After Clouds Sunshine

My brother had a band in high school, guitars, keyboards, drums, vocals, the whole deal. It was not a “hair band” or a “metal band”. Those concepts weren’t part of the lexicon of youth yet. These were guys who wanted to play rock music with electric guitars.

Dust Bunny Lenormand
(c) Copyright 2012 Marcia McCord

They played at our high school dances and were rivals to the other band in town. It wasn’t a rivalry like New York and Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles; it was something of a sneering truce. Since our little town in New Mexico was blessed with two dance bands, we had dances nearly every weekend.

“Noise,” Daddy said.

We laughed at him. It was our noise. Daddy had played oboe in high school, maybe a million years earlier. Although later famous groups would incorporate more than the rock band basics with stunning success, oboe was a laughable instrument when considered with guitars, drums and keyboards during our high school dance years.

I think those may have been the years when my brother hated having a little sister more than any others. After all, what could be more fascinating than slightly-older high school boys who sky-rocketed to instant stardom, locally of course, to a spirited teen-aged sister? And what could be more distracting during a band practice than a flirtatious and devoted younger fan? So, a lot of band practices happened somewhere else.

My best friend had an eye for the sometimes-drummer in the band, a slow-talking, muscular blond with an easy grin and fabulously restored 50’s sedan with leopard-print upholstery and the latest in technology, an 8-track tape. Steve would take us and half a dozen other kids to lunch in his car, usually the A&W where we would order taquitas and sodas and listen to his 8-track.

My friend was a Scorpio and was perfecting the art of being the Mystery Woman. An Aries, I was hopelessly lost in the concept of mystery and the feminine mystique. For me, yes meant yes and no meant no and if you liked someone, you said so. I was as subtle as a sledge-hammer.

I was never sure the guys liked me because of my grades. No one asked me, but if they had, I would have told them I thought it was just plain stupid to be afraid of me because of my I.Q. Well, OK, in retrospect I can see they had a point. “Don’t-hold-back-Marcia” would be a nickname I gained even after I had learned subtlety. But, hey, what would be so scary about a little witty repartee or verbal jousting or mental gymnastics? I mean, what else was flirtation, anyway? I wasn’t trying to win, for goodness’ sake; I was trying to keep up. I’m not sure many of the guys I knew got that about me. It was probably for the best though, like most things that seem like disasters in dating in high school.

I didn’t have a height requirement. At 5’ 1” I considered myself one-size-fits-all. At least I did until I was asked to dance with one tall cowboy one time when my brother’s band was playing. It was a slow dance and the guy was polite and didn’t try anything ungentlemanly. It’s just that he was probably 6’ 6” and I spent the entire song unable to hear a word he said. I was tempted to quip, “How’s the air up there?” Otherwise, I stared at the guy’s belt buckle which, since he was a cowboy, was at least a little more interesting than usual. At that point, I realized I probably did have a height requirement for a guy that was an upper limit of maybe 6’ 1”. No offense to the really tall guys, but when you have Mercury as heavily aspected in your astrology chart as I do, good grief, I want you to talk to me.



Art Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord



This led me to like two very different kinds of guys. I had a special affinity for the fast talkers, the Tarot’s Magician types. I loved to be entertained and some of my favorite guys were natural entertainers. I adored them, in spite of their weaknesses, which I would staunchly deny anyway. After all, the show must go on! Little did they know that it was actually the little slips, the betrayals of imperfections that made the performers dear to me.

The other kind of guy who caught my eye was the Cypher, the guys who said nearly nothing at all. It didn’t make sense, unless you realize that we pick our own Devil in the Tarot and life.



Art Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord



See, as my husband so kindly points out on occasion in the gentlest possible way, I made the classic “girl mistake.” I figured the quiet ones were thinking. It was a challenge to get them to open up and talk as they had never done before. After all, they would feel so much better, right?

