Princess of Wands

Each Princess has a fundamental project in personal development. For the Princess of Wands, it’s the discovery of who she is and what she seems born to do best. This is intimately connected to what excites her or whets her appetite. We create our purpose out of our inclinations. The search is for her gifts, her passions or her calling, and she finds them in the things that ignite her or bring her most fully to life. As the earthy part of fire, she is fuel and the search for fuel. This concerns the getting and using of appropriate combustibles. It’s only an illusion that fuel is something other than energy that’s awaiting liberation. Fuel is locked-up light, and not less light. And it’s moving slowly enough now that we can think about what to do with it. Fuel can also be helpful information, just waiting to be discovered in the things that interest us, or things that help us to flourish or thrive. When things go right, we learn to be attracted to the right combustible substance. The Yijing counterpart, Gua 27, Hungry Mouth or Corners of the Mouth, develops the same fuel metaphor as a question of diet and nutrition, explicitly including our cultural sustenance and carefulness for the words that we use and expose ourselves to. We build ourselves out of these resources, and the light we give back comes from here. We learn a right dependence on such sources. The food metaphor also means learning how to hunger effectively, to feed real hungers instead of becoming all appetite and hungering after things we are told to need. Back when it was legal to experiment on human babies, one batch was given a free choice of diet, twenty little bowls to pick from, with no praise or scolding for choices. It wasn’t long until their little baby bodies told them what they needed. We just need to learn to heed our original natures and hungers. We can then ask something like this of public education: what could take something as insatiably hungry as a young human mind and make it lose its appetite for learning? Being told to stop playing around? Serious learning will follow from a perception of personal relevance. The value of deferred gratification will become clear enough in time. Teaching discipline is relatively irrelevant to a real education. Making students hungry is far more useful, catching them on fire, helping them find the on- switch or driving purpose. The Princess of Wands is on the lookout for sources of nourishment and inspiration that come the closest to what she discovers of her nature. She is a bit of a huntress here, wanting direction or prey, to feed what she wants to be or become. She might try on extra identities, or mistake valid experiences for valid realities. While she may seem endlessly curious and experimental in search of experiences that light her up, she is not looking to digress or wander too far from who she is at heart. Given a choice, she would likely prefer to burn steadily, with reliable enthusiasms, rather than flicker and sputter as excitements come and go. Nonetheless, burning is still about liberation from the solid state of things. She wants a charge, motive power, and arousal, and that could even mean wanting some drama in her life. In fact, drama, theatrics, role playing, and trying on new identities might become important stimuli. “From a little spark may burst a flame” Dante. Thus she may also experiment with different cognitive and affective states and their sources. Sometimes the flame will take on the nature of the fuel that it consumes, so that it pays to learn the right appetites. Hence the phrase from cybernetics: garbage in, garbage out. The noble character wants real substance to burn, consistent resources to feed a reliable flame. This suggests developing some care early on for higher quality sources, which might be inconsistent with a still-underdeveloped sense of identity or purpose. Without knowing what is relevant to what, it might be hard to choose an interest other than by how this lights us up, or an even more superficial appeal. It’s by trial and error that we discovers what empowers us. For this reason we need to be free to make errors. This is a search for personal purpose, something rewarding to do with our lives, our real wants. Which of the two wolves do we feed? Higher purpose, a life serving forces greater than ourselves, comes later than this, if it even comes at all.