Make Your Dreams
because the tarot said so
March has become one of my favorite times of year for purely astrological reasons. Pisces into Aries season is steam energy, water turning to fire as the days get longer and the sun gets brighter. It feels like charging up, powering up, any prepositional phrase that goes with UP. Even the birds are louder (chatting it up).
Aries season begins with the spring equinox and is associated with the Emperor card in tarot. When I first learned this it felt wrong to me— shouldn’t the sprouting of flowers and the birthing of lambs connect to a more feminine card, an earthier ideal? The Emperor is usually depicted as a stern man on a heavy throne and to me looks like everything wrong about the patriarchy. I was also uncomfortable having that imagery associated with me since my birthday is in April. Am I secretly a dictator inside? Is this a terrible truth I need to accept with maturity?
These questions came up when I made a tarot-inspired collage during a workshop. The directions were to choose a card and then make a collage, but I felt like doing things in the opposite order— making a collage and then discerning which card it most represented (more evidence that I’m incapable of following along with a group because of my pathological control issues??). This was what I had before gluing everything down.
I MAKE YOUR DREAMS. So imposing! All these sheep going to receive orders from their untouchable overlord. Very corporate America. I sat on the floor looking at this and mentally shuffling through cards I remembered. It felt like the Emperor, but it also felt like my slanted perception of the Emperor, so I kept looking at it and feeling for the truest message. What is the Emperor really about? Legacy, building, systems that last. I found the mistake in my collage and fixed it.
There is still an imperative, but it’s encouraging. The Emperor says GO DO IT, MAKE YOUR DREAMS! These people are traveling there to gain the strength of the mountain, to gather the resolve to do what they know they need to do. There was an image tugging at my memory that sent me to search through another deck, where I found the card that I realized had been subconsciously influencing me throughout this collage process.
In the Rosebud tarot deck, all the cards have been renamed to eliminate gender associations. Here the Emperor becomes the Elder. An elder builds something which serves future generations. It asks, “What kind of ancestor do you want to be?” And the truth is that I do want to be an ancestor. I put up my finished collage over my kitchen sink where it reminded me every day to MAKE YOUR DREAMS, and that is the energy I brought with me to all the fertility testing I did this month. In April I’ll turn 37, and I’ve decided to find out if my body is still capable of creating a life. And if it can, maybe I will.