It took me a while to really realize that my mother wasn’t just in a very bad mood all the time; she was an introvert. But I had used her example as a template and mistakenly applied it to the quiet guys. After all, my quiet mother was always thinking something even though she didn’t say much; these guys must be doing the same thing. It took me many more years after high school to realize that one of the reasons boys are quiet in high school is that they don’t always have a lot going on that would be stunning conversation with a girl they liked, or might like or even didn’t like.

So, like a muddy puppy, I would occasionally pounce on an unsuspecting quiet guy and try to get him to talk to me. Depending on exactly what bait he took, I would go away sooner or later and try to talk to some other more pliable subject. Or someone who spoke at all.

The guys in the band were just the perfect tantalizing snack for me as a mini-man-eater. They weren’t allowed to talk, not while they were performing. Lots of them hold their mouths funny when they are concentrating on guitar riffs or whathaveyou. It was like my own personal arcade, these guys in the band. I tried to get them to talk, flirt, sharpen their minds, trade bon mots, and engage in conversational duels. Most of the time, I found out, they hadn’t heard a thing I said; they were too busy looking at my chest.

Cripes, guys, get over the chest thing, I thought. The real circus is in the mind!

The naming of a band can be a tender thing. My brother’s band’s name was “After Clouds Sunshine.” It was named for a needlepoint motto from the previous century we found in Mom's antique shop and was just nearly-nonsense enough to pass for a band name. As good as any Strawberry Alarm Clock, we figured.

A long gap after school and New Mexico and high school dances were just a memory, I chanced to marry one of the guys in that band. At the time he had been something of a blend, a performer who talked in bursts, who seemed to be a leader of his friends, and who didn’t seem to mind the muddy puppy/talking thing I did. But neither of us was the person we had known when we dated in high school and it was, alas, a mistake to marry.

And yet, like my Dust Bunny Lenormand cards of the Clouds and the Sun, while happiness was not something he and I found with each other, only the memory of ourselves when we were young and full of hope and little understanding, after the clouds of our failed relationship, I did, after all, find sunshine with my adorable Hubs who is both Magician and Cypher and just the right height, a man who brings me laughter every day. And he has the most boring belt buckles.

After clouds, then, finally, there was sunshine.

Best wishes.

Thanks, Steve

As I sit here during Day 2 of a long software implementation, I remember that I have Steve Jobs to thank for this. A long time ago when I still wore short dresses and high heels, my first job out of college was as a legal secretary. Four years of college to become an English teacher and the job I landed paying 50% more than the nearest teaching job was one that required my high school typing class and my solid Catholic grade school grammar. But the senior partner was a quirky guy named Troy who was trying to get an Apple computer to drive an IBM typewriter. This could be fun.

He and one of his clients had this contraption set up in the little law library at the back of the offices. Troy’s wife Jeannie refused to have anything to do with it, seeing only money being flushed away on expensive gadgets with no new money floating in. Office managers have to think that way. And Troy’s favorite legal secretary Sue likewise declined the opportunity to dip a toe into what felt at the time like science fiction. I was the new kid and basically it was my job to do what Jeannie and Sue didn’t want to do. But it paid so much better than the teaching job I had worked so hard to qualify for.

Even before I went back to college to get a second bachelor’s degree in computer science, I was pretty sure that Apples and IBM’s had just enough of a different philosophy to make this marriage a rocky one. The three of us however tinkered away like mad scientists, interrupted from time to time by real legal work and Jeannie’s increased annoyance at kids playing with toys.

Needless to say, Troy, his friend and I did not become famous for the invention. It worked, in a way, but really was better at proving a concept than being a practical solution. It did serve, however, to pave the way for my later career as a programmer, then database analyst, then the long dark years in technology management and finally emerging as an analyst in my present job. It gave me the “tab A, slot B” background for understanding the inner mysteries of Computer Magic and it also gave me the confidence to know that the machine is only as smart as you tell it to be. As a programmer and DBA I later gained an appreciation for Divine Intervention in the world of computers, but for the most part there was comfort in the binary “it’s either on or it’s off” simplicity of the computational life.

