You are The Sun

Happiness, Content, Joy.

The meanings for the Sun are fairly simple and consistent.

Young, healthy, new, fresh. The brain is working, things that were muddled come clear, everything falls into place, and everything seems to go your way.

The Sun is ruled by the Sun, of course. This is the light that comes after the long dark night, Apollo to the Moon's Diana. A positive card, it promises you your day in the sun. Glory, gain, triumph, pleasure, truth, success. As the moon symbolized inspiration from the unconscious, from dreams, this card symbolizes discoveries made fully consciousness and wide awake. You have an understanding and enjoyment of science and math, beautifully constructed music, carefully reasoned philosophy. It is a card of intellect, clarity of mind, and feelings of youthful energy.

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I was pagan long before I knew I was pagan. I guess you'd say my dad is an apostate Catholic - he converted to Baptist after he and my mom married. I was raised Southern Baptist, and realized at a fairly early age that there were some core beliefs there that I just couldn't accept.

One was the fallen nature of Man. Why should I be punished for something that someone else did eons before I was born? Why should I be cursed and damned to Hell because Eve ate a piece of fruit?

Another was the idea of substitutionary atonement. Why was it necessary for an innocent person to be killed for sins he didn't commit? And what good would it do to punish one person for someone else's wrong? How did that make the sin go away? And how could someone dying 2000 years before I was born take away sins I hadn't even committed yet? And what kind of father would do that to his own son?

Another was the innerrancy of the Bible. There were places where it blatantly contradicted itself. How was I supposed to know which scripture to believe? It was impossible to believe both, and yet that was exactly what I was expected to do.

When I brought these questions to my Sunday School teachers and pastors, I was blown off as a smart-aleck kid, and told that I had better straighten up, because God did not like it when people questioned Him. I was told that I was supposed to believe it, and that it didn't matter if I understood it or not. How could I believe something that didn't make sense? It was like Alice's conversation with the Red Queen, "Nonsense. I can believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast." I couldn't.

The older I got, the more aware I became of the natural world, especially since my grandmother was an avid gardener. After I began taking biology classes in school, and learned about the food web, it became abundantly obvious that what we do to the earth, we eventually do to ourselves, and that the earth was not something to be subdued and conquered, but respected and nurtured.

 Once I was old enough that my parents could no longer make me go to church with them, I quit going. I also started reading everything I could get my hands on regarding other faiths. There were aspects of all of them that appealed to me, but I never found an established path that I felt 100% comfortable with. I was still alboring under the delusion that there was One True Path and that once I found it, all my questions would be answered.

 I got maried at 19 (old enough to be legal, young enough to be stupid) and realized too late that I had merely been a means to a green card, that he would screw anything that walked upright, and that when he was drunk, he had a mean right cross. When I finally decided to leave after a fight one night during which the television became airborne in my direction, and informed my employer (a fundamentalist Christian) of my new address and impending name change, he invited me tocome to church with him. Confused, scared, and lonely, I decided to give Christianity another shot. I even made an appointment to talk to the minister at his church and was told that I did not have the right in God's eyes to leave him. That God had brought us together for a reason, that I had no right to second-guess that reason, and that when I took a vow "for better or for worse," I did not get to decide how bad "for worse" would get. I never went back to that church.

My daughter was conceived during a rebound relationship after the divorce, and while the relationship with her dad did not last, he was also an avid student of various spiritual paths, and helped me to realize that religion was not One Size Fits All. I just still couldn't find one size that fit me.

Nine years later, I remarried, and while he and I were dating decided once again to give Christianity a try, since he was Methodist and I still had not found my path. While I did become friends with one of the pastors at his church, I once again found that I just couldn't accept some of the basic tenets of Christianity. One Sunday, he noticed an ad in the paper for a jazz service at the Unitarian church, and we went out of curiosity. I was so blown away that I decided to go back another Sunday and see what their regular services were like. I beagan reading up on Unitairanism, and talking to the pastor there, and discovered to my delight, that they did not expect me to believe anything in particular, but that the whole point was for me to find and/or create a belief structure that worked for me! I joined their church, and my by-then-fiance flipped because I had done so without consulting him. He later joined so that we would both be members of the same church, but he never really considered it his church, and he always objected when the subject of reigion came up and I said that I was not Christian.

It was thanks to the Unitarians that I realized that I had been pagan for years. I participated in a female spirituality seminar there called "Cakes for the Queen of Heaven" and realized that there was a name for people like me. I had always heard the word pagan used in a derogatory sens before. I began reading about goddess religions and earth-centerd religions, and fially had the epiphany I had been seeking all those years. I COULD take the elements of any path that I found nourished my soul and apply them to my life without having to embrace the total path.

We later divorced - many issues there including but not limited to his severe hypochondria, his refusal to honor my wishes regarding the upbringing of MY daughter, and his refusal to accept my right to my religious beliefs and his anger that I would not pretend to be Christian to please his family.

I am now married to a man who respects my path, even though it is not his path. We find that there are times when our paths parallel, times when they overlap, and times when they diverge widely, and it's all good. We treasure those times when we can share the journey, and we also give each other the space needed for those roads each must travel alone.  We wrote our wedding ritual ourselves incorporating elements of my path, his path, and our path.

As I have grown since then, I find that my connection to the mother aspect grows stronger. As I feed and nurture my child, the earth feeds and nurtures me, and I in turn feed and nurture her other children. I don't view deities as outside forces, but as the very life within me and everyhting around me. They don't so much control my circumstances as they serve as reminders to me of how I need to relate to the rest of the world - sort of like notes on my spiritual bulletin board. More and more I find myself looking for ways to show the earth my respect, whether it's tending my vegetable, flower, and herb gardens,  giving the half-eaten mice my cat brings me a proper burial, making a list of errands so that I can plan the route that burns the least gas, or trying to find a balance between purchasing locally produced foods that are not organically grown and purchasing organically grown items that have been shipped across the globe using obscene amounts of fossil fuels.

So what do you want to know about me?

I'm 42, recently married to a great guy, mother of a 17-year-old goddess in her own right. I have a lovely garden in the tiny back yard of my apartment, with cantaloupe, tomatoes, potatoes, bell peppers, squash, jalapenos, and serranos, along with a lemon, a satsuma, and a blood orange tree, and a small herb garden.

My path is a rather eclectic blend of the more liberal elements of the Christianity I was raised in (love thy neighbor, help those less fortunate, be honest - you know, the parts that all faiths share), with elements of Buddhism, Taoism, Wicca, Mahikari, humanism, andmany other isms. I take wisdom anywhere I find it, from the Bible to The Spiral Dance to Dr. Suess, and incorporate it into my ever-evolving spiritual life.

More later - have to go to the dairy store before they close if I want locally made cheese.