The Star
After the extremes of the The Tower and The Devil, we are brought to a very otherworldly, almost surreal scene; a young woman is pouring water into both a pool and into the ground. She is completely nude, and yet, there is nothing sexual about her openness — in fact her nudity here goes so far as to exude a quality of transcendent innocence. Her right foot is resting on the water itself, which some could see as referring to the Christian story of Jesus walking on water. Six stars loom large in the dark sky, surrounding a massive star that centers both itself and the woman.
At this point in the Major Arcana, we’re now heavily into the symbolic meaning of the tarot. Previously, the cards of the Major Arcana have for the most part been largely direct in how they’ve conveyed meaning. But here with The Star, things are a little more abstract. It’s for that reason that I myself took a while to fully parse its meaning; encountering this card as filtered through other eyes, in other tarot decks was helpful too (a good argument for getting involved in more than one deck, or tarot system).
Water as an element has been long associated with the realm of the unconscious, of feelings and emotions, and as a liquid that is so vital to the body, it has also historically been associated with the “vital essence” of the body. By being poured out onto both the land and the water, there is a double symbol here: that of balance, and that of nourishment. Plants are growing out of the ground, but they are just young sprouts that have not yet grown into fully mature, flowering forms. The water nourishes the earth, and returns in rivulets to the pool. But in pouring out our water onto the earth, we must also balance that by pouring our water back into the pool.
The softness of the young woman’s pose and expression in this card is a stark contrast to the hard masculine energy of The Devil’s aggressiveness and the phallic nature of The Tower. Those two cards marked a major deviation from the balance illustrated in Temperance; here we return to that balance but in a more deeper, connected way. In Temperance, the angel was pouring one cup into another — a symbol of emotional and mental balance within the self, but apart from stepping into the pool the angel was not interacting with the environment. Here though, we see the woman very much connected to nature around her: she is naked, closer in proximity to the ground, and actively interacting with nature through the almost endless water flowing from her dual pitchers.
Before going further into the idea of connecting with nature, I want to talk more about the use of nudity here. We don’t seem to see a lot of nudes in the Major Arcana, or in the Smith-Waite tarot in general. Apart from this card, nudity figures prominently for the Lovers, The Devil, and the Sun. In the Lovers, there is a visual reference to the innocence of Adam and Eve as described in the Torah and the Christian Bible. The nudity in The Devil is a direct riff on The Lovers, while The Sun speaks to joy in its most raw, child-like state. But here, nudity speaks to something very different. After The Devil and the Tower we’ve been stripped down to our most barest, most vulnerable state, without armor, clothing, or protection of any kind. But we aren’t in any danger, surrounded by the nourishment of water, earth, and sky.
Through my own ace lens, this symbolizes the process of healing after the cataclysm(s) we have just experienced. The Tower marked the destruction of our hollow edifices, leaving us broken amidst the rubble of whatever structures in which we previously took comfort — for many, that structure being their formerly allosexual, non-queer life. Now, in The Star, we are given the opportunity to rebuild. But this time, not in the physical sense. After all, what good is rebuilding our personal tower, if it’s just going to get knocked down again? Stripped of whatever might have given us structure and meaning in the past, we are given the opportunity to rebuild our inner selves anew: To discover a new form or practice of religion or spirituality that aligns more closely with our asexuality or aromanticism. To start living more consciously and mindfully in our asexuality, aromanticism, and queerness. To not be afraid to accept ourselves as anything but normatively cisgendered, monosexual, or heterosexual. Here, we are (re)building ourselves as resilient people, more in tune and in touch with ourselves. As stronger people who can’t be knocked down. We may experience other, smaller Tower moments along the way, as we figure out the blueprints for our new inner structures. But each time, we build ourselves back stronger, and better.
The rebuilding process takes work and time, and with that, patience and love towards ourselves: Patience to know that healing is a journey, not an endpoint, and love, which comes with not being ashamed to see and accept ourselves for who we truly are when we are faced with our own bare nakedness.
One other question comes to mind when I think about the imagery of this card: When was the last time we let ourselves connect to nature?
Depending on where people may live, or the disabilities people may live with, not everyone may have the means or the resources to access a park or a place with any significant amount of nature, or natural habitat. And to that, I would gently ask if there is some place that one can walk or travel to with some measure of greenery, or plant life. It could be a place like a hiking trail in a park. It could be flower beds, lawns and trees along a neighbour’s front yard. It could be any place you could think of, which allows you to be in contact with nature. It could even be within your own room, with your computer and your phone shut off, and a simple potted plant to keep you company. Maybe you don’t have a plant nearby, and all you have is a stick, or a stone, or a piece of fruit, or a nut. Those are all perfectly acceptable too.
