The Chariot: Who’s Driving Yours?

The Chariot from the Smith-Rider-Waite Tarot

I spent most of my 20s super single, yet longing for true love, or at least evidence that I was desirable enough to someday find it. I was living in Montana amongst a bunch of other young folks whom I judged to be “bro-brahs”, or heavy drinkers who didn’t have much to talk about besides fresh powder and their ski collection. I assumed they judged me as a dork whose hair was too short and butt was too big to warrant their attention, not to mention their desire.

The one connection I made at the end of that decade was with a dear friend of a dear friend at a dreamy summer wedding. He lived in LA and was a PhD student in literature, and he hit on me. A smart, handsome man thought I was worthy of his affection so, naturally, I was smitten.

So smitten, in fact, that, even though our single “romantic” liaison was—to this day, twenty years later—the least pleasurable of my life, I returned to Montana with hearts in my eyes and visions of our shared future dancing in my head. 

At first he left me sweet messages in both French and Spanish, and he asked if he could visit me. I bought new organic sheets for my bed. I even purchased my first cell phone so I would no longer miss his unpredictable calls. 

You know how this story goes. His calls slowed, but came just often enough to keep me hooked. When I asked about his upcoming visit, he dodged the question. When I called him it always went straight to voicemail. Eventually, I got the courage to ask for clarity, and he admitted that the long-distance thing wasn’t working. 

I was sad and hurt, not only because the hopeful story I had created was now crushed, but because it was further evidence that my haircut and glasses and big butt and general quirkiness rendered me fundamentally undesirable to men. It was the only explanation.

Ten years later, I fell for another guy and the story was pretty much the same. We met in a mossy old-growth forest and connected through writing and skinny dipping in a mountain stream and I fell for him. Hard. He was obviously my soul mate. He was a busy person living in a town a couple hours from my forest home so we wrote handwritten letters, drew pictures, and quoted Whitman. And yet…

He wrote just often enough to keep me hooked but stayed distant enough to keep me perpetually perplexed. He visited just once and, as much as I wanted to ask him how he felt about us, I couldn’t. Deep down inside, I knew it would break the spell.

As the snow started to fall, I finally got brave enough to see him in person and have an honest conversation—and only after several whiskey drinks. It ended with the spoken truth that had been evident all along: he was not available.

That whole summer, when I wasn’t handwriting letters to him, I had scribbled lists in my notebook about the kind of relationship I wanted: Engaged, intimate, evolutionary. I wanted to be with someone who was honest and vulnerable and brave and who approached our partnership as an opportunity for healing and growth and transformation. I wanted to be with someone who was available and into me.

And yet, this sparkly-but-distant letter-writer consistently showed me through his actions that he was none of those things. So WHY did I keep pursuing him?? 

***

The Chariot from the Brady Tarot

This week’s Freewriting with Bex prompts (check it out!) were inspired by The Chariot card from the Brady Tarot. There are many ways to look at this card, and lately I’ve been looking at it as an answer to the question above, which is really just a version of a question I think most folks can relate to— Why do I keep doing things that are totally out of alignment with my conscious desires?

The Chariot is always pulled by two creatures. Traditionally they’re horses, and here they are a snowy egret and a golden eagle. One is light and one is dark. The charioteer, a magpie in this deck, sits on the chariot and holds no reins. So who’s really driving this thing? It’s hard to tell in the drawing.

The eagle and the white ribbon tied to it represent the suit of air, or our conscious desires and intentions. The eagle is trying to move the chariot toward the person we strive to be, the values we hold, and the lives we dearly desire.

The egret and the red ribbon connecting it to the chariot represent the fiery, impulsive parts of ourselves that remain hidden from our cognitive awareness. They are often called shadows, not because they’re bad or shady, but because they feel unworthy of revealing themselves in broad daylight. They’re hard to locate when we look for them directly, but they indicate their presence in the ways they steer our chariots. 

Those shadow parts like to take us to the liquor store after we promised  to experiment with sobriety for a month, into picking a fight when all we really wanted was connection, and into relationships with people who are cute and sparkly and write dreamy letters but are unavailable for true connection. 

The thing is, these parts truly mean well! They are always trying to steer us toward safety, but generally flub up the job. Most of these parts/chariot pullers developed when we were young and didn’t have great tools for coping with emotional or physical discomfort or harm. So they keep tugging us one way while our more grown-up self has the compass pointed in a completely different direction, and we end up on a wild ride! Or come to a dead halt.

