It took almost two weeks to actually make the MRI happen, but it finally did, yesterday morning.*
My COTD: The Fool. Irritating waste of time appointment has now become An Adventure. I do my best to keep this in mind when I get there and realize that my best efforts avoid wearing anything containing any metal have failed, and I'm going to end up in a hospital gown, anyway.
I had never had an MRI before. My knowledge of MRIs is pretty much limited to episodes of House in which the MRI is where a new, dangerous, confusing symptom emerges. I am familiar with the claustrophobia and the "stay perfectly still for most of an hour" thing.
The staying perfectly still part is facilitated by folded towels and bolsters and even a bit of tape to hold down the arm in question. In anticipation of the claustrophobia, I close my eyes once the "sliding into the small confined space" thing starts. I do my best to breathe slowly and deeply without moving at all, which turns into breathing slowly and shallowly. I don't want to start panicking. I am just now realizing what a task staying completely still in a cramped space for 45 minutes might turn out to be.
The thing I am not at all prepared for: the noise.** It is loud, and sudden, then settles into a trance-y rhythm. My first response is to fight it - no need to slide off into a trance when I need to be focused on staying still and breathing and...oh, wait.
The Fool tells me to go with it, and he's there once I let go and fall inward. "Fancy meeting you here," I say, because I speak almost entirely in cliches during visionary work.
"I meet a lot of people here," he says.
We stand about awkwardly for a moment. This is not anywhere I really recognize. We are on an expansive plain, with mountains far in the distance.
The Fool finally looks at me, exasperated, and takes my hand firmly. He leads me to the Emperor, who is sitting very Crowley-esque in a chair. At his feet was his empire, in miniature, about the size of a shoe box.
The Emperor seems utterly unaware of our presence, or the landscape around him. He stares at his shoe box empire. (Band name!) The Fool shrugs at me - what did you expect?
I follow the path on past the Emperor. I see the Hierophant off in the distance and avoid him. He'll make some dull pronouncement, I am sure of it. I have no use for him at all. The Lovers, though.
The Lovers are dancing, and I understand that the card is a pathetic attempt at conveying something very dynamic, very loose and colorful and, honestly, ecstatic. They dance around each other, their clothes swirling and moving about, until the colors mix and I can't tell anyone apart. They pull me into the dance, and separate parts of my identity, bits of my aura, spin together, merging and coalescing into a soft purple. Like a smoothie in a blender.
(I mean, of course it was purple. Have you met me?)
The dance gets faster, and more intense, and another hand grabs mine. Lust. I am pulled away from the Lovers - or maybe they follow, I don't remember - towards a large fire. We dance around and around and around until Lust pulls/pushes/throws me in, right into the middle, where I dance until the fire dies completely and I am charred, dry - mostly ashes.***
I walk away. I sit. I wait. I heal. This, somehow, is Adjustment. (It is only a process, and never represented by a person.)
I seek the Hermit, next. He is making way into a dark cave, accessed through a gaping hole in the earth. He doesn't want to speak with me, and definitely doesn't want me following. He lights my torch, and tells me to find my own cave, so I do.
I travel down to an underground river. I bathe in the river. I contemplate what sort of nasty creatures might await me. I continue deeper into the cave, until I meet Death.
He is killing people, in circles. They line up, then stand around him in a circle, and he very efficiently mows them down, a blade to the throat all the way around.
I'm just visiting, I say.
That is not nearly good enough.
I know I won't get by without offering something.
I pull out little ideas - fear. Loathing. Desperation. He wants none of these things. I am frustrated with trying to provide an appropriate sacrifice.
Finally, I borrow his knife. I trace, through my abdomen, the bits and pieces of darkest things. Here is my sense of guilt and obligation. Here is my tendency to acquiesce to things. Here is the sense of failure as destiny. Here is my resentment of others' success. I trace, eventually, the shape of something small and sort of humanish. The energy blob steps forward out of me, shaped now like a small, sad version of me.
Death slits her throat.
We are, however, not done.
"What else?"
I took the knife again, traced the narcissism. The image of me as so blindly successful that no one can say anything. The fantasy of being worshiped. Of perfection, superiority, control. She steps out, smug, glowing, bathed in golden light.
Death slits her throat.
He lets me pass.
I climbs back up, out onto the plain, and am confronted with the Tower. I run inside, and pick up a glowing ball of golden energy that I use to fill up the spots that had been emptied by the previous sacrifices.
I seek the Star, but she is spinning the wheel of Fortune, as if it were a casino game. I seek the Moon, but she is busy advising the Hermit. He sits meekly at her feet, seeming distraught.
The Hanged Man surprises me, hanging simply by the side of the path.
"What's up?" I ask him.
"Check out that tree," he responds, indicating a tree just across the path from him. It is, perhaps, the only thing he could really see. I noticed it, but did not analyze it in depth.
The Sun is having some sort of a gathering to which I do not feel invited.
And then it is over, and the tech was speaking to me, and I didn't trust myself to open my eyes, much less my mouth.
It's before noon, I still have an eight hour day ahead of me.
In retrospect, I think I was probably much weirder than usual.
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* Yeah, that's actually one of my MRI pics. It's pretty creepy. Stare at it a while. Have your own vision. Alternately, use it to send me any healing or prosperity energy that you're not using.
** Finding MRI samples online is surprisingly hard. Check out the T2 recording here for the closest approximation to what I remember, or this rather strange project if you're feeling a little high and need a bit of a push.
*** This is only fair, considering I scorched my Lust card recently. That's a another post, which will end thusly: "This is why any sort of magick before coffee = bad news bears."
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