And if you can, if you are standing or sitting, try to close your eyes. You can gently rest your hands on the leaves of the plant that might be sitting in front of you, or on your lap, or by your sides, or on a tree on the trail you are walking, or on the grass upon which you may be resting. Your hands could also be in your lap, cradling stone (or piece of fruit, or nut). Breathe in, and breathe out.
Focus on how you feel as you draw in your breath. Focus on how you feel as you let it out of your body.
Then do it again.
Then do it again.
And there we have it: We are now meditating.
We often have this image of meditation as something that is part of some arcane Eastern — often Buddhist — spiritual tradition, far out of the reach or access to us mere mortals steeped in the materialism of North American culture. But I personally believe that that is simply not true. Meditation can be done practically anytime, anywhere. You can mediate while walking. You can even meditate while eating. As someone who still holds onto Catholic Christian traditions like the Rosary, I find myself entering into a meditative trance as I repeat the Hail Mary. I almost lose myself in the seemingly endless repetition of the words; it’s probably the closest I’ve ever come to experiencing unconscious glossolalia.
The point is that meditation can take many forms, and be realized in many ways. But here in this case, it is important to involve nature in our meditation, whether it is with the entirety of a forest in a park, or with the simple, earnest humility of an apple in our hand.
But why?
After the carnage and intensity of The Devil and The Tower, there can be no doubt that we have been left feeling exhausted and badly hurt. Even if we have emerged triumphant after The Tower, that violent event representing a drastic tearing down of an obsolete, oppressive construct, that victory has not come easy. Maybe our understanding of our inner queerness and asexuality or aromanticism has come with the destruction of a relationship, or the destruction of our earlier sense of self. Either way, we’ve come out bruised and beaten. While there are future battles to surely fight, there is a need for us to lick our wounds. In a more realistic and practical sense, there is a need for us to pause, and show ourselves the grace to allow ourselves a period for rest.
That rest can be from emails, and direct messages and all of the difficult connections and conversations that they may entail. That rest can be from social media, and seemingly endless stream of queerphobia and/or aphobia that comes spewing out of the mouths of trolls and haters on the internet. It can also be a rest from friends, family members and others who have shown us a difficulty or even outright unwillingness to honour and accept who we are as ace or aro people. Such is the difficult challenge for many ace and aro people, who have to deal with aphobic and queerphobic people that, for a myriad of reasons, are unavoidable in our day-to-day lives.
There is an compelling array of scientific evidence for the benefits of meditation — but on a more intuitive level, I think there is something deeply healing and nourishing to be gained in unplugging from others, and in turn, plugging into ourselves. If we have been busy fighting battles in our connections with others, it is time to lay down our weapons and focus on healing the wounds we have sustained.
And in turn, a large part of that nourishment is establishing a connection with something that we often don’t think to connect much with: nature. If you’ll forgive the detour into “woo-woo” territory, nature is something we are deeply connected with, if not on a spiritual level, then at least on an energetic and physical level through the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the matter we both consume and dispose of in our daily existence. As I write this, the news is full of stories highlighting the effects of climate change all over the world on a daily, if not weekly basis: Hurricanes and wildfires are increasing in both severity and frequency. Politicians and scientists alike are fretting about and going back and forth on what this means for our current patterns of energy consumption, and capitalist production. Meanwhile, on my Twitter timeline, I stumble into a fascinating thread outlying how humanity, and humanity’s ancestors have evolved and changed in response to our planet’s changing climate over hundreds of thousands and millions of years. There is no getting around our connection to nature.
So then, it is important to involve nature in our healing and meditative process. And how you do that is entirely up to you. There is no wrong or right way to do it. The only important thing is that you try.
A meditative nature habit is not something that can be achieved in the space of an afternoon, or an evening, or a day. Like those other pesky habits that we are so often nagged into doing, like brushing our teeth, or flossing, or hydrating, it is a habit that is hard to build, with benefits we do not often see or perceive. And like those habits, meditation is not something which requires great effort. Like our progress into our more fully realized lives as queer people, and as ace and aro people. All it takes is a matter of small steps, done with bravery and perseverance.
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Next: The Moon
