XIX. The Sun {Tarot Songs}
"Nature / is out of control / you tell me & / that’s what’s so / good about / it." (On Vitality)
A Brief Intro to “Tarot Songs”:
The posts in the Tarot Songs series will be a space for me to ruminate on various cards in the major and minor arcana as I explore, discover, and develop deeper relationships to the cards. What they won’t be: “official” meanings or interpretations. What they will be: mine.
Some years ago, before I had done much study on the Tarot, I pulled a card everyday for 78 days and wrote an intuitive interpretation of it, for a deck I intended to create using photography and collage as the visuals. The image above is for a shoot I did for the Sun card.
The Tarot Songs posts will contain:
a poem + song I feel go with the energy of the card
some personal reflections
my intuitive reading of the card from the above experiment (as I’m intrigued by the subconscious knowing I had of the cards before getting my intellect involved)
an image I’ve made to go along with the ~vibes~ I get from said card.
The long and short of it: I love Tarot (the mythology/philosophy/spiritual/historical/storytelling aspect of it all) and could spend years going ever-deeper on just one card, and will occasionally make these posts nerding out about a singular card. Maybe I’ll do multiple posts on just one card, even! I’ll do whatever I feel! I hope you find it interesting, too, whether you’re a fellow enthusiast or just curious and along for the ride. xx
Index, in case you want to jump to a particular section:
Poems
Originally I thought this was the right poem for this card:
July (Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz)
The figs we ate wrapped in bacon.
The gelato we consumed greedily:
coconut milk, clove, fresh pear.
How we’d dump hot espresso on it
just to watch it melt, licking our spoons
clean. The potatoes fried in duck fat,
the salt we’d suck off our fingers,
the eggs we’d watch get beaten
’til they were a dizzying bright yellow,
how their edges crisped in the pan.
The pink salt blossom of prosciutto
we pulled apart with our hands, melted
on our eager tongues. The green herbs
with goat cheese, the aged brie paired
with a small pot of strawberry jam,
the final sour cherry we kept politely
pushing onto each other’s plate, saying,
No, you. But it’s so good. No, it’s yours.
How I finally put an end to it, plucked it
from the plate, and stuck it in my mouth.
How good it tasted: so sweet and so tart.
How good it felt: to want something and
pretend you don’t, and to get it anyway.
But after writing this, I think the best poem to fit this card might actually be Eileen Myles’s “Peanut Butter” (a long-time favorite of mine):
I am always hungry
& wanting to have
sex. This is a fact.
If you get right
down to it the new
unprocessed peanut
butter is no damn
good & you should
buy it in a jar as
always in the
largest supermarket
you know. And
I am an enemy
of change, as
you know. All
the things I
embrace as new
are in
fact old things,
re-released: swimming,
the sensation of
being dirty in
body and mind
summer as a
time to do
nothing and make
no money. Prayer
as a last re-
sort. Pleasure
as a means,
and then a
means again
with no ends
in sight. I am
absolutely in opposition
to all kinds of
goals. I have
no desire to know
where this, anything
is getting me.
When the water
boils I get
a cup of tea.
Accidentally I
read all the
works of Proust.
It was summer
I was there
so was he. I
write because
I would like
to be used for
years after
my death. Not
only my body
will be compost
but the thoughts
I left during
my life. During
my life I was
a woman with
hazel eyes. Out
the window
is a crooked
silo. Parts
of your
body I think
of as stripes
which I have
learned to
love along. We
swim naked
in ponds &
I write be-
hind your
back. My thoughts
about you are
not exactly
forbidden, but
exalted because
they are useless,
not intended
to get you
because I have
you & you love
me. It’s more
like a playground
where I play
with my reflection
of you until
you come back
and into the
real you I
get to sink
my teeth. With
you I know how
to relax. &
so I work
behind your
back. Which
is lovely.
Nature
is out of control
you tell me &
that’s what’s so
good about
it. I’m immoderately
in love with you,
knocked out by
all your new
white hair
why shouldn’t
something
I have always
known be the
very best there
is. I love
you from my
childhood,
starting back
there when
one day was
just like the
rest, random
growth and
breezes, constant
love, a sand-
wich in the
middle of
day,
a tiny step
in the vastly
conventional
path of
the Sun. I
squint. I
wink. I
take the
ride.
That line — “the vastly conventional path of the Sun.” The Sun as conventional! Even in all its power. Power as conventional; commonplace, even. That’s the kind of vision I hold for the world. (Speaking of course of the power & vitality of our nature, not patriarchal/supremacist power-over.)
