Tal Waksal:
I had a dream that I was climbing a mountain, the peak was covered by clouds and I couldn’t see it, the base of the mountain has long since been lost.
She asks…
What is the role of faith in our journey, the part when you are in the open ocean and anything can happen, where you’ve lost the shore and the new land is not yet present?
Dr. Ori Florentin,
What is immediately apparent in this opening is that the flanking cards, the Sun and the Moon , are creating this field of polarity.
In the Kabbalah, the Jewish Mystical Tradition, life lived fully with faith and courage in one’s heart is likened to a balancing atop an extremely narrow bridge. The Middle Way as it is called in Buddhism is to continuously regain balance in the dance of life. This is not a static balance but a living one, a constant correction between opposites that never fully resolve.
The Sun andThe Moon do not cancel each other out, they generate the very tension required for movement, like two poles of a current allow energy to flow.
The Sun speaks of optimism, affirmation, masculinity, success in one’s pursuits, the joy of a child. The Sun is the realm of consciousness, logic, determined action, knowing, setting out on a clearly delineated path. It is the perfect card of success in what one is attempting to manifest, not merely because it promises attainment, but because it illuminates the path enough to take the next step with conviction. And as many know, manifestation is not just about creating the vision and striving towards it, but being light in the expectation of how the way must be so as to get there. In Tal’s dream, the peak is not seen, and so the Sun must be internalized rather than perceived. In the middle of the journey there will be times of disorientation, where all appears to be lost, the north star covered by passing clouds. But these are passing clouds, and we must carry the sun within when we no longer see it outside, not as blind optimism but as a quiet, steady orientation toward movement itself.
The Moon is wife to the Sun and in many ways both its complementary component and opposite. The Moon speaks of darkness, the night sky, confusion, femininity, creativity, illusion, dreams and fantasies. It is the realm of everlasting change, as the moon changes throughout the month, never holding a single face for long. It is where dreams are born to be pursued and where dangerous fantasies likewise are created that may lead us astray. It is the realm of the unconscious, images, irrationality, magic, and the subtle distortions that reveal as much as they conceal. The Moon is the counterbalance to the sun, the doubt that is necessary to keep the faith of the Sun from becoming brittle, inflated, or delusional. Though many see Faith and Doubt as being opposite, in fact they nurture each other in the right doses. Blind faith and optimism can easily lead us astray and delude us, while too much doubt will leave us circling in place, unable to commit to any path at all. Doubt is the fire that cleans faith so that we may be in harmony with the way of things, keeping us humble while still determined, especially in the middle of the mountain, or the lost at sea portion of our journey upon the purpose of our lives.
Now we arrive at the two central cards, both associated with the number four, the Princess of Wands and the Four of Disks, otherwise known as Power. The Princess of Wands is associated with beauty, courage, enthusiasm, and the raw ignition of creative force. In the Thoth system she represents the earthy part of fire, meaning that she is not merely inspired but capable of embodying that inspiration in the world. Yet she carries within her the shadow qualities of impatience, volatile emotions, jumping into new projects too quickly or abandoning current projects too fast, burning through energy without anchoring it. She is the spark that can either light a sustained flame or dissipate into scattered embers. She is supported in this case by the 4 of Disks, the power of containment, structure, and groundedness, the ability to hold energy rather than leak it, to transform negative into positive through steadiness rather than force, and to withstand the more difficult and unglamorous parts of the journey. The cards together encourage stepping into the virtues of the Princess of Wands while becoming intimately aware of her shadow side, so as not to fall prey to that which can self-sabotage our strivings. This dynamic itself mirrors the tension between the Sun and the Moon, the necessity of holding opposites without collapsing into either extreme.
Notice how the Princess is carrying the Tiger, rather than the tiger walking beside her or leading the way or protecting her. She has within herself immense untapped Power, symbolized by the 4 of Disks, but it is not yet fully integrated into her way of moving through the world. Her sights are too set on the top of the mountain and her ideals, symbolized by the wand with the sun in her hand, rather than on the immediacy of the path beneath her feet. The tiger, or the strength of animal protectors, calls her back into the present. The tiger does not concern itself with the summit or with imagined futures, nor does it ruminate on the past. It sleeps when it is tired, hunts when it is hungry, and plays when it is safe to do so. It embodies a kind of certainty that is not intellectual but instinctual, a direct attunement to what is. The Princess, in carrying rather than following the tiger, reveals a subtle inversion, where vision overrides embodiment, where aspiration risks disconnecting from the very ground that would allow it to manifest. The correction is not to abandon the vision, but to let the body and its rhythms lead the way toward it, step by step, breath by breath, moment by moment.
In this way, the reading returns to Tal’s question about faith in the open ocean, in the place where the shore is gone and the new land has not yet appeared.
Faith here is not a belief that guarantees arrival, nor is it a rigid adherence to a fixed image of the destination. It is something quieter and more demanding. It is the capacity to remain in motion without certainty, to continue walking even when the peak is hidden, to allow doubt to refine rather than destroy, to let vision inspire without letting it tyrannize the present moment.
Power is not the force that propels us forward in dramatic bursts, but the containment that allows us to endure, to remain, to not abandon the path when it becomes ambiguous or uncomfortable. Humility arises naturally from this stance, not as self-diminishment but as an accurate positioning within a field that is larger, more complex, and more mysterious than our plans can account for. To hold the tension between past and future, unconscious and conscious,
faith and doubt, human aspiration and animal certainty, is not a problem to be solved but a discipline to be practiced.
The narrow bridge spoken of in Kabbalah is not crossed by eliminating one side in favor of the other, but by learning how to walk while both are alive within us. The Sun and the Moon must both be honored, the Princess must both dream and learn restraint, and the tiger must be allowed to reintroduce us to the immediacy of life as it is actually lived. And so the answer that emerges is not a reassurance that we are close to the summit, nor a guarantee that the land will soon appear, but a deeper reorientation entirely. You do not reach the peak by fixing your gaze upon it, nor by waiting for clarity to return, but by becoming the kind of being that can continue forward without needing to see it.
In that sense, faith is not about arriving, but about walking, and power is not about conquering the mountain, but about remaining in relationship with it, one step at a time.
Wishing you a month of your own magic.
In your own skin.
Love and Light