Tuning into sorrow

Gaian Tarot (Llewellyn 2011)

Today's card is a curiosity. I don't know what to make of it. It is the Gaian Tarot equivalent of the RWS 9 of Swords, which usually depicts a woman or man awaking abruptly from a nightmare and covering their face in their hands. It has to do with sleeplessness, worry, troubling thoughts, vain imaginings, walking the floor, anxiety, overthinking, etc. The woman in this card has been suffering these symptoms, but she is shown snuggling up to a standing stone and levitating in the purple storm with a cat-eared mask overlooking her.

She Who Watches

The companion book  mentions that the image in the sky is She Who Watches, 'a petroglyph found near the Columbia River on the border of Washington and Oregon.' No other detail is given, other than that She Who Watches is 'the One who always watches over her with love and compassion.'  A Google search reveals that the petroglyph is based on a female chief called Tsagaglal, when people were not yet real people, and so we could still talk to animals. Trickster Fox asked her how she was going to watch over her people when they faced the times of trouble to come, and when she could not answer, he turned her into this stone. That's one version, anyway.

Here is a retelling by Ed Edmo:

I think the card is suggesting that the woman has entered a journey of some sort whilst meditating on her grief. The image in the card is what she may be seeing in her journey, thus the floaty levitation in the purple sky, and the misty appearance of She Who Watches. If I stare at the card, I begin to sense the roiling motion of the clouds, and the image of She Who Watches dematerialises and reappears at different angles. Perhaps this is meant to remind us of the temporary nature of all our emotions. What we feel and think comes and goes, nothing is permanent, and our moment of despair will eventually turn out to be as insubstantial as the dew.

The card doesn't entirely work for me. It lacks the intensity and immediacy of the traditional waking-from-a-nightmare image, and the hands over the face seems to be a universal symbol of crushing hopelessness and despair that is lacking in this card.

On the other hand, the idea of leaning into the pain and experiencing it in all its physical and emotional aspects can be a deep insight meditation practice, and possibly more healing in the long run. The woman strikes me as listening carefully to the vibrations of a tuning fork, the standing stone. She's grounded in and experiencing her grief utterly. Now, I personally find the constant reassurance of this deck that a 'benign force is watching over me' to be unhelpful, but this is the Gaian Tarot, so one would expect this message to keep coming across time and again. In other words, I can do without She Who Watches...but if that's what this woman (and the deck creator) sees on her journey into her own despair, who am I to question. I'm just taking it to represent any images that flit through the mind during these moments of meditation, whatever symbol is of profound comfort to you personally.