The Hanged Man Rx

• Powerlessness

• Sacrifices made in response to other’s wishes and whims

At 48, Morgan’s life reeked of disillusionment.  Having followed the well-trodden path of an unhappily married middle-class career woman, she’d tried hard to convince herself that her life had been fulfilling. But those noxious questions, “Is this it?  Is this all there is to my life, this meaningless round of betrayal, of decisions made for me without consideration for either my whim or my will?” thrust themselves far too frequently into the forefront of her mind.  ‘For the most part, I’ve been content’, she said.

“Liar!” her newly awakened inner voice whispered.  She ignored it.

She and Finn had all the material indicators of success, but Morgan’s internal world was a barren place indeed.  Every so often, Finn would drive off with some young thing named Candi, or Misti or Brandi.  This time it appeared that he’d gone for good. Morgan was shattered because, in spite of everything toxic in her marriage, she just couldn’t gather the reserves required to repair her damaged self esteem, jettison her feelings of worthlessness, or transform her belief in the fundamental meaninglessness of existence.  “I was happy,” she insisted, peering into her rapidly emptying glass.

“Liar!” the voice chanted louder.  Morgan dumped it into her overflowing mental garbage bin of half-rejected truths.

When she looked in the mirror at the woman with the expensively cut and coloured hair, she wondered who this concocted being was. Acid etched lines of age appeared like ravines in which the rotting corpse of her youth had been discarded.  No longer was she the bright young thing who smiled at her from old photographs.  That girl grinned with her hopes and dreams still sparkling in her eyes.  “I should be proud of how I look.   My lifelines are my story, but I hate them. I hate me!  I was happy!”

“Liar,” droned that harping, insistent voice! Morgan thrust it away.

Her friends spoke their smiling falsehoods, “You’re still young and beautiful, Morgan!”  

“Still young and beautiful!”  Scorn dripped poison from Morgan’s mirrored tongue.  Her confidence ravaged image whispered back, “Ugly, old, useless!”

Those same friends disappeared rapidly - Finn’s friends.  They treated her as a bearer of a contagious disease called ‘divorce’.  She saw the multiple rebuffs as extra evidence of her irredeemable worthlessness. 

Morgan raged drunk around the house, “I sacrificed MY life for that bastard. I hate him … I love him … This is just another one of those times.  He’ll be back,” she sobbed, entangled by her own wounded history.

“Liar!”

She shoved the word away, resenting how it sent shivers of relief up her spine.  “I’m supposed to be tormented.  You don’t just erase twenty-six years of marriage with a snap of your fingers; a twelve month wait; an argument over the division of assets; and a  ‘Goodbye, I hope I never see you again’ at a courtroom door.  I’m just not yet ready,” Morgan spoke stubbornly.  “I’ve given up so much to live Finn’s life”.

Deathly silence echoed hollow in her head as she finally heard the meaning of her words. She tried to cover by mumbling, “I can’t blame him.  It’s my fault”.

“Liar!” repeated that self-mocking, scornful voice with its persistent bullying truths.

“I’m scared and scarred and I don’t want to change anything.” Morgan yelled. “I’m afraid of discovering that I am nothing!”

“Liar!”

“Oh, just shut the f*ck up!” she shrieked, pouring herself another drink.

 “Getting drunk won’t help!”

“Always has before!” Morgan slurred.  She decided to die.

Fumbling, she strung one of Finn’s ties from a stair rail. “How symbolic,” she slurred, downing a couple of Diazepam with the last of the Scotch.  The tie came loose the moment she fell forward to choke herself. “Bloody hell, I can’t even hang myself properly”. 

All of a sudden Morgan began to laugh, rolling around the floor, hysterical tears running down her cheeks, a sense of release so strong that she bellowed, “That’s it.  Time to break free of this self-sacrificing bullshit.  Time to rewind twenty-six years.  I’m going to India”.  For the first time in decades, Morgan felt strong as she vomited and then fell semi-comatose on the hall carpet, Finn’s tie draped decoratively around her ankles.

Three of Cups

• Celebrations

• Alcohol abuse

• Co-dependent relationships

• Mutual support between women

When Morgan met Finn at a post graduation party, she’d been planning to back-pack around Asia before she settled down to the business of Life!  She didn’t know yet what she wanted. She’d worked in the café at Uni, waitressed at night, saved enough for a round-the-world flight, some extra cash, but not enough to keep her options open.  She’d planned on working for another year now that uni was over, and then go, firstly, to India.

Somehow Finn with his hypnotic eyes, his towering intelligence, his humour and captivating charm had washed away those desires.  Made vulnerable by her indecision about her future, she lost her ability to know where she ended and where he began.  Melded together like heat melts sand into glass, Morgan was manufactured into a pretty object for Finn’s pleasure - just as fragile, just as easily broken.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love Finn, even in the bad times, but that ache to travel was an irresistible ever-weeping wound.  She’d come to recognise bouts of travel-thirst as precursors to increasingly more self-destructive periods of depression and drunkenness. They chewed at her vitals like hyenas howling maniacally tearing into rotting kill.  She’d lost her inner voice.  She had slipped her tarot deck into the dark recesses of an unused cupboard where it lay neglected, hidden for a quarter of a century. Finn objected to such ‘superstitious twaddle’.  She ached to feel the cards in her hands.

