rebirth
Honor Your Ancestors As The Wheel Turns
The Wheel of Fortune in the Tarot signifies change and transformation in our lives. We are now moving into a new season, but also other changes are coming. We can feel them! When we live close to the seasons and cycles of life, nature assists us through this transformation.
As the wheel turns, we come into the time now of Halloween, Samhain, Hallowmas, and then All Souls’ Day to honor our ancestors. Our elders are many: the ancestors, the wisdom keepers, our inner wise one, as well as those who give counsel and pass it on to those who seek them out. They are the healers of old and can come through as ancestors or guides.
These wise ones can slip between the worlds, transforming inner reality into outer reality, reminding us that we can too. They ask us: what do you want? What is your dream and vision? What’s holding you back? What are you willing to give up for something greater, a bigger vision? What needs to be healed? What would you do if you tapped into, and trusted your own wisdom?
Our European sister, the Baba Yaga, Hecate, the Greek Goddess of the Crossroads, is someone I deeply connect with, as is Mother Mary and Archangel Azrael. In my practice one of my specialties is working with those going through transitions and metaphorical crossroads of all kinds. Crossroads are places of power. It’s a place where we can give an offering of gratitude, or petition, or prayer.
At this time of the year the veil is thin, a time when we celebrate and honor our ancestors. There are many ways we can do this, for example by changing up our altars or creating a sacred space where we can display pictures of our loved ones, friends, pets, and adding things around it that they loved in this life, along with candles, and flowers.
Embrace The Many Blessings Of Autumn
As we approach autumn and transition through yet another season of beauty and wonder, let us reflect on our place within this most magnificent Universe. This beautiful time of the year is sometimes overlooked for its lack of summer and winter adventure. As it is neither hot nor cold, autumn brings us balance and provides us with the perfect climate for ‘cooling off.’
Metaphysically, this a period for each of us to step back and become more introspective, acknowledging the blessings that have been placed at our feet. This is also a time to peel away the old, to make room for the new. It is a time of self-renewal at a deeper level, that will guide us through the winter of our lives and ultimately into the newness of spring.
Science teaches that the cycles of the seasons occur as a result of our planet tilting on its axis, as well as its orbit around the sun. As the axis faces the Sun, our respective hemisphere celebrates the warmth of summer, while the hemisphere tilting in the opposite direction, away from the Sun, welcomes winter. This seasonal change, in turn, makes our days shorter and our temperatures cooler.
We can further observe other changes within the natural world around us, as vegetation slows down, trees lose their leaves, and animals scurry to prepare their nests and dens for winter’s dearth. But autumn is also a season of vast abundance, with the harvesting of a plethora of crops, especially here in North America, where much of the world’s staples ripen and fall at our feet.
Let The Tarot Speak To You
I can remember, like it was yesterday, the first time I picked up a deck of Tarot cards and it spoke to me. As I recall, it was the Four of Swords card that was my first introduction to the deck. What it revealed to me at the time was daunting. “You don’t do this often enough…and we are going to show you how,” the card said.
I was surprised and intrigued! So, I pulled another card. This time it was one of the Major Arcana cards. Death, to be exact. This time the card said, “Changes are coming, and you must do it and not be afraid. We will get through this together, but you have to let go of the old in order to embrace the new.”
This, mind you, was all happening during my first Saturn Return around age 29. I already had ‘all hell breaking loose’ as it was. I’d left a ‘good job,’ which I hated. My mother did not understand and, since she worked for the government, even called her friends at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)…because I was thinking of leaving town. I actually did leave, but turned around and came right back, but that’s a story for another day.
So, my Saturn Return was complicated enough, and it was about to get even more so. Talking Tarot cards, indeed! But so it was that they spoke to me. And that was how I got to know each of them, along with much further reading and studying, of course. But nothing can give you the true feel for a Tarot card, but a Tarot card itself.
The cards continued to communicate with me throughout the years, and eventually they decided it was time I share what they say with others. So, here we go with three of my favorite examples of what they have to say.
