August 1st, 2024
The Sun XIX
I am sunned. When people see me, they have to say it. “Wow, you are tan!” And I am. Although I always stay under the umbrella at the beach and always use 50 sunscreen, I am outside as much as I can in good weather, walking Walter, pulling weeds, and even running outside to greet the sound of playing children when they wander into my yard to look for fairies with their open hearts like I taught them. Some may say that I must be more careful with the sun, but the truth is that I have my mother’s skin. Though German and Italian, my mother’s skin leans more toward her Neapolitan roots and tans beautiful in the summer. Over the years, the sun has been kind to her, and she does not have many wrinkles. My two sisters and I all hope we have my mother’s skin as we age further. She is beautiful and always has been. I am half-Irish as well, so there is that. From my Dad, I have the Celtic freckles, the big, warm brown eyes, the curly, frizzy hair, and soft blond hair that grows smooth along my skin. I am a mixed breed grown in Bronx, NY, in the sunlight of two good-looking people who have loved and raised each other since grammar school. And this is one of the secret blessings of my life. I have grown up in the light of a great sun, the great love story of my parents. In the tarot, this is the sun.
The Sun card in the tarot is perhaps my favorite. When it flips up with its beams of hope, I can take a big breath. So can you. With radiance, I can assure, acknowledge, and even promise that all is well. You have made it through. The sun means fertile soil. New beginnings. Blessings. Abundance. Strength. It also means you can afford to be generous. And what does that mean, “You can afford to be generous.” It means you have tapped into an internal source of light,love and resources. It means you are no longer a bloodsucker, an energy vampire, or a drama queen. It means you have found your center and can go there and get anything you need at any time. It means that you, my darling, have made it through your earth initiation… for now.
Recently, I had a profound download of my personal connection to the sun. For the past seven years I have been studying with a Peruvian shaman and taking very deep dives into my story as a being beyond who I am in this lifetime. My last shamanic journey weaved for me a tall tale of how I came to inhabit the earth and who I am in pure energy form. This will be a reach for some of you reading. Many of us are fascinated with the afterlife, I am equally fascinated with the before. Carl Sagan reminds us to consider this, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” The before holds the star stuff. I want to know about that.
When I journey with my Shaman, I hear a narrator; I call this voice “The Mother” or “Pachamama.” She whispers to me to follow her and listen carefully. She leans in and soothes me, welcomes me, and has much to say. She waits for me to come to her, to open, to remember. This past conversation lasted over 8 hours. It seems that in all the universe, my particular star stuff is linked with our sun. The sun of our solar system. At one time, a meteor past our sun, and I, in gaseous form, hitched a ride to Earth. The gas of my being caught fire while heading through the earth’s atmosphere and landed somewhere near Peru. This created a large fire that took a very long time to die down. Indigenous people who inhabited the earth at this time believed that this fire was a sacred gift from the Sun God and erected a temple to keep the fire going. For hundreds of years, I burned in this temple in the form of gas and fire. I was part of a greater consciousness, a form of light, a direct path to the wisdom of the sun. But for the first time, I was separated. No longer a part of the sun. Like an ambassador from another country, I was in between homes. People came to me and prayed. I saw and felt them. I did what I could to soothe them, encourage them, and help them to find their answers. I learned their language and their ways. I watched how love moved them and how fear tore them apart. To this day, when a client sits before me, I feel this ember glowing deep within me, along with the secret knowledge that it is in sitting quietly in the glow of this light that they will hear and get what they need. That somehow, they can hitch a ride toward their own light, their own star stuff. I have felt this glow since as far back as I remember. It has made me generous. It has made me kind. It is my inner wellspring of love and intuition.
At one point, I grew tired of burning day in and day out. I decided I wanted to jump from the element of fire and move to earth and form, feel the wind, drown in water, muddy myself with dirt, and become human. I wanted to feel and see and touch and smell and taste and live the density of the human experience. I don’t remember the transition at this point from fire to earth but I remember the deep longing that took me there. My next vision came from deep in a cave where I was formed. For ages I spent my life living deep inside the mountains, my body a part of the rock and mineral world. In this life, I learned to listen to the great mother. I kept close to her heartbeat, to her breath, to the fulgurations of her awe-inspiring, creative, moving body. Here, I moved between lava and earth, water and mud, and I learned to listen. There, I became a giant. As a giant and often under the full moon, I helped her move things around, I was a builder. I helped carve out what she needed for rivers to flow, assisting her in the irrigation of her body. I took handfuls of trees and flowers and spread them all over her. Whatever she needed, I moved, like a child building a sandcastle; the earth was my canvas.
Then, after many hundreds of years, I squeezed myself into a smaller form. I gazed at the sun and began to forget who I was and where I came from. I became fully human. I began to hear the mother in the distance. I walked as far as I could from her beating heart. I lived and lived and lived. From Warrior to beggar, lord to geisha, slave to statesman. Tragedy, war, treachery, pillaging, birth, death. I took what I could, swindled, and survived. I went as deep and as far into the dark of forgetting as I could. Then I found God in a thousand ways and repented in a thousand more. I yogied, shamaned, medicined, priested and high priested. There is no one I meet who I have not destroyed, no one I have not begged for forgiveness, no one I have not forgiven. Everyone is my beloved now. I missed nothing. I have been here for 10,000 years, and now, finally, in this life, I have remembered the path home.
That, for me, is the path toward our sun.
We all have the stuff of stars in us. We all have hitched a ride at some point, caught on fire, and landed on the earth. And because of it, we all carry the seeds of the universe within us. We all have ancient and cosmic embers to stoke. When we see this card in a spread, we can know one thing for sure. We have become truly self-reliant. We are self-sourced. We have all we need, and there is so much more to come.