So there were the drinks, all the parties they’d held for no particular reason.  For Morgan they represented actions designed to hide her misery.  For Finn, they were an opportunity to flirt; to conduct affairs.  So she drank too much and her friends were really Finn’s friends.   So rapidly enmeshed in his life, she’d let go of her own, except for Kate.  Kate refused to be discarded.  She’d remained constant with her letters from different climes and it seemed, from different times - poignant reminders of lost opportunities and lost dreams, of being trapped, of travel and tarot.

Rarely did Kate land on her doorstep, but when she did she smelt of exotic places.  She dressed in eccentric clothing, jangled with striking jewellery, her back-pack always filled with unique treasures.  How Finn hated her.  Kate appeared oblivious but wasn’t.  She only ever stayed a few days before disappearing again into other worlds lost to Morgan by marriage.  Those brief times with Kate were real celebrations which fed an aching need within her to keep alive the fading memories of her dreams.

Having decided to live, Morgan signed everything that would release her.  Everything was sold, everything that had seemed real and stable and solid was going, going, gone - in spite of Finn’s now strenuous objections.

“It’s my time,” she whispered into the hush of the near empty house. Kate emailed her delight.  It was reason indeed to celebrate.

Seven of Wands

• Standing strong against opposition

• Fighting for one's spirit, one's ‘essential’ life

• Determination to win against all odds

Finn hit the roof. “What the hell do you mean you’re going to India?  Have you gone completely nuts?  Is this some kind of peri-menopausal madness?”

“If you’d care to remember”, Morgan replied coldly, “What I do is actually none of your business and longer”. Morgan stepped backwards instinctively out of the heat of Finn’s volcanic rage. 

“Divorce or no divorce, you will always be my business.”  Finn seethed.

Morgan spoke softly but resolutely.  “No Finn, I am not ‘your’ business.  I go where I choose.

“So that’s why you divorced me, to run away on some hair-brained trip.  With Kate no doubt.  Probably her idea! She was always a bad influence on you.  I’ve warned you time and time again, but did you ever listen to me?  No, of course not … I’m only your husband after all.”

Morgan sighed.  It had always been this way.  How easily he could twist truth, transforming it into some bizarre, implausible fabrication which wormed its convoluted way past rational argument.  His histrionics and narcissism left her teetering on treacherous earth-quaking ground, unsure whether her next words would plunge her into chaos.  But no more!

Inside the apprehension and terror still churned but she knew that unless she stood staunch against him, she would be lost.  She showed Finn the door.

Suddenly her lost ‘friends’ were calling, suggesting that she needed to seek psychiatric help.  She hung up on them.   And Mindi … even Mindi!  Morgan had just emptied her pack for the fifth time after trying unsuccessfully to heft its appalling weight onto her shoulders.  While in the grips of decision-making about what to leave behind, the phone rang.  Distracted, she heard a tight tiny voice cry out “Finn doesn’t want you to go.  He thinks that you are crazy and I agree!”  Mindi’s voice shrilled into a crescendo of tears.

“Let me give you a word or two of advice,” Morgan spoke uncaring that Finn was listening.  “Get out while you can.  If it is already too late, take care of yourself, you need to, and good luck!” Finn roared in anger as Morgan gently replaced the receiver.

Leaving her pack half empty, feeling in need of a release, she carelessly pulled on the one boot and one shoe that were handy.  Morgan grabbed her wallet and car keys.  She headed towards the Lookout on Mount Dandenong.  Twilight coloured the sky silver and mauve as she drove up the mountain. This was her last opportunity to see the’ fairy lights’ of childhood before she left.

Morgan stood in the balmy summer’s air watching the sky darken.  The night seemed to be holding it’s breath in anticipation.  Gradually the strings of lights lit up over Melbourne’s Eastern suburbs, stretching out before her in twinkling rows looking remote and ethereal as a dream.  Picking up a dropped eucalypt branch, she held it before her, a quarterstaff in her battle for Selfhood.

“F*ck you Finn’, she whispered into the night, savouring this moment of courage.  Morgan felt an inner strength and vitality re-enter her soul. Nothing could stop her now!

Knight of Cups Rx

• Turbulent emotions and weariness in a relationship

• Emotional imbalanced between two people

• Emotions so overworked, and over used that one wants to leave

Of course it wasn’t over that easily. Finn was on his knees. Morgan heard them pop with age as he sank to the floor looking like some ludicrous Lothario.  His voice echoed through the empty house. “I’ll leave her.  I promise.” 

Morgan couldn’t believe how intensely icy and clear-minded she felt.  Watching his aging deceitful face and thin lipped mouth beg her to stay to be available to be his personal punching bag and possession, she recalled all the abuses, all the betrayals.

Morgan had believed for years that the beatings were her fault.  She’d pretended that Finn’s flings meant nothing.  How often had he come to her to beg her to ‘do’ something because he’d gotten in too deep?  How humiliating it was to ring some poor victim to break the news that Finn was not going to, and had never intended leaving his marriage, whatever his promises.  It was a pattern played out time and again, she’d explain. He was a rubber-band man.

