Reading of Portland’s Spiritual Climate 7/31/2013

Waning Influence: Nine of Wind (Nine of Swords)

Portland’s recent past has been characterized by feelings of fear and helplessness, and the inability to see clearly. This card is sometimes known as the nightmare card, which is connected to a more reassuring aspect; just as a nightmare is an illusion, so too are the fears that have been stirred up recently not truly real. They are products of our mind, not true threats in the world around us.

Personally, people are likely to have been revisited by old ghosts and demons. This has contributed to another aspect of this card, which is dramatic difficulty in clear communication between people and within groups.

We haven’t been hearing or seeing each other clearly; we’ve been seeing projections, like monsters from old movies superimposed in black and white over the actual people moving through our lives in living color in the present moment.

The Nine of Wind speaks to the deep power of the mind to create stories, dreams so compelling we inhabit them. This is a power that, in the recent past, we have been using unconsciously. We have not been fully engaged with the sharp clarity our minds are capable of. We need to reclaim this abandoned power, take up the swords of our minds and slice through the veil of frightening illusion with honest, intentional communication and fierce questioning of what we think we know.

Full Influence: Five of Fire (Five of Wands)

The fear and illusions of the Nine of Wind may be fading, but they’ve stirred up trouble in their wake. In the present moment, people are still reacting based on those fears. This looks like plenty of being being confused about what they want, jumping back and forth between different options, beset by internal conflict. There’s a lot of simmering resentment and frustration, the sense that roadblocks stand in the way of forward movement, and a tendency to blame other people

There’s the stymied desire for everyone’s passions to be in alignment. People have been thinking things like, “Why can’t we just all want the same thing?” or “Why doesn’t everyone just want what I want, which is clearly the best option?”

At heart, there’s a lot of pent-up desire for change, but this desire is split into many different fragments or factions and these are all working at cross purposes.

Waxing Influence: Brother Wind (Knight of Swords)

In the face of the Five of Fire’s frustrating gridlock, there’s a desire–growing larger and larger–simply to leave. Leaving might mean many different things, of course–physically going somewhere else, creating space in relationships, ending one’s participation in a job or shared project.

This card shares a suit with the Nine of Wind, which suggests that this desire to leave is motivated, at its root, by the false fears that started this chapter of our lives. We are facing the temptation to simply run away.

But this card has some paradox to it as well. Brother Wind’s fierce, drastic movement also has the potential to be liberating. He might not be running away but making a dramatic shift, moving his consciousness out of the feedback loop of helplessness and terror and towards new possibilities.

This process itself is a deeply scary one. To be Brother Wind, to strike out boldly into the uncertainty of airy realms is inevitably to confront fear. Specifically, fears of falling apart, losing stability, death (or deep change that evokes grief).

Brother Wind also heralds the possibility of taking new risks in communication, of speaking more bravely than we have before, of letting words take us someplace new.

That might be how to distinguish between running away because of fear and moving through fear towards growth: how much you’re speaking about your process and your fears and how much you’re holding in silence.

The other key to this card is choice. Brother Wind is coming to blow you fiercely in a new direction: where do you want to go?

The Oracle’s Advice: Resurrection (Judgement)

There’s something buried that needs to reemerge, something forgotten that needs to be remembered, some ghost that needs to be seen and welcome home.

There is something dead that needs to come back to life.

In the light of the call to Resurrection, the conflicts and confusion of the Five of Fire are revealed to be petty squabbles. More than this, they are blocking the path, obstructing the space through which new/old life needs to emerge.

The process of Resurrection can sometimes be a painful one. It can be a kind of shadow work, and what comes up is almost always a mixture of bliss and pain, old wounds and new blessings. Part of the work of this card is sorting through all this, determining which returned elements you want to keep and which you no longer need, adjudicating the proper placement of things.

But before any of that can happen we need to summon the lost back home. This is work that is beyond our human selves. We are being called to open to the yearnings of Spirit, to clear the way so that Life’s song can reach all the way into our depths, into the darkest, most forgotten corners of our souls.

We might need to sing along, to blow our own trumpets in the symphony-of-loving-remembrance. We certainly need to open up, to listen, to surrender our ideas of who and what we are, to be willing to be deeply changed. If we do, we will find ourselves revitalized, vibrant, full of each and every color, deeply and completely ourselves-in-our-bodies.

We will come back to life.