Songs
Again, these are very different vibes, but they both feel like a version of this card:
Chet Baker’s “Happy Little Sunbeam”
Alicia Keys’s “3 Hour Drive ft. Sampha” (imagine she’s singing to the sun, not a person)
Energetic Reflection
In one of my favorite, albeit unlikely, books of Tarot interpretations (the booklet that accompanies the Bowie deck), the author describes the Sun energy as “the sheer visceral celebration of being alive” and “the exquisite process of growing into ourselves.” He references the Chinese goddess Guan Yin: “life granter.”
At the beginning of the year, I pulled a 12-card spread for each month of 2022. October’s card was The Sun. That month (and beyond, now) I experienced this card and archetype as the experience of my truest nature & purest essence. Not in a spirtual-bypass-y way, but in a childlike, imaginative, total zest-for-life way. I found my way back (after a long, long winter) into feeling excited, thrilled, energized and engaged by life and by my self again — ready to tear my teeth into the meat of things. I bought gold eye shadow and got a sassy haircut that made me feel both edgy and new, while simultaneously connected to my child-self. I dressed differently. I danced differently. I started to feel joy bubble up within me on a near-daily basis.
Both of the poems I included above are about hunger, and wanting, and getting what you want. And having the getting be good. And the sun is like that: a charging station. Both fulfillment and a catalyst for more. The Sun makes us voracious. It awakens appetite, celebrates it, can kill you but only if you lose consciousness, might burn you but will always be worth it. That beach day will always outweigh the application of aloe after, you know? Desire is a many-faced God, and also not a god at all. The sun exists both for and in spite of you and your ideas. The Sun is bigger than you, bigger than emotions. The sun feeds. The sun care-takes. Without the sun, joylessness. Without the sun, literally death. The Sun Tarot card comes right before Judgement. The Sun is the near-denouement of the World — the whole shebang.
I found myself tapping into this vitality after I let go of philosophizing and got back in my body. I find more after I get honest. Honesty frees up energy, I found. So does physical movement and dancing. So does responsibility. Energizing can be a verb. Doing those things I’d rather put off? — loosens up and breeds more of it, like taking a bag of loose change to the bank. Suddenly you’ve got more to spend.
The Sun card is Marnie’s PURE SOURCE ENERGY. Prana, Qi, Chi. Third chakra-solar plexus-core-life force. It’s sunflowers and fresh grass. It’s words like golden and joy and blossom and brilliance and energy. It’s the truth of the word capable.
Typically related to the masculine in Western tradition, Maryam Hasnaa offers an alternative Eastern interpretation of the Sun as divine feminine energy:
There is nothing submissive about the Sun. There is nothing Divine about submission. God asks us to be sovereign, and the Sun shows us how to do it. The Sun is the medicine. Is healer. The Sun, sinking below the horizon, shows surrender as a natural order, a balancing dance, not a giving-in.
In my last post, I talked for a moment about the Sun card as it pertains to the devil side of us: the two-in-one, double negative of the light. I talked about how I’ve come to find that wholeness includes all parts of us, both shadowy and sparkling. Acceptance and acknowledgement of that is, in fact, where the aliveness comes from. The letting-in of all of it is the joy.
Intuitive Interpretation
Back when I was writing my own tarot deck on pure instinct alone (with zero training or study), this is what I wrote about The Sun:
XIX. THE SUN
THIS IS ABOUT POWER. YOURS. Not coercion, not forcefulness, not getting what your ego wants. It’s the life force that can come to you anytime, anywhere: after a long, hard day of physical labor, after a sleepless night, after a dark night of the soul. It’s called Energy. And it is there, in endless, boundless supply, available for you and to you to access, tap into, (re)ignite, fly. It is life-giving. It is life. Growth. Blooming. It’s warmth, heat, burning, emanating. Like the ocean, it is awful in its grandeur, in its capacity to grow life and too destroy. That element is what’s in you. You are not here to walk always in darkness. There is a time for rest and there is a time for kicking, dancing, beaming your way through and into each day like an open doorway. That time is now. It’s unignorable, undeniable.
It costs nothing.
I’d love to hear your own thoughts about this card — what do you think of when you pull it? What feelings does it evoke? Which poem do you think fits better - “July” or “Peanut Butter”? What poems or songs would you pair with it?
Tell me things.