Now here he was again pleading with worn out phrases, expecting them to work like all the times past.  Well, not this time. The rubber-band had snapped.

“For god’s sake get up.  You look ridiculous.  You’re too old to play the romantic returning hero.” Her voice was stone-cold, expressionless, so wearied of this game. Finn’s face became a picture of manipulation.  She could see his brain ticking it’s way through the list of buttons he’d learnt to push to make her come to heel.  He frowned, not with anger, but with concentration, then…

“What the hell are you doing wearing one boot and one shoe?  And your hair looks slept in?  You’ve gone nuts again! Of course, I should have recognised the signs.  I wonder whether I should have you committed.”   Whammo!  There it was. 

In the depths of suicidal depression Morgan had once voluntarily committed herself for treatment.  Finn had been beating her with the stick of ‘madness’ ever since.

“Should I defend myself?”’ she considered, “or would I just be hooking into his game, returning to that emotionally convulsing world?”  She deliberately laughed a loud crazy crone’s cackle and watched him scramble backwards across the floor in sudden fright.  Morgan stood tall; a picture of hieratic dignity. In a clear, cold voice she crooned caustically… “My hair looks slept in because it is.  It is a new look I’m creating.  Glad you noticed it.  And the shoe-boot decision is a statement about the fact that I have been out of step with my life for twenty-six years now, and I am in the process of change”.  She walked over to her pack, up-ended it, replaced her shoe with her other boot, and said … “Now how’d ya like to be literally kicked out of here with these beauties?  Steel-capped!  Get the hell out of my life”

Her crazed cackle followed Finn as he ran for his car.

“This worm has turned” Morgan laughed softly as she knelt before her pack. She began the process of re-filling it with love in her heart, this time only with the barest essentials.  She was saying goodbye to a life of both material plenty, and spiritual poverty, to travel to a country which reflected the reverse.  She felt a profound and soothing sense of initiation as she tucked her old tarot deck into the top most pocket of her pack.

Knight of Wands

• A young adventurous man

• Beginning a new adventure

• Impatience enthusiasm courage

• A major life change in life

• Returning to one’s youth with spirit and verve

“Okay, so getting to the airport four hours before time was an over-reaction.  It is the excitement, the urge to move, the desire to begin this adventure,” Morgan thought as departure time crept closer.

“I’m so excited I’ll wet myself any minute!” She spoke aloud.

“Better go to the loo then”, said a familiar voice.

Morgan charged into Kate’s arms, embracing her with laughter, kisses and tears.  “You made it!”

“Do you think that I would have missed this?  A little later than planned by two and a half decades But I always said I’d wave you off.  So here I am!”

Morgan bounced around like an excited puppy.  She glowed.  This was the young woman in the photographs, eyes star-filled with adventure and exhilaration. “Feel’s truly weird.  It is usually I who am waving you off!”

Kate handed Morgan a small parcel.  “Open it!”  Inside was a beautiful, heavily embroidered cloth with threads of gold which enhanced the richness of saffron orange, sunshine yellow, vanilla cream and peacock blue.  A border of tiny bells tinkled silver.  Wrapped in the cloth was a brand new tarot deck.

Astounded, Morgan hugged Kate in vice-like grip. “Your old deck, if you still have it, is a collector’s item by now,” Kate laughed.

 “I did keep it.”  Rapidly she removed it from her pack, and exchanged it for the new one.  “Keep it for me?”

“Of course! Go on! It’s time!”   Morgan hoicked her pack onto her shoulder and carried it across to the departures desk.  Pulling out her passport, dumping her pack on the scales, watching it disappear, she grinned elated.

She turned, waving once, blinked back tears that represented both grief at the parting and wild enthusiasm for the adventure ahead, then, with her stomach dropping to her boots, she walked through the departure doors, and rushed headlong to find her new life.

Queen of Cups Rx

• Excessive emotionality

• Veering out of control

• Clinging, irresponsible

Morgan’s confidence lasted until the plane took off.  “Oh goddess, what have I done?” she moaned to herself.  She sunk into the misery of her economy-class seat.  Her self esteem hit rock bottom as she castigated herself for ever thinking that she could cope.  Needling thoughts of inadequacy pierced her mind, “I can’t even get around Melbourne on Public Transport.  How on earth am I going to cope in a completely strange country? Finn was right.  I’m stupid and useless and can’t do anything right.

I’ve got to change planes in Kuala Lumpur. I don’t even know how to change planes! Finn did all that. I can’t go slinking back like a dog with its tail between its legs.  I don’t have a home, a car, just some stuff in storage and my bloody pack which will no doubt go missing in transit.  Jeepers, it’s probably on its way to Istanbul as we speak.”  Tears oozed out from under her eyelashes. Panic overwhelmed her.

Keeping her head down, they trickled like a salty shower down her cheeks dribbling between her trembling lips.  She searched in her day pack for tissues. Surreptitiously blotting this seemingly unassuageable flow, praying in the depths of her despair that her misery remained unobserved, she realised her failure when a lovely deep voice with an Irish brogue commented, “First trip overseas?”
“Yes! On my own, yes!” she began to sob convulsively.  She felt a strong arm wrap itself around her shoulders and hug her tight as she cried her heart out. 