The Chariot from This Might Hurt Tarot. If she doesn’t keep her bikes aligned, it won’t be pretty!

When The Chariot card comes up in a reading, we are being invited to notice the place(s) in our lives where our deepest yearnings and clearest values have been hijacked by seemingly mysterious forces. Once we observe the out-of-alignment behaviors, The Chariot wants us to slow down and feel into the the physical sensations and emotions that arose just before we got off track. And then turn toward those sensations with kindness and curiosity, speaking to them as though they were the young and tender beings that they are:

Oh, sweet stuff, I feel you in the pit of my belly. What are you afraid will happen if I don’t drink alcohol tonight? 

How does fighting meet your need for connection? Is there another way to ask for the closeness you seek? 

What are you afraid will happen if I choose a partner who is actually available for deep intimacy? 

It took a long time for me to hear the answer to that final question, but when I did it sounded something like, You will have to experience conflict and vulnerability, and I’m pretty sure those things are deadly! WE DON’T DO THAT. And even if you DO learn how to do that without dying, you still will be abandoned by the man you love most with no warning one perfect fall evening, just when you think life is at its most grand. 

(These parts can be quite extreme… and convincing!)

I grew up in a joyful, loving family with inherited conflict aversion on both sides, which a young part of me internalized as the message that conflict was something to be avoided at all costs. And then my dad died suddenly when I was 19. We were quite close, and my grief built a tight shield around my heart just when I should have been opening wide. 

And so began a twenty-year practice of unwittingly steering myself toward men who could show up for the highs of romance but would never let me get close enough for true connection. Win/win, right? I got my romantic needs met while ensuring that, with with no real intimacy at risk, there could be no true abandonment. Or so my young, protective parts believed. 

That strategy was well intended, but ultimately caused me more suffering than the hurts it was trying to protect me from. But when I finally understood the strategy for what is was, I realized that I wasn’t doomed to a lifetime of failed relationships with emotionally unavailable men after all! I wasn’t victim to a senseless pattern, nor was I fundamentally undesirable. Rather, I had been letting my scared parts pick my wanna-be-boyfriends for me. Now that I understood that, I knew I could make different choices.

I’m now married to someone who sure as hell shows for discussing his and my own unmet needs (aka conflict), and it still scares the pants off parts of me. And other parts of me are certain that he’s fallen off the tractor or had a heart attack in the barn when he’s away from home longer than I’d expected. And now I understand why.

This intimacy is definitely scarier and thus requires more courage than any relationship I’ve ever been in. And yet, it gifts me daily with a deeper closeness than I’ve ever known, and is the spitting image of The List I penned a zillion versions of the same summer I pined for my romantic pen pal. 

The Chariot card is a reminder that our rides can be all kinds of herky-jerky when the impulsive egret and intentional eagle try to pull us in divergent directions, but that when we let the magpie at the helm guide our chariots, we soar.

Let’s look at this one again.

The magpie is what Terry Real calls our Wise Adult, IFS calls Self Energy, and others refer to as the Highest Self, True Nature, or Love. It’s not a part but a wholeness that wraps up all of our parts with compassion. Magpie is able to lean back, observe Egret and Eagle with curiosity and delight, and enjoy the ride. 

The relaxed, hands-free charioteer of my life exists in both/and consciousness. She knows that the route my chariot takes is created by the often dueling desires of my conscious mind and tender, wounded parts. My Wise Adult honors the fears that lie beneath the off-the-map tugs of impulsive Egret and invites illuminated Eagle to work with Egret by acknowledging its fears, thanking it for its efforts to steer me away from harm, and assuring it that it doesn’t have to carry that responsibility alone any more.

To be clear, my Wise Adult is not always seated at the helm, but she’s there more often than not these days. And when she is, I’m able to sit with my partner or my community in conflict or closeness, feel my fears arise as an inclination to appease or escape, offer gratitude to my panicked parts for their intentions to protect me from discomfort, and then state aloud what is true for me anyway, letting my fearful young ones come along for the ride.

With every passing mile, those tender parts are learning to trust me more, so the less they tug the reins toward what they think will keep me safe. Instead, my Wise Adult just leans on back and enjoys the view while Egret and Eagle dance together to pull my stick-and-ribbon chariot on a winding course through the sky.

Maybe this is what healing is. To me, it feels like soaring.