February 2011 -- 5; The Hierophant
You don't choose your medicine. It chooses you.
My words and lyrics seem to start off this month, too. Specifically 'nothing to surrounded me, keep me from my fears' and 'did you lay it on the line, did you make it count'. The cool soothing and tremors continued to peter out through my life relationship wise. This month saw the birth of Espoir II, born originally for Valentine's Day surprises (that would go horribly awry).
At the completely opposite end of the month, it was, also, the first month Espoir II became about nothing to do with surprises, with put on my face, the one that's gonna get me through another day. Which was when it got another purpose, even if I refused to touch it for a very long time after it, because personal space was such a betrayal to and of myself.
I was truly deeply oscalatingly emotional during this month, as the shock and pause of January wore off. With the next visit from my girlfriend, and Earl's cruise trip which had him out of the picture for nearly two weeks. A quote which summed up Earl returning from his long trip that month: "I wonder if it will be--can be--any more beautiful than this," murmured Anne, looking around her with the loving, enraptured eyes of those to whom "home" must always be the loveliest spot in the world, no matter what fairer lands may lie under alien stars.
-- Anne of the Island, L.M. Montgomery
I found one of my most favorite books of the year: If I Stay. A truly glorious thing happened this month though: It snowed. Lest you ever forget how I feel about snow, there is this for all time:
Goddess Grove had its Imbolc. It was a month with a lot of laughter and excess in the happier places in my life. Godiva was everywhere. I continued to be very much in love with my new job. It was a very Glamourkin heavy month, as well, amusingly. And the month I bought my Teavana Rhapsody for flowering tea (that I'm still carrying daily in my purse, and using every work morning, eleven months later).
The last day of February I wrote this, and I wish I could reach back and hug the myself of then:
I feel like I'm stuck trying to gather the shards of a great looking glass that has been smashed. But my skin parts, like butter, for each edge of the fragments as I collect them, getting lost in silence and drops of bright red blood, which are stolen from me as much as they are stains upon the once clear glass.
I never chose to give my trust, my faith. It's just there.
For everyone, everything, every moment, second.
And, in explosive, devastating quickness...gone.
Once it was all there. Completely overlooked and underappreciated as a given.
Then, I'm left trying to figure out how one ever chooses to put trust together. While the puzzle pieces are all falling off the table, out the warped frame.
~*~
Closing Thoughts
....I don't really feel like this card fit my month. Unless I want to say that all the lessons were there drawn for me in stone, quartered and blooded, for all the world to see, and I dispelled them, blew each one away like it was nothing more than grains of sand traced with an errant finger. Sometimes this card is seen as the first level of understanding. A warning to the querant that you need to reaxmine your understand of the meaning of things.
Maybe I did. Maybe I needed to learn to see and understand, more than having already learned to see or learned to understand. Every ripple and confused tear, every step where I struggled to try and feel like the girl I'd been only months before, but who was jagged and torn from the events of the previous month. Who beat herself up for not being able to just let go of that hurt, of being utterly ignored and snubbed into silence.
A silence I had not asked for, and that been dictated to another for me by someone else, a double edged sword when it became known. For feeling guilty for feeling betrayed by others, but also by myself. For allowing myself to have expectation or wanting and having expected more than could be given, even in terms of respect and consideration and maturity.
Sometimes it's talked about like the superego, too. The thing which shapes us, if at times in a super brutal fashion that is necessary to growth. And in that, February was. Quite brutal. And quite necessary. Especially with how certain decks link The Hierophant directly to the Ten of Swords (Ruin). Oh, this month. And oh, this year.
It feels like the battering of a sand storm just to reread it. Sometimes I wonder how any of you stood standing by just watching me. I want to apologize, and not all at once. I'm sorry for the length, but I'm not sorry for the lessons, or for the strength it gave me to make the second more important decision I'm living now, the one I've never had the strength to make or keep after I ended a relationship before.
Maybe I needed all of this, all eight months to come after this still, to know this truth I know now. Hold in my hand more fragile than anything I've held in a very long time. As My Wolf said once, as strong as china, and as fragile as steel. I know what he meant when he named as such again.