Finally her tears stopped and shaking with sobs, she looked up and gasped.  “Oh goddess” she thought, “So young … and so beautiful”.

She straightened up in her seat and said “Sorry!  I feel like a complete idiot.  Before we left I felt invincible.  Now I’m just scared shitless, freaking out all over the place.”  The face smiled.

“I was too, the first time.  I’ve been on the road for seven years now and I’ve not only survived but I have fallen in love with travelling.  You will too!  You have the look of a traveller.”

 “Thanks!  I feel much better”.  Morgan smiled shyly and introduced herself. 

He replied, “I’m Michael!”

They talked non-stop throughout the flight, the lengthy stop-over in Kuala Lumpur, and then all the way to New Delhi.  Morgan clung to Michael when they shared a cab to Pahar Ganj, a bustling narrow street full of cheap hotels, of colours, smells, noise, heat, filth, poverty and magic.  Arriving in the late afternoon meant difficulty finding empty rooms so they shared a double.

Morgan and Michael wandered out to eat then meandered up and down the lively street.  Back at the hotel, she felt strange undressing in front of this beautiful young man.  He’d stripped bare.  She left her knickers on and a t-shirt, having manoeuvred her bra off from underneath.  She hopped into bed.

Body clocks awry, they talked for hours, smoking the local charis (hashish).  Next thing they were kissing, and though utterly aghast that she was with this ‘boy’, Morgan felt beautiful and desirable for the first time in decades.

Eight of Cups

Three of Swords

Nine of Swords

Five of Cups

Morgan began her morning smiling, blithely ignoring the principle of proximity to the probability of casual sex.  She felt a little in love, but swiftly came an emotional cropper when Michael went out to book his single plane ticket to Calcutta.   Out in the streets, she fought off the appeals of a multitude of shop keepers, bought her train ticket to Ajmer and stopped at a Café for lunch.  She watched disinterested, as a cockroach scurried across the table, and a mouse scooted out from under her chair.

“Odd” she thought. “At home I’d be freaking at both the wild life and the loss of Michael.  Primarily though, I would be feeling profoundly abandoned and rejected.  Wondering why she was feeling any sense of loss at all following what was, in all honesty, a completely meaningless one night stand, she thought,  “Here I am, a little in love with a complete stranger who is 22 years my junior.  Even I know, logically, that it’s a ridiculous response to the situation.  Emotionally, of course, it speaks of past wounds.”

She ate chapatti and Dahl, her mind a mass of moods. What is this grief about?  It can’t really be about Michael, except insofar as I feel wounded at my learned reliance on a male figure as my guide through life, for good or evil.  So, is this the loss of the feeling of illusory safety which a partner brings? I did cling to him horribly.  She blushed at her tendency to revert to type. “Bugger, I would’ve followed him anywhere, changed all my plans – just like I did with Finn!  Jeepers Morgan, grow up!”

Finally, she remembered that she had transferred her tarot deck and cloth to the new bag she’d bought the previous evening.  She spread her cloth on the table which was grimy from disinterested swipes with a damp, dirty rag. 

Sorting through the cards, she separated out the majors.  “I’m not ready to consider these just yet”, she thought.  She recognised herself as the excito-puppy in the Knight of Wands when she’d charged through the doors of the airport.  He was also Michael.  She saw herself as the reversed Queen of Cups, her feelings turned upside down and unruly on the plane.  She saw the Queen reversed too, in her annoyance and regret at how easily she’d attached herself emotionally to Michael. Her primary interest though, was to identify which card seemed to relate best to the feelings of loss that she was currently experiencing. 

She dismissed the 3 of swords with its pierced heart.  “Yes”, she thought, “I have heart wounds, or, if I see the heart as a symbol of the soul, ‘soul wounds’, and there is grief attached to those, and much healing to be done.  But that is primarily Finn stuff; the ‘how’ I came to create that life for myself.  This feeling of loss doesn’t seem to be Finn related in spite of my inappropriate over-attachment to Michael.  Mind you, they probably come from the same source.”

She saw herself in the 8 of Cups, cloaked, leaving behind a whole plethora of emotions and heading off into the unknown, but she felt no sadness about the image. While relevant, it did not reflect her current sense of bereavement because it was her choice to leave that world behind and venture out to find who she really is under the light of the eclipsed moon.

The 9 of swords?  No, that represented all her fears and anxieties, the nightmares and worries, the depression of yesterday, of her past.  Her mood was certainly a little anxious, and she did feel some guilt over so readily giving herself intimately to a stranger, but no more than one would expect in the circumstances.  This certainly wasn’t the nightmare psychological self abuse apparent in the card.