Naturally, it’s not that simple any more. The more stuff you plug into the chain of things between your question and the answer you’re looking for on a computer, the more complex that simplicity has become. I laugh just as hard as you do (or not) at the promise we made to unsuspecting non-techies that computers were going to make our lives easier. I laugh every time one of the cats walks across my husband’s laptop and hits the little setting that disconnects him from the network. I laugh when he roars and whines that his computer is broken. I laugh when I walk into his office and reach forward with one finger, like a magic wand, to press the one little button that solves his problem while he glares at me in disgust and disbelief. Magicians aren’t always appreciated, Mr. Jobs. I’ll bet you learned that too. Maybe we shouldn’t laugh when we do these things. But sometimes it’s funny.

Tea Tarot
(c) Copyright 2011 Marcia McCord



“See that little blue light-y thingee?” I ask in my best Goon-techno-speak. He’s a people person, not a computer person. “You’re gonna wanna make sure that stays blue and if it doesn’t, just touch it with your finger.” This bit of wizardry repeats itself because it is repeatedly lost. I find he doesn’t hear as well when he’s at his wits’ end. I’m pretty sure I have the same trait so I don’t actually mind.

Of course, I’m really only on the fringe of being a real geek. Oh, once, a long time ago in an Illinois far, far away, I lived in the belly of the beast. I worked for a major Midwest insurance company who at the time loved its technical people. You got a rose on your birthday. You could pick your Christmas present from the company out of a catalog. The company had a private park with tennis courts, a small lake, volleyball courts, picnic areas and golf course. I traveled to exotic places like Hartford, Connecticut and Chicago for more intense IBM training, only to learn, like much of life, that if you clean up after yourself once in a while and vacuum out the dust-bunnies, your household and your computer both seem to run more smoothly. In turn for these marvelous perks, I pulled so many all-nighters recovering databases that the IBM guys thought I might have the most experience of anyone they knew performing that little task. They quickly figured out how to automate it with tools and so my dubious glory was short-lived. I think my record was 43 full forward recoveries on the Big Iron. By then I was a long way from Steve Jobs’ idea of computing accessibility to mere mortals.

And then there was the dirty little secret. While I loved computer fire-fighting and had branched out into what I thought of as “preventative design” to keep others’ really good ideas from going horribly wrong with one little oops, I became bored. Bored! How could I be so ungrateful? The career that more than doubled my salary a couple of times became routine. I could recover mainframe databases in my sleep. Well, I kind of had to because most of the time it was over night so that the business day wasn’t interrupted.

I realized that I could concentrate on customer service, which I loved, or “chase” technology and continue to keep up with whatever the latest sexy trend in languages and hardware and database design caught the fancy of the gizmo guys. I loved all that relational vs. hierarchical debate and how far to go with normalizing data. But I wanted it to work, you know? I wanted it to be useful, to make people’s lives better. It wasn’t just a toy to fiddle with in the law library.

So I gave up trying to be the latest in techno-fashion and concentrated on the folly of trying to make customers happy. Ever after I have spent a lifetime of being misunderstood by my bosses, slugged by the “patients” while packing them into the ambulance and attempting to translate technical terms into something that makes sense to people who have better things to do than try to understand what a dad-blasted machine is thinking.

Here’s just a little tip for people hoping to make a career out of technology and customer service: Please, whatever you do, limit your expectations of gratitude from those you are saving. The Magician is so often considered a trickster, a liar, a showman, and a thief by his admirers. Somehow, it never occurs to many people who are your loving customer base that if you have an ability you might choose to use it for good even if you had the opportunity to do otherwise. You may spend a lifetime being needed but never trusted fully. You must remember that a Magician is no one without his audience and you need them as much as they need you. That’s the good news and the bad news.

For that, I’m happy we had a Jobs. RIP, Steve.

Best wishes.

Mercury Retrograde

I just won a contest for having the best Mercury Retrograde story! It’s a lot like winning the Darwin Award but on a much smaller scale. For one thing, unlike the Darwin Award, there isn’t a death penalty.

