Two of Swords: the Animal Plant
(This week’s post is based on a real reading with a client: it has been shared with her and posted with her permission.)
My client is a professional healer, and today, I am reading for her with the Marseille cards. Initially, she is put off by the overt Christian imagery. Fair enough: I can understand that. And yet, as the reading unfolds, she comes around, she sees what I see: that there is something so much deeper and universal in the Marseille cards than any surface depictions. This depth is present in the Two of Swords card that seems to be the most important for her.
Above: Two of Swords from the Jodorowsky/Camoin version of the Tarot de Marseille.
Is it a flower? A sea creature? An eye? It seems to float, to spread itself out into the egg-like space which two curved swords have created around it. This mysterious symbol has limited space, and yet compared to the other Sword cards in the Marseille pips, it speaks of freedom and movement, having far more space to move than all of the others (except the Ace, of course). It seems to my client that the central symbol needs no more than its world offers, like a tiny plant in a giant pot of soil, or a healthy fish in a small natural pond. When I look at this beautiful being – this animal-plant symbol (let’s call it that for today) – I see peace and contentedness of the mind. Swords are the suit of the mind, after all. And in this Two, someone doesn’t have the world, and doesn’t need the world, either. Someone knows their limits and lives happily within them.
My client does not feel like this in her mind. She is growing older; she fears the changes that she experiences, the amount of medical appointments that are creeping into her life on a weekly basis. “I see nothing beautiful in old age,” she tells me, “just pain and suffering. I am struggling to relate to these cards”.
These very words punish her mind. They add an extra layer of suffering upon the already-difficult pains of growing old. The card to the right of this is the Ace of Wands, showing a hand holding out a beautiful floral stick: an offering, a suggestion. She must offer something more beautiful to her mind as she ages, I propose. These cards are not reflections of what is happening, but rather they offer advice for what is to come. I say something like, “Can you plant kinder seeds in your mind than this resentment? Can your mind become like this animal-plant, acknowledging the limits of ageing and yet floating peacefully within them? How might you be able to do that?”
Above: Three cards from the Metanoia Marseille reading mentioned in this post. The Two of Swords is at the centre.
We must be diligent when we notice negative thought patterns in our mind. We should not accept them as “just the way I am”. Thoughts are like seeds: which ones will we choose to plant, nurture and to grow? Nobody will stop old age or any other kind of physical pain from hurting us. Nobody will stop grief and loss from being devastating. But we add layers of hurt to ourselves with our resistance to what is happening. How can we be kind to ourselves in spaces that limit us?
Where there is pain, we can choose resentment – a sword-stab to the mind – or we can give ourselves a break and accept what is. Of course, we should do everything we can to alleviate any pain we experience in life, but we must also learn to sit with what we can’t change. Nature teaches us this perfectly, every time we choose to pay close attention. This Two of Swords, too, shows what happens to our minds when we offer ourselves acceptance and kindness, rather than even more suffering.
That’s all for now, friends. Thank you for being here – and please check out my Therapeutic Tarot Sessions and my courses embracing Tarot and Nature if you’d like us to work together. You can also sign up for the Tarot Blog newsletter (different to my main newsletter) below to receive occasional email updates (roughly monthly) with the latest posts.
Smiles from Scotland,
Stephen