“Ah, the 5 of cups!”  I have found my ‘now’. I am not unaware that there are cups still standing behind me.  I can collect them at my leisure. But for now, I am rigid with the pain of the losses that lie right before me, spilt and irretrievable. She sat for hours with her sadness, buying mango juices and coffees to assuage the owner’s desire for paying custom. But, these actions were automata, programmed so as not to draw her attention away from her emotional focus. It was time to just experience her sadness, explore and feel the honesty of it.  Now, having arrived at her initial destination, the energy required to pursue this new life-stage had left her.  She sat alone and culture-shocked, feeling the loss of all that was seemingly safe and familiar.  She realised that this was the first time in memory when she’d felt anything honestly, unveiled by the protections of her various roles, place, identifying position and status, and her fear of Finn. 

“I sit here,” she thought, “No one knows anything about me, nor cares. I carry nothing but a pack, a passport, an accent and a gender.  Not much to hide behind.  I can be anyone I want to be, but I want to be ‘me’, and I don’t know who that is.  All the things that I have used to define myself don’t exist here.  It is frightening, disturbing, disorienting.  I feel lost.  After last night, I no longer know how I will respond in any given situation.   Until then, it was unimaginable to me that I would engage in an essentially meaningless one night stand, in spite of my ex-husband’s exquisite role-modelling.  I would have said ‘never’.  I wonder what other values I profess but will discover are equally counterfeit? These are losses indeed, but positive losses for they help me to redefine who I am based on the actual, rather than on imagined experiences.”

When she arrived back to the hotel, the receptionist handed her a note. “From your friend!”  Opening it, it was as she expected.  Michael was gone.  He’d left her a heart-warming thank you. She cried herself to sleep, lost somewhere between bereavement, and the joy of taking her first adult emotional steps.

Six of Swords

• KeyWordA

• KeyWordB

As the train rocked rhythmically through the sparse mustard fields and desert vastness of Rajasthan, Morgan’s sadness slipped away. She squatted for hours at the open door between carriages, smoking cigarettes, experiencing the joy of an alien landscape, dreaming the dreams of one who is on her way to finding some recognisable version of her Self. 

She knew that it would take hard work to shake off those psychologically degrading messages that had told her she was completely incapable - a ditzy twit who couldn’t cope with the simplest things.  “But, I’m not” Morgan spoke out loud, and then looked around embarrassed.  She realised that the man squatting near her wore a walkman. The sounds of Indian music scratched the air above the heartbeat of the train. The music, the smells, the sights lifted her now buoyant heart out from that place of fundamental tragedy and pessimism in which she’d lived for so long

Back in her seat, she dozed in a hypnagogic state, experiencing herself in a swaying boat, gradually moving away from the painful known, into the unknown.  She let the flowing dream waters wash away some of her fears and inner conflicts. She dreamed that the younger, capable, bright-eyed, competent Morgan her sat beside her, wrapped in a cloak which they shared.  She imagined a merging occurring.  It would take time, but she was cutting herself free from the past. It would never disappear, but it would become part of her story – the narrative of who she was, and how she came to be in each passing moment. Her past experience was not something to repress or hide from in drink.  Nor was it a barb-wired wrapped treasure to tear apart with bare hands, cutting her Self to shreds. It was an experience through which she could temper the steel of her inner and outer self.

Ace of Pentacles

The Devil

The rickety, overcrowded bus from Ajmer Station wound its terrifying way through the harsh hairpin bends of the Snake Mountains and into the picturesque Pushkar Valley.   Climbing down from the bus a smiling young man headed straight for her. 

“You will come with me please to our Guest House.”

“Is it the Lakshmi Guest House?  That is where I was planning to stay”.

“No, No!  Not for you.  Our guest house is for you.”  Morgan shrugged smiling.  It didn’t really matter.  Besides, her long-lost intuition was kicking in, telling her that this was significant. 

“You belong at my father’s Guest House. Your name please?”

“Morgan”

“Welcome to Pushkar Morgan.  I am Gopal.  You will stay a long time!”

They walked along a sandy road until finally Gopal pushed open a gate and waved Morgan through. 

A painted tortoise sunned itself in the garden.  Goats bleated and two cows, milk heavy, were being led for a ‘walk’ amongst straggly trees by Mataji.  She stopped, smiling shyly.  A teenaged girl, Rohani, rushed to meet her.  Gopal and his father, Supash-ji smiled, “Welcome, Namaste, Ram Ram”.

Morgan murmured.  “I feel like I have come home”.  The girl Rohani laughed, and pointed upstairs, a question in her eyes.  Morgan nodded and followed.

Friendly faces smiled at her from the balcony.  A young woman stood at her door as she began to unpack, and said “G’day!”

“Jeepers …. Another bloody Aussie”. 

“Heard you coming up the stairs. Where ya from?”

“Melbourne!” Morgan introduced herself.

“Adelaide! Name’s Chrissie. 

“Join us?”  This skinny young girl waved her hand to where a group sat cross-legged, smoking, talking, playing Backgammon, drinking coffee, engaging in the ancient arts of traveller’s – hand mending clothes, cleaning ankle bracelets and so on.  An older Northern Italian man was reading a girl’s palm.  He looked at her and frowned with instantaneous dislike.  The feeling was entirely mutual. 

