A Tarot Spread in the Woods

I went for a walk into the forest a few days ago. This is a fir wood in the top of the mountains: there is the old, decayed stone-hut and I use to sit on a slab on the ground to think and enjoy the shadowy sunlight after a walk of about one hour to reach the place. My dog often comes with me. We don't live together, but I can say that our bond is special thanks to these wanderings in the woods, when I go to visit him and that part of my family. I had with me the Wildwood Tarot, an appropriate deck to the occasion and I drew three cards for a simple spread that might be read as either PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE or MIND, BODY, SPIRIT. I place the Body in the middle because it is the actual connector between Mind and Spirit. I'm in a moment of strong personal transformation and the deck answered me in a very curious, fitting way. Three "watery" cards came out, representing respectively a large, naturally enclosed water; water in a human container, resembling a liquid mirror; wild, streaming water.

The Kingfisher flies free on the clear pool, his eye pierce the surface and reach everything hidden below - there is no fear of truth, but a thirst for it. The Seer can close her eyes sensing the dark water below and achieving her vision. This is not the universal pool of the Kingfisher, but a very personal water - the revelation of one's own soul with its feelings and projections: something that needs to be recollected in solitude. The next step is letting go. The Otter is a joyful messenger of childhood, the possibility of jumping again inside flowing, powerful waters, falling in love with life. This is not a childish attitude, but the capacity to be faithful to intense and long-nurtured wishes - something that can happen only after having considered and contextualized one's path in the world. Truth, focus, discernment are the necessary premises to the immersion into the next stage of existence. They come subtle, vital, refreshing and also difficult to grab like water itself.
A calm pool, a mysterious water mirror, a fast, singing river that translate into these words - experience, learning, risk; or into these verbs - watch, feel, plunge.

Aengus, The Fool

Lucia Mattioli, Fairy Lights Tarot

 What's better than a post about The Fool, to begin my tarot blog?
Tarot is a journey and one that always make me think first of a poem by William Butler Yeats, The Song of Wandering Aengus, published in the book The Wind Among the Reeds (1889).

Here the protagonist, Aengus, is either the Irish god of love or the Fool, starting his travel through the hazelwood of knowledge and self-discovery. What he will find there is a peculiar kind of love: he will meet his heart's desire, his opposite and then he will have to pursue her in order to be a full person - the individual that truly finds and touches his own soul through the search for the loved and long dreamed other. The innocence of the Fool/Aengus is enlightened by the fire of imagination first, then from love, seen as the energy of revelation. The final image showing the apple trees of Sun and Moon, represents the marriage of the opposites, but it also can be read as a hint to the wonderful western garden of the Hesperides of Greek mythology, where the golden apples of immortality grow. Maybe immortality is just this gift: the full experience of one's soul.