The High Priestess Arrives

Last week was a traffic jam. A snarled knot of different yarns in a basket. Frequent calls from an aging uncle, whose townhome I was in charge of selling, intersected with three family members moving at the same time each needing support with van rentals and driving and trading furniture between houses, with shifting logistics on a quarter-hour basis. Hovering in the background, an aging relative spiraled in a vortex of negativity with her neighbor over a fence dispute. 

I stood (standing, to avoid lifting so as to not add physical injury to the list of things to be managed) in the midst of the snarl, seeing myself as a helper, trying really hard to not take over and impose my decor and furniture arranging aesthetic onto my grown children and their father, my ex. I desperately tried to ignore the impulse to take boxes of worn out bed linens and tattered pillows to the dump rather than to the next apartment.  I refrained, just barely, from pointing out how all of this stuff simply was not going to fit in the new abodes. After all, these abodes, and all their contents, were not mine, not my decision. 

Meanwhile, my memoir languished, untouched over three weeks, triggering the familiar refrain of my Ugly Stress Sister: “So, are you really a writer, or what?” 

“No, I’m a caretaker now,” I retorted defensively.  “I’m 67 years old, and when women of my age are in relatively good health, they are the chosen ones to take care of others. That’s the natural order of things.” 

I can’t really complain about this, although thus far these words sound an awful lot like a complaint. I don’t think the departed and beloved Sen. John Lewis meant for me to use his famous phrase this way, but with all due respect, I’ll borrow it now: I was experiencing Good Trouble.

I could not in good moral conscience be anywhere else than in support of my children, my uncle, my ex-husband, even my grumpy relative— AND despite my good intentions, it was a lot of trouble. A messy closet of caretaking, leaving my unchecked ego to throw around the caretaker label like it was akin to leprosy, thus proving that while I tried to be a good person, I was actually selfish and resentful. Welcome to my inner sanctum (sanitarium), where good thoughts go to die. 

Fortunately, I have the good (enough) sense to take counsel from my grown children, and my son had another way of looking at it when I brought forth the demonic voices from my inner cave. 

“Cindy!” (He calls me this instead of Mom when we’re having adult-to-adult conversation)  “No, no, no, no, you have this all wrong. What you do is not mere caretaking, though that’s an important piece. You are the High Priestess, literally holding the whole family together!”

My ego perked up at this bit of flattering news. “What might a ‘High Priestess’ be?” I asked hopefully. 

“In tarot, the High Priestess stands in the space between great Wisdom and the Mystery. She is wise and insightful, and at the same time has access to the unmanifested, the spiritual realm, the Great Unknowing.” 

Being an archetype enthusiast, he went on to point out how the High Priestess implores one to listen to their intuition rather than prioritizing the intellect and conscious mind. She is the Divine feminine - the mysterious female that understands and holds the answers to the deep unknowns: religion, self, nature. She represents someone who is intuitive and curious, and open to spirituality and all its unknowable mysteries. 

Fresh off my recent shamanic training and looking back on the interactions with family and friends over the past few weeks, I did see where the acts of caretaking— picking up the rental van, negotiating the condo sale, making sure everyone was fed, taking care of the grand-dogs— were opportunities to remind each of them to look within for their intuitive guidance, their moral center, their values, and to seek connection with the Divine Energy flowing through us all.  In so doing, I might add, reminding myself to do the same. 

Right behind that, however, my Ugly Stress Sister pointed out how deeply flawed I am at so many things:  having writing discipline, drinking coffee without my beloved honey, Tourettes-level cursing, directing other people’s lives, or bathing appropriately for public consumption post-Covid. 

But now I have my High Priestess! She apparently does not care about all that. Or cares less about those short-comings than plugging into the energetic forces that matter more than my questionable personal care routine or my propensity for sarcasm and judgment. 

The human bias for negativity, for the worst case scenario, for the tiger crouching in the high grass, is a thing. We all have it leftover from when our lizard brains needed to stay engaged simply to survive another day in the jungle.  It’s a thing but not a REAL thing TODAY.  It’s an echo of the past, a mirage. If we’re lucky and we have  people who really know us and love us at our core, and we listen to them tell us what they love about us, then we have a chance at escaping the gravity field of the negative interpretation—and tell a different, more empowering story about ourselves and others. 

Caretaker to High Priestess was a mind-set change. This shift from my anemic, misguided, martyred version of Caretaker  (and apologies to all the truly angelic and compassionate caretakers that the world so desperately needs) to High Priestess created just enough light in the cave for me to question the truth of the darkness I was sitting in. 

Now it’s up to me to leave the martyred caretaker to her own devices and actually BE the High Priestess.