It felt wonderful though, relaxed and peaceful, like some Hindu Garden of Eden.  The balmy breeze was redolent of flowers, incense, dung and wood fires and the odour of charis being smoked. Temple music and chanting fluttered on the air.  A Welsh lad climbed down the ladder from the roof where he had been doing his yoga and began playing a flute, jamming with the music from the multitude of temples.  Talk flowed around her in a dozen languages. Great sweeping green Alexandrine Parrots squawked, peacocks cried their melancholic moans, a monkey from the Hanuman Temple swung across from tree to roof to balcony to tree. A caravan of camel carts and their drivers, glorious in colour and jangling bells, moved along the street up which she had just walked. Morgan heaved a huge sigh, breathing in the atmosphere which seemed at once so familiar, and yet so alien.

She felt graced, blessed with a safe haven of peace and tranquillity. But, she thought, as her eyes slid over the palm-reader, Giordano, who had made such an ostentatious play of ignoring her, he is the reason I am here.  She felt a confirmatory tingle churn around her crown chakra.  Though deeply happy to be gifted with this earthly heaven, she wished for a little respite before her work with the Devil began.

In spite of an introduction by Chrissie, Giordano had refused the greeting.  With the others he was friendly, animated, exciting.  He was tall, fine-boned and achingly handsome, blessed – or cursed - with both charisma and a commanding presence.    Certainly the younger girls seemed to be enthralled by him.

“I guess every Garden of Eden must have its snake and in India the snake takes on many, many layers of meaning”.

The High Priestess

The Devil

The Magician Rx

The Moon

Two of Swords

In order to practice her rusty card-reading skills, Morgan had in the following weeks done a swathe of readings for the traveller’s who had come and gone.  Like her, Giordano had stayed on as well, longer and longer, seemingly unable to leave.  Always keeping his distance, he appeared to be constantly aware of her, brooding when he was no longer centre of attention. She’d catch him sidling closer as she read the cards, pretending disinterest.  Morgan detested him, and yet was fascinated by, and attracted to him, as well!

Pushkar is a small town nestled in a green valley skirting a Holy Lake believed to have been created by the Lord Brahma.  Every morning, Morgan walked from the back gate of the Guest House, through the fields on the track which wound its way past camels, across ghats running down to the lake, through a twisting tangle of narrow streets and lanes and into the main bazaar.  She’d developed the habit of enjoying coffee with the old Kashmiri shop-owner Rashid from whom she’d bought shoes.  They engaged in friendly bartering each day over a fine Kashmiri wool shawl, beautifully hand-embroidered.  He knew she would buy it when it came time for her to leave this haven of peace.  So each day, Morgan and Rashid played out the game.

Each day they read, too, the New Delhi Times and discussed world events.  He was interested in the opinions of a woman of her age, intelligent, educated, and not one of the youngsters who seemed to see India as their own special playground and who often behaved badly. Further on, Morgan would sometimes stop at the Techno Café for its’ Special Lassi’s, - a drink of yoghurt, fruit and finely ground flowers of the marijuana plant -  to write postcards, to buy stamps from the tiny post office opposite. 

Some days, she would trade-in books she’d read for new or second-hand ones, at one of the many booksellers.  Then she’d wander on to the Moondance Café. She spent many an afternoon with newly made friends, talking, or listening as travellers played guitars.  Sometimes she’d share a joint, or sit and write in her journal.  More often than not, she’d give readings as she gained in confidence.  People took her at face value.

Many times in the evenings she sat on the ghats near the Sunset Café to watch the sun go down over Pushkar Lake, listening to musicians from all over the world come together to create magnificent heart-stirring rhythms – to watch jugglers and fire-stick twirlers from various European cities, and a pair of Japanese girls who ribbon danced.  It was hardly surprising that she should see Giordano on her route.  It was such a small town. 

She’d be drinking coffee or chai with Rashid and there was Giordano sitting talking with the Sadhu’s who spent their days sleeping, meditating and making crafts in the shade of a huge tree opposite Rashid’s Shop.  Or later, he’d be seated cross-legged on the thin mattresses which acted as cushions on the floor at the Moondance Café.
It was only when she made the one hour trek up to the hilltop Saraswati Temple one early morning, and was sitting peering out over the great lion-coloured stretches of desert that she saw him climbing the last remaining stairs cut in the mountain, and wondered if he was following her. 

The next day, she’d wandered off the beaten track into the outlying villages.  Sitting talking and sharing chai with a family of women and children, she became convinced that it was so.  There he was again.  The women invited him to join them.  The younger mother sent one of the children for their father.  The father came and offered both she and Giordano charis, leading them together along winding pathways into the flower farm which stretched lush and perfumed behind them until, hidden under a box, he revealed his stash.  He directed them across the fields and back towards the lake and their sandy path to the Guest House.  Though they walked together for half an hour, at no time did Giordano speak to her. “What did he want from her?  What was this mutual repulsion and attraction all about?” 

Often, as they sat at opposite ends of the balcony, it seemed that he saw her as a competitor for the hearts and minds of their fellow travellers.  He read palms, she read cards.  He held court, talking a charmed language of seduction, and would look across at her with slitted eyes and a smug expression, as if to say “This one is mine!”  The looks were so fleeting that sometimes she wondered whether she had imagined them.