First, for those of you who don’t get what Mercury Retrograde is, it’s a term from astrology. Those of you who never got beyond, “Hey, what’s your sign?” may not grok this right away, but basically we have all the signs and all the planets in our chart. It’s not like they go away on our birthdays or any other day for that matter.

About three times a year Mercury appears to stand still or go backwards in relative motion to the earth. The planets don’t actually stand still; it’s the “in relative motion to the earth” that’s the key phrase here. It isn’t only Mercury that does this but Mercury gets talked about the most. You know how people talk about more crime and crazy stuff happening with the full moon? Well, some swear by it and some seek to prove that no more crime or crazy stuff happens then than any other time. But people still seem to note those times.

Mercury Retrograde periods are something like that but it’s not crime, at least major crime, and it’s not crazy stuff. It is little stuff that could send you over the edge, though. It usually has to do with Mercury-related topics like communication, electronics, new purchases, access to things, shipments, that kind of stuff. And during the retrograde times, people tend to be more aware of things going awry, snafus, if you will. And in fact, it also has to do with the “if you will” part. Mercury is identified with the Magician in tarot, presto, change-o, illusions, ability and the statement, “I will.” It’s the can-do card. In fact, it’s the ‘can do it in front of people’ card because the Magician is a bit of a showman. His number is 1. His cartoon character could be Thumper in Bambi. Thumper’s best quote in the movie is the ice skating scene where he zips across the freshly frozen pond ice shrieking for joy, “Look what I can do!” I love Thumper.

The Magician grows up to be a wizard after he gets over his Sorcerer’s Apprentice phase in youth. You see him more clearly next in the tarot as The Hermit. After he’s mastered the arts and tools ‘as above, so below,’ he retreats for a bit of introspection. Just being able to do something is not enough. How many times have we shaken our heads at youthful enthusiasm and hoped they will learn to use their force for good instead of evil? For instance, just because you can drive, should you? But the Magician is focusing on the “can” part of things in the first numbered card of the major arcana. He not only believes he can, he really can do it, whatever it is.

So just because the Magician can do it, should he? And that combination of showmanship and a dash of moral ambiguity gives him his Trickster reputation. So he is also Coyote in First People’s stories, an able magical creature with wonderful talents that you sometimes trust and sometimes don’t.

People have a natural mistrust of abilities beyond their own. It’s not so egotistical as it is just plain experience. If you’ve never seen something before, do you trust it immediately? Our natural case of the heebie-jeebies is part of that ol’ lizard brain telling us Yellow Alert just in case the new shiny or fuzzy thing has teeth and likes to eat people. Approach with caution. Curiosity is what we’re all about, but the point is to live through the experience.


Magician, reversed, from Victorian Trade Card Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord


When the Magician is upside down, or in tarot talk reversed, something is stopping him from doing what he can do. Or, the Trickster side is coming out. Things don’t go as planned. Unexpected results from your usual can-do may occur, but they are usually on a small scale. We’re not talking The Tower here. This is just the stuff that will drive you nuts. If it really is the little things in life, Mercury Retrograde is a time when those little things mean frustration, exasperation, errors in communication, etc.

Our current retrograde period lasts through Christmas. Think of all those fun electronic gizmos people give and get for Christmas. And the calls to the help desks for assistance when the durned thing doesn’t do what the instructions say. Instructions not exactly in English? Tab A, Slot B but there is no Tab A on your whatsit? You mean THAT is the On button? Oh, fresh batteries. I should have known. Yup, that’s Mercury territory. On hold for five and half hours with the help desk only to have the help desk person accidentally hang up? Mercury Retrograde. Your Magician is standing on his head. And he’s probably laughing. Funny guy. Ha ha.

I’m hoping Mr Mercury calms down for me but I wouldn’t put money on it. In my horoscope chart, Mercury is my rising planet, the first one to get over the horizon when I was born, and in my first house of self. Mercury is something of a big deal in my chart, so funny little things like the typical Magician reversed/Mercury Retrograde stuff could affect me personally a little more than other people. At least, that’s how they read it. I’m more likely to notice those little things. Good news, I’m more likely to think of them as funny, too.

