Memories and Ruminations
Belgrade, not long ago. Candles and wood and a tall opaque man who is nonetheless my friend. My cards on the table between us.
An energy in the room, rich and fragrant and mildly intoxicating. Like mulled wine, or sandalwood. Heaviness, but not unpleasant, like the heaviness of sunwarm sleep or the wood he crafts.
Beyond the room and its flickering light there is falling snow, and night and a ghostly forest at the edge of the fields. I can see it from the window. A silence, in the room and on the plain, a snow-silence, a wood-silence.
There's a hot drink in my hands the images of the cards are staring to dissolve, to flow. As I loosen my focus, the edges of my mind I can sense the threads of the reading take shape, follow each one, tasting it, feelig it, translating it for the man and the woman in the room.
I love these moments of quiet connectedness during a relaxed reading, feeling him, the shape of his life, of thier lives emerge like a developing photographs. Love tracing it with my mind the way a blind person traces a face with their hands.
He is not in the cards or in the room, in this reading my feelings are based on the absence of things, rather than their presence. He drifts without any real idea of direction. He flows the way tides do, he has no roots, no home, no real idea of purpose, or where he is going or how or why. The shapings he makes in the wood are the shapings of his own heart, each one like a dream or abstract art. He is closed down, withdrawn into himself and I find the shape for him, the card for him: The Hermit.
A perfect symbol. A man who walks through the desert alone, at night, only seeing by the lantern of the light he carries only that which is immediately in front of him. He follows no set path, he simply wanders from one place to another. The Hermit is a symbol of deep reflection, profound self-study and inner journeyings. Also isolation, loneliness, which is his shadow side.
A man closed down, shut within himself oscillating between his sensitivity and his stone face. And continuously just drifting along, following his own tides and the momentum of life events around him. Not really unhappy with this, he is a fish, and fish are content to drift. More often it's the people around them who go nuts with the frustration.
And he is not the only one in a desert. His desert is rock and stone, a mountain range. Mine is like Sahara, a dune sea, a landscape of harsh opposites. Belgrade, and the people there were an oasis. For the first time in years I feel it as a home, felt genuine happiness to be there, to be loved openly, generously, warmly. To feel loved.
But oases are where you rest, not where you live. For better or for worse I am doing my own wandering, but I know my purpose and direction just not where I am in the landscape of constantly shifting sands.
Crossing a desert that seems without end, where each day is as the last, where the summit of each climbed dune reveals only the other dunes still left to crest. Much more so than in recent years I think of myself as a nomad and I feel the aloneness of that.
An energy in the room, rich and fragrant and mildly intoxicating. Like mulled wine, or sandalwood. Heaviness, but not unpleasant, like the heaviness of sunwarm sleep or the wood he crafts.
Beyond the room and its flickering light there is falling snow, and night and a ghostly forest at the edge of the fields. I can see it from the window. A silence, in the room and on the plain, a snow-silence, a wood-silence.
There's a hot drink in my hands the images of the cards are staring to dissolve, to flow. As I loosen my focus, the edges of my mind I can sense the threads of the reading take shape, follow each one, tasting it, feelig it, translating it for the man and the woman in the room.
I love these moments of quiet connectedness during a relaxed reading, feeling him, the shape of his life, of thier lives emerge like a developing photographs. Love tracing it with my mind the way a blind person traces a face with their hands.
He is not in the cards or in the room, in this reading my feelings are based on the absence of things, rather than their presence. He drifts without any real idea of direction. He flows the way tides do, he has no roots, no home, no real idea of purpose, or where he is going or how or why. The shapings he makes in the wood are the shapings of his own heart, each one like a dream or abstract art. He is closed down, withdrawn into himself and I find the shape for him, the card for him: The Hermit.
A perfect symbol. A man who walks through the desert alone, at night, only seeing by the lantern of the light he carries only that which is immediately in front of him. He follows no set path, he simply wanders from one place to another. The Hermit is a symbol of deep reflection, profound self-study and inner journeyings. Also isolation, loneliness, which is his shadow side.
A man closed down, shut within himself oscillating between his sensitivity and his stone face. And continuously just drifting along, following his own tides and the momentum of life events around him. Not really unhappy with this, he is a fish, and fish are content to drift. More often it's the people around them who go nuts with the frustration.
And he is not the only one in a desert. His desert is rock and stone, a mountain range. Mine is like Sahara, a dune sea, a landscape of harsh opposites. Belgrade, and the people there were an oasis. For the first time in years I feel it as a home, felt genuine happiness to be there, to be loved openly, generously, warmly. To feel loved.
But oases are where you rest, not where you live. For better or for worse I am doing my own wandering, but I know my purpose and direction just not where I am in the landscape of constantly shifting sands.
Crossing a desert that seems without end, where each day is as the last, where the summit of each climbed dune reveals only the other dunes still left to crest. Much more so than in recent years I think of myself as a nomad and I feel the aloneness of that.