A Heron's Joy

(Tarot Study Hall is tomorrow! Sunday the 7th at 7 PM CDT. Hope to see you there!)

This morning, I turned to the best essay ever written (at least in the English language), Wendell Berry’s ‘A Native Hill’. It can be found in his collection ‘The World-Ending Fire’, a book that we have two copies of in the house, so Abi and I can each underline and notate our own. I love to go back over this essay and pull cards again and again for the same passages, or find new lines that inspire me. I always learn so much.

I wanted to share this one little section that just sings to me. It’s so beautiful. Pull cards for it as you please, and it also inspired a little 4-card spread you’ll find at the end.

“I sat one summer evening and watched a great blue heron make his descent from the top of the hill into the valley. He came down at a measured deliberate pace, stately as always, like a dignitary going down a stair. And then, at a point I judged to be midway over the river, without at all varying his wingbeat, he did a backward turn in the air, a loop-the-loop. It could only have been a gesture of pure exuberance, of joy—a speaking of his sense of the evening, the day’s fulfillment, his descent homeward. He made just the one slow turn, and then flew on out of sight in the direction of a slew farther down in the bottom. The movement was incredibly beautiful, at once exultant and stately, a benediction on the evening and on the river and on me. It seemed so perfectly to confirm the presence of a free nonhuman joy in the world—a joy I feel a great need to believe in—that I had the skeptic’s impulse to doubt that I had seen it. If I had, I thought, it would be the sign of a presence of something heavenly in the earth. And then, one evening a year later, I saw it again.”

Photo by Timothy Abraham on Unsplash

I pulled 10 of Pentacles for the ‘sign of a presence of something heavenly in the earth’, and that felt so good. I often see this card as the reminder that we are surrounded by magic, that we are in a world full of signs, that this is ‘heaven’, if we can adjust our eyes to see it.

Whatever cards you pull, whether for the passage as a whole, or a specific line, I’d love to hear about them! And here’s the spread:

• I have a great need to believe in this

• Why my inner skeptic doubts/resists/denies it

• The experience my inner skeptic needs in order to soften

• How I can facilitate this experience

I hope this serves you!

And I hope to see you at study hall tomorrow; it’s a lot of fun to practice together. I dare say practicing in a group is a necessary part of deepening your own relationship with the cards. Seeing how others approach and interpret and engage with the Tarot is so inspiring.