Temperance

Angels we have heard on high

Angel Ornament, given to me by my Grandmother.

Every year, my grandmother evokes the Christmas season with a battalion of winged Angels. On ornaments, wrapping paper, and cookies. In picture books, greeting cards, and crafts. Their tunics drape with celestial grace, their mouths part in perfect ‘o’s emitting heavenly song. She has never explained her affinity for these mythical creatures to me. But Oma’s eyes twinkle each time she offers me a new haloed trinket for my Christmas tree. I can see that Angels carry some spark of divine light for her, and she wants to share this delight—with me.

So I collect her gifts dutifully. And I love them in a way. They remind me of my grandmother’s faith and her love of things both wholesome and beautiful: like flowers and birds and the faces of children.

“Only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one.”
—“The World I Live In” Mary Oliver

But even as a child prone to imaginary flights of fancy, I never felt my spirit stirred by the notion of a heavenly host. In the Bible, Angels seemed kind of creepy: making startling pronouncements or leading hordes of Christian soldiers into bloody battle. I failed to connect to any kind of “guardian angel” at my shoulder à la It’s a Wonderful Life. The idea that an invisible force could step in and save me from dire straights, I found suspicious and even unjust. Bad things happened to good people all the time. If there were Angels, it was obvious that some of them were letting things slide.

So despite my grandmother’s sweet offerings, it’s taken me 40 years to finally land on an Angelic vision I could believe in:

Tarot’s Temperance.

Who is she/they? A supernatural figure poised between one world and the next. The embodiment of oppositional forces: Heaven and Earth, Water and Fire. She simultaneously fills two cups with one gravity-defying pour! To me she is a woman, but could just as easily be a man. Her non-binary essence is symbolized by the triangle and square overlaying her heart. Crowned by the sun, she arises from the pool of life. There is heavenly exhalation here, but also the Angel’s calm comportment. She is peace in the midst of elemental combustion.

Rider Waite Smith Temperance with oranges and juniper bough.

When I pull this card in a reading, I feel an immediate sense of relief. Of comfort and love.

It’s as if the heavens really have opened and reassured me that no matter what situation I’ve brought to my deck, I am not facing it alone. I have divine support. Which isn’t to say that the Angel has come to ‘save’ me or fix my problems or grant my wishes. Temperance is a creatrix, an alchemist, at work with her potions. Like Justice, Temperance values effort. She asks me to align my actions with my values.

But then she reminds me to ~let go.~

Let go of attachments to outcomes. Release my grip on pre-set “goals.” Temperance doesn’t muscle results into being, she alights on inspiration, she flows with creative ease. She invites us to do the same.

Thus, she is the perfect support for Sagittarius season, with which she corresponds. (Or is it just me who runs around from late November until Solstice chasing after endless holiday tableaux while tackling end-of-year writing sprints?)

I call on her—less for help tackling my to-do lists, (s/he’s Temperance after all. The solution is in the name: DON’T OVER DO IT) and more for help in releasing. I ask for help in surrendering my expectations, which at this time of year are thrown into high-relief.

First, there are all of the things I had thought I might accomplish in 2024 that didn’t quite come to pass. Then, there are all of the dreams that shimmer in my imagination for the year ahead. More immediately, there are my hopes for familial, holiday bliss: my children starry-eyed on Christmas morning! My X-mas dinner executed to perfection! My gifts unwrapped with feelings of warmth and appreciation!

It’s easy to expect…too much.

Another of Oma’s ornaments, I think she made this one!

And so the end of the year often becomes an amplification of my lifestyle in general: rushing around wishing I was further along than I am, wondering how quickly I can make up for lost time, anxious about the fruition of my work as a parent, a creative, a person.

It’s time to let go.

I’ve been at this long enough to know, that that’s when the magic happens anyway. I have to surrender in order to sink into the joy that this season offers me: reviving and revising my ancestral traditions, connecting with family, friends, and the cycle of seasons. If I consciously release my tendency to control: Heaven arrives. I start to see angels. The literal ones that my grandmother still packages in the mail to ship to me three states away, and also the ones that have moved serendipitously through my experience, bringing just the help or the insight, the solution or support that I need.

There are lots of anecdotal instances of this: like finding your keys the minute you stop looking for them. Or landing on a plot-solution when you finally step away from your writing desk long enough to take a walk.

But I’ll give you my own very practical, earth-based example of Temperance energy at work:

Some years back, I was sleep-deprived new mother, having just moved to a new city where I didn’t know a soul, desperate for my daughter to nap during the day so that I could wrestle back one sweet, precious hour of my child-free life. I consumed countless blogs, books and magazine articles on “sleep training,” sorting through conflicting, highly-opinionated voices that only intensified my anxiety about the task at hand.

Then I remember reading somewhere that the key to getting your child to nap is to not care if they sleep or not.

I’m sure I threw the book across the room.

But the author was annoyingly right.

Babies are tiny super-radars for human energy. Of course my infant daughter could always tell when I was amped up, just waiting for her to fall asleep so the real fun could begin. Why would she sleep and miss out? Ideally I would give up my attachment to her nap time. It would make it easier for her to relax into sleep, and much easier for me to deal with the consequences if she didn’t.

“Surrender and serenity are synonymous;
you can’t experience one without the other.”
—Debbie Ford, Spiritual Divorce

Only…no matter how hard I tried to achieve the recommended equilibrium, I only managed it a handful of times. I just couldn’t let go of my reliance on that nap time. It wasn’t that my daughter needed the rest, it was that I needed the space. I needed help caretaking. But I was up against some pretty gnarly personal, cultural, not to mention financial barriers to asking for it. I thought I should be able to do it on my own.

Proof that they could sleep.

I find it quite meaningful that when I finally asked around for a babysitter, reaching out to strangers on Nextdoor, I eventually found help through a neighbor whom I had never met before. Her niece could watch my kids, she said, oh and she had a daughter the same age as mine, could we get them together for a playdate? That neighbor eventually became my very best mom friend, and if you have kids yourself you know how critical it is to have that kind of supportive presence in your life.

“Every blade of grass has an angel that bends over it and whispers,
‘Grow, grow, grow!’”
—The Talmud.

When Temperance is in the mix, I get the sense that she’s here to help me identify what it is that I REALLY need under all of my dramatic, emotional wanting. That’s the need she will help me to meet, potentially in an unexpected way, through connections I cannot yet conceive of, possibly exceeding my initial expectations of what I thought was possible!

Like my grandma with her sparkling angel figurines, I get pretty starry-eyed myself thinking of Temperance in this way.

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

I may not believe in my grandmother’s heaven, but I can easily imagine that we work with unseen energies propelling us toward our evolution, personally and collectively. What if this beneficent force existed for us always and was here for us now? The literal now? As you are reading this? Maybe, if you pause for a moment, you’ll feel her—there—just over your shoulder, the air stirred by the beating of her soft, powerful plumes.

May she work many a miracle through you this season and in the year to come.

Happy Holidays.