The Courage To Shed Our ‘Old Bark’
In recent readings, new romance has been indicated very strongly for one of my regular clients. This is a welcome new development, because for a long time, and to his annoyance, his readings tended to relate more to business than to affairs of the heart! He has been very open to new romance for a long time now, but it has been eluding him.
In many of his readings, his late father featured prominently and suggested that unresolved issues connected to his dad were actually impacting his self-worth. As a result, he also didn’t feel lovable or attractive enough to meet a life partner.
It seems strange though, that after reading for this gentleman for several years, he’d never mentioned his family. The subject only arose unprompted during the recent readings. This suggests that subconsciously he was ready to release that old baggage and to embrace positive change.
Because he was ready, we were discovering that it was important to now remove any deep-seated belief systems and blockages to his happiness, and for him to finally find a life partner who respected him, as opposed to the abusive relationships he’d known for years. I told him that he was like a tree shedding old bark!
This took me back years, to a time when I would help a former boyfriend, who was a horticulturist, with his seasonal work of pruning. He would climb the trees and prune those, and I learned to be quite the rose pruner at ground level.
Our Spiritual Contracts
Before we come into this lifetime, we design a soul contract. We choose a family that we want to be born to and we plan specific things that we want to accomplish, such as career, relationships, children, and so on. The contract is about our spiritual self and therefore also includes those things that we need to overcome and learn from.
Some of the more important things in your contract may come as a surprise, because often they are those things you do not want to do! This is usually a sure way of knowing that something is contractual. The things we prefer to do, or have done, we’ve already mastered, but the challenges and obstacles offer us opportunity to overcome our fears and anxieties, to step forward and learn more, to grow spiritually.
Some contracts are also much longer than others. Some of us remain here for a long time, while others do not. I doubt anyone knows for sure, but for the time that we are here, we must make every effort to learn and grow from every life experience.
This is also why some of us attract the wrong people, and constantly get into the wrong relationships? In these cases it is often your soul contract trying to teach you to speak up for yourself and claim your self-worth.
When old souls come in, usually nothing bothers them. They tend to take things with a grain of salt. However, when new souls come in, they are often very excited about so many things and can’t seem to get enough done.
Trusting The Process
We are never too old to learn new life lessons. I have been married for 38 years. I cherished our relationship. It was not perfect, but intentions were always good. I was treated very well by my spouse, and I returned the favor.
But I have to admit, I didn’t do most of the work around the house; my partner did most of it. It was not fair. However, it worked for us. I was also the outwardly more needy one. My partner’s needs were more disguised, but they were there.
The way we handled things worked for us, but then something happened recently that broke the trust between us. No, it was no due to an extramarital affair, nor any criminal activity. It was not due to any of the typical or usual things that negatively impact marriages, but it was pretty eye-opening nonetheless.
After this major wake-up call, we must now work on revamping our marriage, and it may, or may not, work out for us in the long run. This is a new journey for me. I am walking in the dark on an unknown path, and I feel lost, but I will have to learn to trust the process.
Change – The Sublime Season Of Necessity
We are part of a world that is continually changing. It’s happening in the very air we breathe. But why is change so difficult? For most people, creating major changes in their lives makes for a difficult and unsettling period. The reason being that attachment to familiar activities, along with the people, places, friends and family which have constituted one’s world thus far, increases the probability of not wanting to let go. But change is inevitable, and without it the pain endured by trying to remain unmoved is almost unbearable… growing in intensity with each day endured.
Nothing remains the same. Try as we might, we cannot continue to live in an unaltered world. Chaos is part of dissolving our imagined pristine worlds. Chaos fosters the creative change so vitally needed in our day-to-day living. In all actuality, people don’t change; seasons do. And, when the season of change is upon us, we are powerless in the face of it. To surrender totally remains the only option, if we are too prevent an extended, abysmal stay in an unwanted reality.
In order to stay alive, we must destroy the food we eat by consuming it, through the destructive process of assimilation. If we left it in an untouched form, by not digesting it and not having it changed into the chemical composition we need, we would literally starve to death. So too must we participate in the process of destroying some of the existing elements in our lives in order to continue living more fully. We can only procrastinate, hide, deny and resist for so long, until ‘creation of the new’ demands our response, with or without our approval.