Family Tree

This is the 5 of Fire in Lane's Greenwitch Tarot:

Uh oh! Conflict, Chaos, and Confusion. Yikes! Sometimes the energies refuse to coalesce. Lightning strikes. Rain pours down. Thunder roars. The ancestral sacred apple tree crashes to the ground. Precious things are lost forever. It’s hard to keep sight of the idea of the phoenix rising from the ashes. There is nothing to be done but to feel it all. No choice but to step over the fallen family tree in our path and weather the storm by surrendering to the energies as they swirl around us. We pray it’s the darkness before the dawn to come.

Can you visualize the seeds being  planted for you in this storm? What are your versions of the snaky spirals – Allies - that still dance along side? Can you integrate the fiery Kundalini energies that want to rise inside you? What is the fire whispering? What is the rain washing away? Take heart. Dawn will come.

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Journal 12/4/95:

Pieces of the outside world come and go - intersecting with my own journey. Deepening. The deMoll pipelines have been open and humming. Alot of pain - growth is there but difficult for most of the others to see.... In the depths/Coming out of all this Friday I painted the "Journey" [assignment from the painting class] as a fallen tree - bits smashed. It feels appropriate based on class’s clearing discussion, the real trees that are falling all around us in the storm (that Skye and I have had fun clearing up) and the family tree that is at present writhing in agony at all the revelations and scrutiny. Everyone’s pain is so out there - everyone has been dragged in. The wheel turns.

Journal 3/10/97:

During the course of that fall as I was wrestling with all this family stuff, the wild apple tree that I have always associated with Back Home and Family fell down in a storm across the path to my space. What an omen. Its red/yellow leaves were the one bit of fall color every year I could see from the house here. I often used it as a touchstone for the feeling of Rose Valley and Home. Not only did it fall, but it fell across my path. I had to clamber over it and under it every time I went down to paint. Trees are important symbols in my paintings anyway. Interestingly, it is growing new sprouts this year - out of the old stump and what is left from cutting it up for firewood.

Journal April 8, 2013:

I just read in the Flower Essence Society book that Crab Apple is about healing of shame around sexuality and the sense that it is unclean. I immediately thought of the crab apple tree falling years ago in the midst of my private Hero’s Journey around my family. Getting rid of that old paradigm. Yay!

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