Six of Swords
Six of Swords
She said: “the intellect is a marvelous servant and a terrible master.” The swords represent this intellect—have I mentioned that already? And note: that boat cannot be steered by them. A deep rod is required. Another of the deck’s suits. A strong length of wood black with potential. This is the intuition. So, the thinking mind itself must be ferried and piloted and carried across the waters. And the tool is the gut, the part of one’s mind that knows without thinking. The waters are the subconscious, the emotional—note the overlaps—and to reach that far shore, with the earth solid under one’s feet again, one must pole along with great care. Must ride that narrow path between the chaotic turbulence at our right hand, the enigmatic calm at our left. There is more than one way to drown.
There’s a rest stop out in Nebraska where, half a life ago, my friends and I spent a ratty night’s sleep on picnic tables amid weeks of hedonistic driving from where I live now to California and back. It’s been years since I talked with any of these people, save one. We were young enough that we thought every hazard to our souls would be circumvented, the injury healed-over. But the places we’d been were making us who we were. No one told us that would happen. I assumed I was indestructible. Pure potential, a creature who could not yet be judged for his shortcomings.
It’s the first image when you search “Nebraska rest stop.” Nice, as far as that goes. A sort of wainscotting along the lower half of the building, a cladding of faux-brick in mixed shape and size, a fleet of vending machines, shaded out-buildings with one picnic table each, plenty of fertilized grass to exercise the stiff legs and turgid bladders of cross-country dogs.
I would finish college a couple years after sleeping on that picnic table and scaring an elderly couple walking their shih tzu as they turned the corner and there I was sprawled dusty and hung-over. I would cut my hair very short and never let it grow again. I would write several books, live in other time zones, visit countries I could not have predicted.
Twice more I’d visit this rest stop in Nebraska and maybe will again. From none of these visits was I capable of seeing the next. At each I could feel my way back to that last time as though my echo were still there, could feel myself back then being touched by something ineffable from the future.
Once, the Greyhound stopped there so we could pee and smoke cigarettes and stretch our legs. I was traveling back from New York to Boise, Idaho where I lived, with an underground city in Cappadocia the furthest point this trip had reached. I’d be a resident of Austin, Texas before year’s end and gone from there before I’d see that rest-stop again: driving in my ratty Corolla from Denver, where I’d moved to and then run out of money, to Rochester, New York where I’d run out of money again. Where I’d run out of country, as someone said once in a movie.
The six of swords is about traveling. It is not about vacation. The word travel comes from the word “travail,” from the meaning “to work.”
I thought one was meant to fling themselves out into the world and never come back. That the far side would be some alien land unimaginable. And it is, though I live now twenty minutes from where I grew up. This place I’m from and back within has not stayed the same for a moment, has not really changed at all. My college mate, the father of my godson, wandered this planet fifteen years from Samoa to Turkey to countries I can hardly pronounce. He lives up the street. Bought a little bungalow and mows his lawn once a week on the dot.
We sit in chairs out in his yard and we tell stories in which we can’t recall if we were characters or not. Across from us sits some aging creature who’s gone out and around and back again, takes the same shape of a kid we befriended in a previous life. We keep getting to know each other, though by the time we do he’s a different person than we started with.
Notice that there are others in the boat. The six of swords, as well, is about the ferrying of souls. Our own and others. The vulnerable child in your life or the child inside a little scared and naive. The woman or man you love and their counterpart in the divine within. On the distant shore, if you’ve poled the depths well, perhaps she’ll come to your cohort with hot tea and fish. Allow you to rest your bones. I am a ferryman of souls now, in my way. A husband and a step-father, “bonus dad,” with a child come into my life fully-formed and well-parented. I’ve brought her onto my skiff, meager as it is, along with her mother. And I am on theirs. And so I’ve staked a landmark out there past the openness—not to provide her with the best life possible, because she was well-provisioned before I ever knew her name. But just to make it matter that I was there. To nudge us all a little closer to dry land. To share what it is I know, the things I’ve thought, and push us along. . .she never could have predicted our coming years together when we first shyly met in the living room—hiding in her mother’s skirt and me behind what little I understood of children. And each day something new has been asked of and tomorrow will be another. And neither her nor I would have predicted this when we set our boats in the water. But the years ahead seem somehow more predictable than they’ve ever been. Perhaps that’s just because I’ve been so long afloat.