Nearly everyone wants to see this card appear in a reading. Whether we are still searching for what we understand as love or standing stable with a cherished partner – we like to see this card. Though the appearance of this Tarot key often refers to bringing the rejected parts of our inner life into the light, into the love we call acceptance, it certainly can mean what we might call romantic love. But as the popular song asks us to question, what is love?
The concept of romantic love is a modern-day invention with an interesting and ever-twisting narrative as to how it became our most sought-after relational acquisition. This fact of human history is worth our deep consideration. We tend to view romantic love, and even subsequent monogamy, as the most natural and necessary of all the quests. But is it? Our ancestors did not necessarily agree. The old courtships were about fantasy not mortgage payments and screaming babies and leaking refrigerators. Day-to-day life was lived out in larger family and community settings. The romantic fantasy was not meant to overlap with these hardships, it was meant to be and remain an ideal that was lived out through social rituals and poetry, and song. At some point, however, the wild human heart said: but let me try, let me try to live inside the dream.
The poet Mary Oliver delivers a beautiful and succinct expression of what romantic love means over the course of decades. She offers no definition, but rather an invitation to immerse one’s self fully in the never-ending discovery of another:
The Whistler by Mary Oliver
All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden
I mean that for more than thirty years she had not
whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was
in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and
she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and
cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war-
bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.
Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she
said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can
still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled
through the house, whistling.
May the anticipation be of greater value than our need for control.
Author of Daydream Tarot: A Basic Guide for Visionaries
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