My winning entry for the “retrograde-est” Mercury went like this. Theresa Reed, also known as The Tarot Lady, posted an offer for a free tarot reading to the author of the best entry on her Facebook page for a Mercury Retrograde story. Here’s my post:

It's the little things that send you over the edge. My 85-years-young friend has locked herself out of her house twice since the Merc Rx and crawled in through the window to get back in (pretty good). My husband could not get his electronic key to open his car, called AAA and they determined there was nothing wrong. Nothing. The alarm company called for routine maintenance via the phone, which hung up on us twice, then, finally, to diagnose an issue, I had to climb onto the washing machine. I told the tech at the alarm company that if she heard a scream, it was only me falling behind the washer and in that case she should call emergency to rescue me. Except for the constant laughter, we completed our mission unscathed, but the imagined picture of a 56-yr-old woman climbing onto her washer was just too much for the tech to keep a straight face. The housekeeper almost walked in on me when I was just out of the shower and not ready for guests. I got to the door on time to keep it closed, barely. Pun intended. He wouldn't have been phased though. And, finally, I figured out the reason I'm so out of synch with one of the shops where I read is that...I'm not on their mailing list!!

Oh and when I tried to post this, I had to close my browsers and relaunch Facebook!

I feel like Queen for a Day because my sad story won the clap-o-meter but in this case it was the laugh-o-meter. Sometimes I think, because of the strong influence of Mercury in my chart, I gravitate toward this kind of thing. And, like the Magician and his audience, even when these little things don’t work exactly as planned, at least I’m entertained.

My prize for winning The Tarot Lady’s contest is a free reading over the phone. Hmm, you know, phones are covered by Mercury too. I think I’ll wait until the Trickster goes direct before I collect.

Best wishes!

The Incompleat Workes of Beth the Jester

Oh, wow, I’m breathless! I just received my latest Beth Seilonen decks, among them, the Tarot of the Red Jester. And I also just received the originals of a deck not otherwise published, Owls in the Night. Beth lives and breathes art and tarot in Maine. I would like to say I’m one of her oldest fans, but I think there are people older than I am who love her work too. At least I hope so.

I first saw mention of her work on Aeclectic Tarot where some of her other fans were oooh-ing and ahhh-ing over her decks. I had to see what the fuss was about. And what a delight! Now, I know that there’s a time and place for those bite-you-in-the-neck-scream-and-swoon decks; I have those too, trust me. Even the relentlessly optimistic have a dark side. But Beth’s work fills a gap in the whimsy department like no other tarot artist. So I’ve become one of her frequent patrons of the arts.

Besides those two new arrivals, my collection of Beth’s work is, to my mind, small: Another Way, Arcana Cats, Fishy Tarot (true, I’m a fish-nut but I love these fish), Foxy Arcana, Funky Lighthouse, the incomparable Isabel Snail, the Pink Arcana, Purple Penguin, Home Sweet Home, Split View, Tree Women, Watchers, Whimsy Tarot, Witches II and Jester’s Tarot (not to be confused with Tarot of the Red Jester). It is by no means a complete collection! Yet to be snagged are The Maine, Sun Conure, Symbolically Simplistic, Hues, Sails, Baby of Thine, well, good grief, you guys, just go look at all this lovely stuff! http://www.catseyeart.com/index.html

Beth’s decks aren’t just whimsy and color. Her trees bear messages of the harm we do to the environment, the preciousness of our earth, the delight of life and the enormity of circumstance as viewed by the individual. Take a close look at her Watchers and you’ll start looking over your shoulder. Her Tree Women have deep roots. Even bouncy little Nestor the Jester in the Pink Arcana shows the emotion and ambiguity of the tarot much deeper than his pink rolly-polliness may at first glance convey. The Jester makes us laugh, but stay a moment because he (or is that she?) makes us think too. The Jester plucks the conscience of the king as Shakespeare might suggest. Even slow-moving, unsuspecting, gentle and delicate Isabel Snail can ooze up to rest on the wrong golf ball of life with dire consequences. As in that funny-but-true song, “Sometimes you’re the windshield. Sometimes you’re the bug.”

