On a Breath of Rising Wind

I am participating in the #vatarotjanuary challenge on Instagram (hosted by @violetauraphoto) where a prompt is given for each day, and participants use Tarot and oracles to engage it. Today's prompt asks us to "Read the First Swords Card Dealt."

Last night, in preparation, I pulled out my Wild Unknown deck, shuffled and cut, and found that the bottom card was the Father of Swords. I set that to the side, and then started digging down, layer by layer, to find the first swords card on the top of the deck. I laid them side by side and as I noticed the rainbow blade of the owl Father, in contrast with the tightly bound edges of the 3 of Swords, a poem started to form:

Wild Unknown Tarot

What do you do with the bitter memories; the ones that lie in tangled knots in your deep and shadowed corners?

Do you leave them in peace, allow them to calcify and harden just beyond the edge of your waking?

Do you cut them free, release them from their aching cage, like birds in flight;

their once-piercing calls now dispersed in fading echoes?

Pain is our most merciless teacher, and, with love, our most faithful companion.
The instinctual drive for relief, for escape, is primordial.

But what happens when we don't push it away;
rather we open ourselves to its presence,
let it move through us

and then,

on a breath of rising wind,
allow it to be carried deep into the heavens,

as a prayer?