Treasure Hunt

Image description: an abstract oil pastel. A curved band of yellow snakes across the canvas from top to bottom. Concentric circles of orange, dark brown, yellow, and green cluster in the bottom right cuadrant. On the left side, pale yellow marks surround a lopsided oval of brown, orange, yellow, and green.

Sometimes one finds themselves looking for something valuable. That something is large. Also small. Amorphous. Shy. Sometimes that something is elusive. Past methods of wayfinding do not serve. A new map is needed.

One can begin by making lists, writing them on paper or holding them in the heart, of sources available, of weathered longings and wonderings, of slim chances for hope.

• Precious metal of my intuition

• My body’s language—purest infant babble, long muffled, becoming newly audible

• Which among the trillions of possible expressions of timeless archetypes is mine?

• Plain comfort of what is here—walls meet ceiling, ground pushes back, light shines and shadows

Sometimes one must do something that is mundane but feels radical. One must create the map one needs from disparate pieces. One doubts, because the pieces are of wholly different makeup. One could stitch paper to cloth, but porcelain to air? Sensation to stone? There is a way, one discovers when one tries.

***

Before I can even begin, tarot offers a slid-off card. Keeping it face down, I bring the card to the floor with me. Supine and eyes closed and everything internal: loops and swirls of beating heart into feeling heart, breathing lungs over soothing lungs. A skip of excitement as I sense spirit sewn through fibers.

Eyes open and the environment becomes the main thing. Few centimeters of black mark on white ceiling. Blah of the closet door. Late-spring, mid-morning light through the window. Spunky, cartoony whistle of the Bullock’s oriole.

I turn the card face up: Tres de Bastos (Three of Wands). Here I am, gathering wisdom on a cliff above the sunset sea. I have traveled long and far, from desert to rain forest, mountaintop to oceanside. The youngster in me held out through extremes of heat and wind and freeze and downpour but in the end finally did fray away into the night. By that point, exhausted and weary, I wasn’t disturbed to realize it had gone. Now in this place with a wide view of many comings and goings, I am beginning to integrate a thick book of experience. I am in the earliest, most awkward and resistant stages of becoming an elder.

My body calls me back: I roll to my belly. Mars comes to me right away. My Mars, who carries so much weight and responsibility in my personality, the sentry at the castle gate of my psyche, and yet retains the ability to slide into pleasure, to frolic, to harmonize. My Mars, spunky like the Bullock’s oriole, off in a flash of orange and black to orchestrate springtime.

In the cradle of this position, abdomen safe to relax and spread against the floor, I can flow in and out of the symbolic and the physical. Sensation stands on its own. Intuition courses through. Memory mingles and confuses with dream.

I hear my teachers’ voices: What is here? I raise my face just a few inches. My belly presses into the floor, my pelvis an exquisite fulcrum. I bring my head down and rest for a moment.

Several moments.

Many moments.

I scrub the tops of my feet against the carpet, soft and scratchy. My legs bend at the knees and my feet come up, soles facing the ceiling. My calves sway in tandem from one side to the other then begin to crisscross, slow then faster. I revel in the feeling of the weight change, the fall toward the Earth and the swing of momentum back through space.

The Tres de Bastos saturates my imagination: orange sky reflecting gold onto crescent bay. After the end and before the beginning, the journeyer takes it all in, assessing, metabolizing, breathing in and out.

Legs down and head floats up. I let loose the string, observe what happens. Pliable spine follows, chest opens wide to confront reality and receive.

Image description: under a bright blue sky, steep walls of rock rise above a narrow canyon filled with green shrubbery.

Mars, who has taken on a role of service for so long, is ready to receive. Mars, who wings from gallery to mountain crest, relishing and manifesting the aesthetic beauty of everyday life, is ready to occupy a place in the middle. But not the exact middle, Mars clarifies as I unfurl with an acrobatic range that comes out of nowhere. My sciatic nerve zings through my left hip and thigh. My right shoulder, like always, lifts closer to my ear. Asymmetrical balance.

Forehead to the floor again and spontaneous movement takes the lead. Before formulating the thought, my hands are doing: palms massaging in circles against the carpet, giving support back to the supportive surface, to the earth below and to the Earth all the way inward. I remember circles of fluorescent lichen on boulders above a stream carving a box canyon deep in the Great Basin. My hands communicate downward in curves and loops, rough and caressing as lichen and boulders.

Image description: a close-up of the oil pastel from above. Tiny rolled fragments of oil pastel rest atop curved marks of orange, brown, yellow, and green.

The line blurs between receiver and giver.

Other and self.

Hard border and soft boundary.

This time my legs lift at the same time my trunk does, my body a sliver of crescent moon. At rest, I ask what the tarot has to say: Los Enamorados (The Lovers). I’ve seen it three times in the last several days and now here I am caressing the floor as it holds me.

I put my body’s question into words: what is it like to give to the surface below?

My forehead stays connected while I butterfly my shoulder blades, one flap and another of my broad, light-as-air wings. When my torso comes up again my hands are pressing down in partnership with the floor and the arcing and lifting keeps going until I’m all the way up to hands and knees.

It’s time to be upright again. I pull one more card: Dos de Espadas (Two of Swords). That crescent moon above the lapping surface of water. There I am with my two sensitive antennae, channeling down into airy thought the waves of slippery existence.

Here is a new portion of the map. And one way through.

Image description: three tarot cards on a background of light blue, purple, and white. In the Tres de Bastos (Three of Wands), three wooden staffs stand upright at a person’s back as they look towards an orange sky and body of water. In Los Enamorados (The Lovers), a winged angel is suspended in a cloud over two naked people. In the Dos de Espadas (Two of Swords), a person wearing a blindfold holds two swords crossed over their chest. A crescent moon hangs in the sky above water.