Beth’s limited edition decks are easy to read with but personally, I don’t usually want to take the risk of ruining them with shuffling and use. I do like to get them out to admire and meditate. Isabel Snail’s Tower feels just like October 2002 for me. I can still feel that *whoosh* of the wind I caught just before life hit me right square in the snail shell. The Foxy Arcana “Yearn” shows we all have dreams, the fox and the chickens: If you have sweet little dreams, you sleep; if you have obsessive dreams, you’re up all night.

Just this past weekend, though, I broke my own rule about reading with Beth’s cards. Owls in the Night is so tiny (most of Beth’s decks are “normal” playing card size, but the Owls deck is a bit smaller) that it easily slips into my purse along with what seems to be several hundred pounds of other stuff in there (the Hubs swears this is where the missing Mr Hoffa may be…gotta love those vintage Dooney & Burkes for durability). I read for a private party, some delightful ladies, one of whom had been the successful bidder on my silent auction offering at the Benicia Vallejo Humane Society’s Barkitecture fundraiser. Our hostess plied me with the always-welcome endless glass of water and a glazed donut, plus treated me to a break between readings with a walk in her backyard full of roses and a glorious view of the Carquinez Straits. As a special treat, each sitter got to pick an owl’s card as their closing message for the day. It ended what might have been a “heavy” session on a light note.

Each of Beth’s decks has come with its own hand-decorated box and usually a little drawstring pouch. They are generally laminated, numbered, signed and easy to hold. Beth’s note cards are nearly as much fun as her decks. And, with Beth’s permission, I wanted to share some examples here with you.

The best news of all is that Beth appears to be nowhere near the end of her creativity with tarot. Her Red Jester comes in two alternatives, true to her tailored to the customer’s wish, in its limited edition. For those who want only to be guided by the image, there is the choice of having the card interpretations printed on additional cards supplied with the deck. For those collectors who want to preserve both her images and words together on each card, there is the choice to have the Red Jester “with interpretation.” In addition, there’s a silk cloth, 11” x 11” in choice of 4 colors. I picked “with” and red, being subtle in my collecting.

I’m quite pleased to note that we have available to us here the (happily) Incompleat Workes of Beth the Jester, a whimsical Maine artist and mom, with wonderful new visions of the funny, scary, angry, sad, joyful and loving world of tarot. Encore! Encore! May your inks and watercolors never run dry!

You can find Beth’s decks through this website: http://www.catseyeart.com/index.html, on Etsy, on eBay and if you’re really nice, she’ll accept your friend invitation on Facebook. Please write to her to encourage her to come to this year’s BATS (Bay Area Tarot Symposium) too!

**

Psst! Registration for BATS just opened and they accept PayPal. The dates are August 28-29, 2010 in San Francisco. It’s loads of fun for tarot enthusiasts and always features fabulously informed experts and a luscious marketplace. For more information and registration, go to http://www.dodivination.com/sf_bats



Best wishes!

At the Magician’s Table

I like doing new things. It could be the Aries in me. My new thing this past weekend was teaching a class in beginning tarot. And, “Oh, me of little faith!” I was prepared to cancel the class the day before since there were no advance registrations. I knew it might happen that way because people who take tarot classes may not want to start at the very beginning, just getting to know the 78 cards. I figured there might be more interest in my fourth class scheduled this year on beginning reading or perhaps the 3rd one on creativity and tarot.

My prior week had been difficult. My dear friend and boss at my day job had had an accident much more spectacular than my bathtub halfpipe and had sadly not stuck the landing. She “landed” instead in the hospital and out on disability for at least a couple of weeks. We got the word out, sent flowers and presents, kept up with her situation and made sure the team was still running smoothly.

