Tolle et ambula

for miracles, against poison

It was thirty-eight degrees and snowing the day before I turned thirty-eight.¹

There was the mountain that people around here call The Priest and the river Tye we had given to our daughter as a middle name. She was in my husband’s arms, squirming, trying to touch her river, trying to shove its rocks into her mouth. Her cheeks were red like polished apples, the poisonous kind a witch would show up with, the kind you know are poisonous because they’re so red, the world is so stark, and the cold vines and the bare ground and the snow are all tells that nothing around here should gleam like that, not at this time, not in this season.

Lyra Tye’s cheeks gleamed, though, and Theo, her brother, stripped his pants off and stood in the rushing water, above the rocks, where a small waterfall had to push past ice now, too, as well as the normal gates of granite and moss, fallen sycamore and maple. Lyra refuses cold, but Theo can’t abide too much warmth: in the car on the way home he will roll the windows down as his sister screams in protest. He’ll beg to turn the heater off; he’ll pant like a dog: “I can’t stand it,” he’ll say. “Too hot.”

There was a snowstorm the week he was born in Nebraska. January 14, 2020. The town slowed down a few months before the world would shut down entirely. Plague, pandemic, why are you so scared every time I cough, he asks me. He says he is never scared of anything but in the secret place inside of him, he keeps a list of things that he is certain deserve his horror.

On this last day of 37, I can see that my secret place of secret fears has been inverted, turned inside out. It rests at the bottom of the river, this clear, rushing, icy, mountain river, this bed for the confessions of The Priest himself, tumbling and urging me, stripped now myself, into it, into the water.

The temperature of this secret place feels no more than twenty degrees, the same number as the Judgement card in the tarot, or the Aeon, in the deck I use. Resurrection traded for the cosmic age of the divine or monstrous child depending. What miracle transforms fear into a river? A monster into a god? A god into a child, tended to by a mother who steps into a river as a spell against fear in winter?

*

I’ve been reading about the miracles in the Gospel of John. Of the seven, Valentin Tomberg calls the raising of Lazarus the archetype of them all, the miracle that speaks for all miracles, because it is the one that comprises and so exceeds them all. If you raise a corpse from a tomb, you turn water into wine (putrefying liquid into warm blood), blindness into sight (the eyes can see again, after all), lameness into harmonious movement (the legs can walk again, the arms can gesture again), sickness into health (death as ultimate sickness; the chance to live again, the ultimate health), the “reinstatement of independent bearing” (walking on water), and the devastation of the skeleton into a frame that can bear nourishment (feeding the five-thousand, but within your own body).

The miracle of Lazarus’ resurrection is, according to Tomberg, the miracle of healing. It gestures to the healing of the past and foretells the healing of the future. In other words, it is the sign, symbol, event, parable, and teaching of the miracle of the “Word” become “flesh.” The human body is necessary for this healing to occur. The human “I”—Self in Jungian terms—is necessary for this healing to occur. Or, lest you think I’m getting too orthodox, and as Tomberg says in Seven Lectures on Inner Development, the “human being is the religion of the gods.”

*

I have stayed close to Tomberg all fall, throughout these bitter months of winter, which all at once signify the cruelty of our age, the coldness of my birth, the resurrection of my body, the latter changed each year by surgeries, poisons, radiations, births, deaths. Horrors and delights.

I delight in the transcendent brought down the mountain as the water roars down my Priest, the seeking of God as a child to be cared for here, on this beloved earth, in my beloved body, with my beloved family, however broken we are, however pretend-brave, however sick and sick at heart.

*

I’m reading about miracles, because there is no better time to read about miracles than when you are afraid that every moment might contain some hidden poison, some evil bite, some chunk of reality that finally, once and for all, chokes you to death.

*

The third miracle in John’s Gospel is the healing of a man who has lain by a pool for thirty-eight years, hoping to be transformed. Sometimes an angel descends into the pool and stirs the waters, sometimes another sick person manages a blessing for herself, but never this man. Not until Christ walks by. “Rise, take up your pallet and walk,” he says to the man, and the man is healed. The man rises, the man takes up his pallet, the man walks, without ever touching the pool, without ever meeting the angel. Tolle et ambula, the words written out in Latin in Tomberg’s book look like a witch’s spell, like a chant I might grit under my teeth to get Theo out the door in time for school.

Tolle et ambula, I tell myself, on the day before my thirty-eighth birthday. I am naked in the falling snow. It snowed on my birthday, too, and I gather myself up and walk into the river. I touch the water, I embrace the angel in this place, I sink to the bottom where I’ve stowed all my secrets throughout every season. When I emerge, everything’s exposed, even the place in my heart where a divine child lives and roars and, with the reddest of cheeks, apple of my eye, miracle of miracles, roams free.

Happy New Moon in Capricorn. I’m happy to pull a card for you as your guide over the next two weeks. Comment with your rising sign and your specific question below. You can also book a full reading with me below or sign up for the class I’m teaching in February on the Major Arcana. It’s going to be so fun, so enlightening, and such a great community for these winter months.

1. today and tomorrow, as it were!