This year has been challenging for obvious reasons and forced me to stop and regroup for a while. Writing, too, had to pause by reflex because it’s not something I take lightly – I want it to be done to the best of my capabilities.
“In time, in time they tell me, I’ll not feel so bad. I don’t want time to heal me. There’s a reason I’m like this.
I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won’t smooth you away.
I can’t say goodbye.”
― China Miéville, The Scar
The Emperor will easily represent the father figure as the central constituent element of the personality. The direction he is looking can orient us upon the centers of interest to a father: is it toward the family, or toward the outside? Toward his daughter, his wife, his son? Toward his own parents? Well placed, The Emperor evokes a stable companion and protector and a balanced home. For a young man, it could also pose the question of masculinity: how has it been passed down by the father, what are the means of fulfilling oneself as a man in reality?
The High Priestess will often refer to a female individual, the mother or grandmother who has handed down either an ideal of purity or an authoritarian coldness. She will also incarnate the cold mother, the sexless woman, who finds justification in a religious ideal or morality, and who does not know how to be tender. But her demand for purity can put us on the trail of a woman of high spiritual stature, a priestess, a therapist, a female guide, who could be of any age. In love, The High Priestess is ready to form a couple based on the union of souls.
“For too long I have played on the stage of lucidity, and I have lost. Now I need to accustom my eyes to the falling darkness. I need to contemplate the natural slumber of all things, which the light calls forth, yet also causes to tire. Life must begin in darkness. Its powers of germination lie hidden. Every day has its night, every light has its shadow.
I cannot be asked to accept these shadows gladly. It is enough that I accept them.”
― Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years