Add to that business travel to the “Mothership” for meetings and software releases,  plus the fact that the software release lasted much longer than anyone had predicted.  Well, by 2 pm on Sunday, an hour before my class was due to start, I was, I thought, drained of energy and intelligence. I had been up at 6 am working each day all week and all weekend and somewhere in there, I flew to southern California and back to northern California.

Then Sunday afternoon I got the call from Angel Heart 4 You (501 First Street, Benicia, CA, 707-745-2024). There were two people who had come in for my class! There’s nothing like mild panic for that extra power boost to get you through the day. Phone Call gives you wings, too!

Quickly I dressed, did what I could to make myself presentable, grabbed decks, printed my bibliography and took off to teach Beginning Tarot – Air: An Introduction to the 78 cards. I spread my own Celtic sarong (now there’s a mixture of cultures!) onto the plastic topped table. I set my course materials and decks of cards down. I grabbed a cold bottle of water from the little refrigerator in the back of the shop. I took my deep breath of fresh air and settled in. I was ready. Since I had brought several versions of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, a glance at the box of each of these showed me the familiar cover picture of The Magician.

Pamela Colman Smith’s depiction of The Magician shows him at his table. By the way, “him” is ambiguous in the RWS deck for The Magician. I learned at the BATS tarot symposium that Pamela’s model for the Magician was her friend and then-famous stage actress Ellen Terry, as celebrated and idolized in her own time as any star today. In my opinion, the best cards contain ambiguity. It is that doorway where intuition and spirit can enter. Otherwise, we’re reciting from a book.

The Magician’s table is set with his tools of alchemy: a sword for air, a wand for fire, a pentacle or coin for earth and a cup for water. The ancients believed that these things in proper combination could create anything. We remember them mostly for the pursuit of turning these basic ingredients into gold. The Magician is ready, in his robe of red and tunic of white, with roses and lilies in front of the table, magic wand (or is it a scroll?) in one hand pointed to the heavens and his other hand poised to the ground. As above, so below. The Magician says, “I WILL.”

This isn’t the child’s defiant, “I will, TOO,” but the statement that the all-important fifth element, the one we can’t touch, of spirit and intent work at the table to combine, tinker, analyze, demonstrate, distill, translate and otherwise affect inanimate objects and unseen forces of nature to make, well, magic of a sort. For a fun take on the fifth element, see the movie by the same name with Bruce Willis, a personal fav.

Sure, the accidental mixture of water and earth is mud, but add the spirit of intent and will, and man can make these into clay, or better still, find naturally occurring clay. Add fire and/or air and the clay becomes hard and the object becomes useful to man, a brick, a vessel, a tile, or artistry. We have the will to manipulate, in that word’s most neutral sense, the world to suit our purposes. The Magician doesn’t tell whether the purposes are worthy or not. He does have the tools and knowledge at his disposal and he calls upon higher power to assist in his efforts. He is ready.

I must confess one of my favorite depictions of The Magician isn’t in tarot at all, but in the Walt Disney movie Fantasia. Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice decides he’s ready for some real action in the magic department while the Sorcerer is out. Soon the castle is flooding and the mops and brooms are in a frenzy to clean up before the boss gets home. It is somewhat reminiscent of my childhood. Sometimes, the apprentice is ready, sometimes not. Naturally, I was hoping my magician moment wasn’t going to flood the castle.

And there I sat at my table with my Magician’s tools, hoping to call upon the alchemy of translating pictures, words and ideas into understanding for my two students. I loved the fact that this first class was intimate. Lynn and Janet were fun, interested and not afraid to ask questions. Only time will tell if my efforts and theirs will be successful. It’s a lot of information to absorb. Carol, the shop owner, said they expressed enjoyment and enthusiasm at the end of the class. Whew, no flood! I never cease to wonder at the magic of learning.

The next class in Tarot Basics – Earth: History, Myth and the Tarot will be on June 6, 2010, from 3 pm to 5 pm (or longer if we all agree) at Angel Heart 4 You, 501 First Street, Benicia, California. To sign up in advance (very much appreciated), please contact AH4Y at 707-745-2024. You need not pay in advance to enroll.

Best wishes.