top of the ladder inside of the Bruce Johnson sculpture (Root 101 Series, see below).

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Still at the top is a close up of one of Bruce Johnson’s sculptures in his “Root 101” Exhibit up at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, California.

Notecard to a Nursing Mother