Once, when they passed one another on the stairs he hissed, “Charlatan!”

Morgan had made no bones about the fact that she hadn’t read tarot for twenty-six years and, even then, had been inexperienced.  She refused prediction in favour of problem-solving.  She admitted cheerfully when she didn’t grasp a card, so she seethed at Giordano’s unprovoked hostility. Finally, after letting it gnaw at her for too long, she decided that it was his projection, and had nothing to do with her.

Nonetheless, she wondered, “Who are you, that I can be so powerfully attracted to you, and yet loathe you so much?”  She felt just as much in his thrall as any of the young girls who ached for his attention, and she hated it, him and herself, for her fragility.

Sometimes they were the only traveller’s staying at Sri Hanuman.  They sat opposite one another downstairs for evening Thali in an atmosphere so contaminated by the contradictory elements of attraction and repulsion that Morgan’s appetite vanished.

Rohani worried.  Supash-ji, when he came upstairs late in the evening to pump water up from the well for the showers, often found Morgan sitting still and alone in the dark, apparently sleepless, rhythmically shuffling her cards.  He made her Special Lassi.  “To sleep” he would say … offering it to her with a worried face.

Morgan did not need the drink to sleep.  She had found with each passing day, how much she needed these precious times of mute tranquillity to let the workings of her personal unconscious, and themes from the archetypal world to shift and stir within her.  Inklings of this mysterious material intermittently surfaced showing themselves in hints of who she was, and where she belonged in this unfamiliar life.

Nonetheless, she always thanked Supash-ji for his thoughtfulness, and drank the lassi.  He watched with a worried parental face.  Although she was actually older than either he or his wife, she deeply appreciated the fact that the family had taken her under its wing.  They sensed her fragility, the broken places within her, but mostly they treated her as ‘Shakti’ incarnate. They invited her into the kitchen, a place normally not open to non-Hindus.

It was through these meditative exercises that Morgan recognised Giordano as a manifestation of Finn, and both as reflections – elements - of some past life drama which would be played out here for good or ill, in Pushkar.  Giordano was her “Devil” of course, and a trickster, a charlatan himself.  Hence his projection.  He had the charisma of Finn.  “How could I have not seen this earlier?”  She felt her old sense of stupidity and worthlessness re-emerge, breaking through her peace.

She felt so very stuck, blinded by both his projections and her own.  He is not Finn, she told herself, nor Finn he.  I don’t need to feel this powerlessness, nor these feelings of being in thrall to him. “What to do? What to do? Acha-cha!  Should I just pack up and move on, or would that just be running away?”

She sat cross-legged one evening on a rope bed on the balcony, her ‘book’ of tarot in her hands, watching the strange Northern hemisphere stars.  A stream of meteorites burned in a fiery glory across the sky.  Morgan suddenly felt herself shift into that gold tinged place where the light wattage of the planet ratcheted up many notches.  Her crown tingled, vibrating her up a spinning spiral into a state of consciousness which was just as ‘real’ and ‘solid’ as the mundane physical world, though very different and inexplicable.

She experienced a peeling back of layers of reality, like a veil being lifted from blind eyes.  She felt ‘at home’ while simultaneously swimming through some alien, shadowy, dreamy silvered astral landscape. A dog howled its’ night song in time with the chanting from the nearby temples. Though she could communicate across the abyss of golden light to another person, it was taxing, because things were sensed, intuited, difficult to describe in the language of word symbols.

She sensed that it was time to do her first tarot reading for herself in a quarter of a century. She realised that she had been hiding behind her readings for others, tricking herself into concealing her own need for insight.  It was time to know more consciously.

“The 8 of Pentacles.  How separately and intent he sits and works on his bench apart from the village in the distance!  It is me, the apprentice reader absorbed, diligently hammering away, practising and refining my skills, working towards the mastery which I am convinced takes many lifetimes to acquire.  To some extent though, I have allowed this work to separate me from meeting my own inner needs – from diligently working on my own city of god/dess within.  I have been here for months doing many readings each day in the outer world, but none for myself!

“Another card of separation.  Pamela Colman-Smith’s ‘stage’ on which we act roles.  Am I building a fence to keep out a wilder world more frightening because unknown - no villages or familiar cities to run to for safety?  Am I building my fence in psychic self-defence against the fears and deceits I expect to find in the depths of my unconscious?  Or against the devourers found along the paths of any journeying heroine?  Or do I fear that there exists within me, a spiritual wasteland?  I am certainly wounded by my experiences.  This is a nine though, suggesting that I have taken one step onwards in the numbered symbolic sequence of growth from the previous card.”

“Yet here we have earth followed by fire.”  Morgan tried to remember what she had once known about how the elements worked together, but all she could recall was that fire and earth were neutral. But then, if I see the minors as a circling sequence of elements overlaid by the majors, then the 9 is both a numeric step and an elemental one.

And surely, as a nine, the fire is a mere flicker as the element is more grounded in earth towards the end of its cycle? It is not in its’ home world of Atziluth, but being quenched as it ‘falls’ closer to the earth.  How much I fear getting burned by the Devil’s fires, nonetheless! Yet, although I am aware of Giordano’s obsession with me, am I not just as obsessed with him?  Is this what my barrier is about? Or is it merely a reminder that I still have resources at my disposal to fight and defeat the monsters in my inner and outer wildernesses?”

