The Lovers

Even before the Lovers card took on its now-traditional associations with the zodiac sign of Gemini and Mutable Air, it was never really about two people in love, whether this was a fraternal, platonic, romantic, or erotic love. It was always about a change or transition from a younger, smaller, or denser state to one more developed, expansive, or rarified. As we mature, we are gradually drawn into larger and larger worlds. Child leaves crib, youth leaves home, groom and bride start a new family, extending their clans, and the sage leaves his nation behind, and maybe even his species, to live in a greater world. Such thresholds are one-way crossings into more expansive environ- ments. We are drawn irrevocably outward. Although we may revisit our younger states from time to time, we do so as permanently altered entities, unable to truly come home again. We can’t get the worms back into the can. This Trump is a transition from childhood into adulthood, from the familial and familiar life into a life richer in unknowns and surprises. Our education, a word that arose from ex-ducere, to lead out of, is how we prepare for such transitions, in advance of the restlessness, allurements, attractions, appetites, compulsions, temptations, desires, and loves that would draw us out there, with or without the education in advance. This is the crossroads, where the mischievous spirits are so wont to loiter. But we face facts: when is making a choice or vow not the same as giving something else up? We must foreclose some of our options as we move forward through life. Since its association with Gemini, this card is more about the mutability and changes that learning, experiences, and perceptions bring to us, the long-term alterations that our minds undergo. But this is still best symbolized by our closest human relationships and the cluster of social needs that pervades Maslow's pyramid at all levels, those for family, belonging, affiliation, love, sex, and the esteem of others. We will strive to overcome our original and fundamental sense of separation to seek a higher integration with something transpersonal, beyond and greater than ourselves. We still try to find a sense of wholeness alone, and not let our needs and our neediness overtake us, but only some kind of love, someone or some thing we can love, can move us out of ourselves, where the reality of it all will outlive us and not flicker out of existence when we do. To reach for this, we must also be somewhat less than whole, and sometimes be exactly a half. This is life reaching and branching out into higher dimensions. The poor, delud- ed Pharaohs thought that the pyramid’s shape would capture the eternal. Yet what lives the longest is the humble bush, that branches outward and survives by spreading its seeds around. But lest there be the confusion that often catches up with such lovers of larger life, this is not a reaching out for something more general or something more abstract: that way be mostly platitudes and experience with little content. This is reaching out for more of the specific, real loves and relationships, encountered one at a time, single acts of kindness, the little things in life, and hence all the multiplying branches of the bush. We still retain some coherence and identity as we expand. In choosing the bigger worlds, we expand ourselves into unknowns and the unfamiliar. A decision made in thin air becomes a path in reality. We make bargains and contracts with strangers. We risk complete immersion in the strange. We commit to life-altering choices, from which we can never come all the way back, even when skilled at unlearning. We are changed in critical ways, especially by significant others. We risk becoming someone else entirely and losing our comforting mindsets. There are choices and errors that will have to be paid for, and high opportunity costs for all we forego. We don’t all have the courage for this, even knowing that a larger world most likely means more to be gained. We have to trust that if this is not in our nature, then learning and adapting can become our second nature. We have to have something as potent as love, or mad desire at least, to overcome the fear and mistrust. The Yijing counterpart is Gua 59, Huan, Scattering or Dispersion, Wind over Water, which is perhaps the most mystical of the chapters and one of the few that mentions the establishment of temples. One way to understand this is ‘seeding the world’ with what used to be a smaller, denser version of you. It’s change to a higher state of being which shares the same symbolism as Omar Khayyam’s line, ‘I came like water, and like wind I go.’ It’s also literally about the energy moved around in changes in states of matter, melting, evaporation, and sublimation. Much further wisdom may be gleaned here from Rumi and M. Eckhart. We are becoming a part of something larger, returning the bits of stardust that were gathered together in our making. There is a sense of surrender here, and often a terror that precedes it, death threats to the human ego that we try to block out with our fairy tales. There are trust issues involved at all levels in this card, and issues of commitment and courage. But what we have to gain is immense.