A number of times this weekend, I had occasion to tell the story of Robert Desnos, the French surrealist poet, who in the 1940s was arrested by the Nazis for his work with the Resistance.  One day in the concentration camp, he was loaded with a bunch of men into the truck that went out each day but from which no one ever returned as its destination was the gas chambers. Both guards and prisoners were silent.  Death was inevitable.  But when the men were being loaded off the truck, Robert Desnos grabbed the hand of one man and read his palm.  Using the stream of consciousness gift of a surrealist poet (because I don’t believe he was a palm reader), he began to tell the man of his long life and the children to come.  He read other palms showing great futures for his fellow prisoners and the guards began to wonder.  They packed everyone back on the truck and these men survived the day.

I remember vividly reading that story in an Utne Reader article sitting in the Lilly Library on a warm day.  It gave me goose bumps so I vividly and bodily remember the moment.  Of course, I couldn’t remember the year!  But through the great labyrinth of knowledge that is the Internet I found that Susan Griffin had written it and an on-line version of the article can be found at http://thetyee.ca/Citizentoolkit/2004/11/15/CanImagSaveUs/ .

Re-reading the whole article reminded me of Griffin’s main point, that the imagination has the power to make change.  The story Desnos told from his imagination shifted consciousness and allowed people to question what was inevitable.  He transformed the group’s beliefs and their futures shifted.

But can just anyone do that?  Wasn’t he a specially gifted person? Perhaps, but I think that what he really had going for him was practice.  The surrealist poets would give performances of their stream of consciousness poetry and Desnos was especially adept in his performances.  Reading palms – whether he actually was training in this or not – came easy as his consciousness shifting muscles were limber and strong.

And this is where tarot cards can help us.  Over and over this past weekend, the presenters lead us into the imagination.  We looked deeply into one card to see how it showed us past, present, and future through images all on that one card (lead by Geraldine Amaral); we picked a central teacher or DNA card and then entered it to see and hear what advice a figure in it had to give us (under the guidance of James Wanless), and we took on personas of exotic fortune tellers with mysterious origins to free our voices of prediction (with the always imaginative Rachel Pollack). I think Robert Desnos would have jumped right into this last activity!

We can be as imaginative as Desnos with a little working out and tarot practice is a tool to help with this.  We need this imagination to move forward out of these times into a positive future.  Our major institutions of finance, government, industry, media, and religion are breaking apart.  We can put band aids on them, but the deeper underlying problems will remain and the fix won’t last long.  We must work hard at imagining this new world.  Time is of the essence.

Before I close, I must note that time ran out for Robert Desnos.  He died of typhus a few days of the liberation of his camp.  The larger circumstances of his life closed in on him.  But what of the other men?  Surely some survived and perhaps inspired by their palm readings believed they could have a better life, find love, have children.  This “cheap fortune telling” gave them hope and changed their lives.

Mary Greer has written about the value of hope and tarot readings on her blog at http://marygreer.wordpress.com/2008/11/24/guidance-in-the-economic-downturn/ and I think she might write something on this as well.  Always good to check out what Mary is writing.

The cards themselves can be prompts for the questions that we need to ask ourselves as we engage in change making.  (I am sure that I learned this technique and its creative use from Rachel Pollack.)  I developed the attached spread for one of our Awen Tree Tarotplay groups focused on the 10s.  The class began with a look at the Major Arcana’s X, the Wheel of Fortune, which is the card with change most clearly at the core of its meaning (more musings on this card very soon).  We then explored the 10s of the four suits.  To reinforce our discussion of these cards, I’d prepared a reading with 4 questions inspired by the meanings of the cards from from each suit.  Laid out in a circle around a wheel of change, of course!

Click completion-spread-or-the-power-of-the-minor-10s to see the spread. Can you identify which card inspired which question?

We can connect with our own birthing and dying – not as two discrete happenings which will mark the beginning and ending of a linear experience called life, but rather as two ever present aspects of a continuous process whose revolutions stretch forth into infinity.  Sallie Nichols, Jung and Tarot:  An Archytipcal Journey

You take chances in life and you may lose.  But how else do you win? Sometimes you have to take a risk to break free of a closed belief system, or to experience a world bigger and more wonderous than the one you were taught.  Rachel Rollack, The Forest of Souls

To accept growth and change in oneself is also a kind of departure, a leaving behind of the safe and the known.  Sometimes we realize the poignancy of our loss only after the fact, but there is no returning home.  Margaret Guenther, Holy Listening

 I have been thinking about the process of change and what makes it possible for us to create changes in our lives and society. I’ve been reading William Bridges, the psychologist, and his work on transitions.  He lays out a change process that includes letting of go of the old and creating a picture of the new.  Creating the new does not happen immediately so for a while those in the process of change are in the “neutral zone.”  This inspired me to create a Tarot spread for how to work with the neutral zone.

 It was a bit of a challenging spread for those least farmilar with Tarot, but I also got pleanty of positive response.  Two people really loved it and were inspired by how I turned my reading and intellection exploration in an action tool.  I felt it was a positive experiement.

The handout on the spread that I gave out in the Playgroup is attached. spread-for-insight-into-neutral-zone.doc