“Although the figures in each of these two cards are separated existentially on their stages from their worlds, how different the feel and appearance of these cards.  The first figure seems so safe, as though he has insulated himself with his work, unaware of, or hiding from, the aching needs of the inner life evident with the wounded 9 of wands figure.”

“It has been so easy to stay here in Pushkar in this safe place, repeating my pleasant daily routines but not really engaging in the more challenging and testing fight for selfhood which travelling, with its’ inherent confrontations with the new and unexpected, present.  I’ve been chipping away at the edges.  Yep … I’ve done good work, but …”

She did feel battered by her experiences with both Finn and Giordano nonetheless, even though Giordano had only ever spoken that one word to her.  This was a spiritual battle and she was in defence mode, but maybe, just maybe, she had learned a little along the way.  She had recognised in Delhi how she would have clung to Michael if he had given her the chance.  Yes, she felt, she had come some distance in the wilderness of living with her Self alone, closer to a place of spiritual safety. She would no longer so easily give up her Self to another.

And, although her meditative journeys had begun in the tranquil, albeit mysterious, state of peace and serenity of the High Priestess, of late, her inner images were more of the Moon - the fears and self-deceptions howling in her inner night, waking her to wider awareness, if she chose to walk a more dangerous path.

Hmmm!  The 9 of Pentacles.  Next in the sequence of Pentacles, and the second nine.  Yesod – ruled by the Moon, the astral plane.  The yellow sky seemed to Morgan, to be the dawning glow of her golden place.  “What is more, I have fire surrounded by earth.  This augers well … maybe?  Oh how much more difficult it is to read for oneself!  Has earth put out the spiritual flame, or has it grounded my fears in a richer reality of my own growth?   I must remember, too, that although the minor cards appear as separate elements, all elements are intrinsically mixed, even when one is more overtly present”.

“Nonetheless, from the defensiveness of the wounded and exhausted 9 of wands, this figure is on home territory. The wild world has receded.  My fence has become a hedge, glorious, alive and growing.   Ah! ‘PaRDeS’ – paradise, the walled garden.  Here I am, self-reliant, self-aware, and independent. This certainly suggests a rather definite change from the chains I wore willingly in my relationship with Finn, and if asked, would have worn with Michael - chains that I am still so tempted to pick-up and voluntarily attach with Giordano.  Two 9’s suggest though that this cycle is ending. Pushkar has been my Garden of Eden prior to the fall.  Can I resist the snake?  Will I ‘fall’ with Typhon? Yes, the dousing of the passion of the wands with earth is beneficial.

This figure has stepped off her stage, out of her existential separation from her environment, out of her position of woundedness and defensiveness but she is still separated from the wild world.  She is still safe in her garden, her passions hooded.  Oh, I suspect that these two Pentacle cards may also be indicating that I could too, too easily stay here in Pushkar, this ‘apparently’ safe sanctuary, ignore the message of ending in the two nines, and their implicit prompting towards new beginnings, and succumb to temptation.  How long before I eat the apple? 

The symbol which stood out most significantly for Morgan was the snail.  It moved to the right, into consciousness.  Slow movement of a being feeling it’s way carefully through the garden,  taking in every detail, carrying everything upon its back in a world rich in the growth of actual experience.  “Am I, with my pack on my back, moving slowly, taking my time, antennae out, scrutinising everything, possibly unaware of the bigger picture and the fact that my self-sufficiency is merely a thin shell, which can all too easily be crushed? Or, is the geometric curl of the shell symbolic of a curled snake which appears asleep, but lies in wait ready to strike?  And is the snake’s poison deadly or transformative?

The Wheel of Fortune. A deep breathe filled Morgan’s lungs and her heart chakra began to sing.   As she exhaled she felt an enormous sense of release.  Yes, the cycle ends and another begins.  This ‘felt’ right.  It reminded her of the spiralling of the energies which crowned her, the spiralling on the snail –snake, Typhon-Set.  She sensed intuitively that she was about to ride with Hermanubis to the top. The Queen of Cups was upright again, having reversed from the over-emotional nutcase on the plane and the clingy idiot who grabbed so tightly to Michael.

She was aware now that this ‘garden’ was just one step on her road, that all things, no matter how ‘apparently’ safe and secure, come to an end.  Time to stop practicing.  Fate turns its’ wheel to remind me that nothing ever stays the same. I’m cool with that!

The Fool, the alpha and the omega, the omega and the alpha.  Morgan laughed with such innocent delight.  “I had feared leaving Finn in case I found that I was nothing … and I am – Zero – No-thing …how joyful this is!

She knew now that her time here in Pushkar was coming to an end.  The karmic wheel was turning and whatever it was between she and Finn-Giordano was about to resolve itself.

Tempted to deal out another layer of cards, she stopped.  “Be like the Holy Fool – What will be, will be!  Don’t chew at it like a dog with a bone,” she laughed.  “New things are afoot, if I just take that leap of faith when presented with the determining event.”