The Moon Tarot

I recently found my old high school and college journals. Reading them, I was surprised by what emotions rose up first — not nostalgia, but shame. At almost forty, I hoped I’d see my younger self as charmingly naive, someone I could empathize with. Instead, I cringed.

Journals from 2002 to 2012

That reaction made me think of the tarot card I’d just completed: Mary Lennox as The Moon. I chose her to represent duality and intuition — not the serene wisdom of The High Priestess, but the raw, unfiltered intuition of a child.

Two Marys: Neglected and Healed

At the beginning of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic novel The Secret Garden, the main character, Mary Lennox, is sour and unpleasant. She repels everyone around her with rude and selfish behavior — and as a young reader, she repelled me as well.

Detail: Mary pretending to garden, while her parents dance at a ball.

In an early scene, Mary plays alone in a patch of sandy dirt, pretending to tend a garden. The other children mock her as “Mistress Mary, Quite Contrary,” but the moment hints at her own quiet intuition: she somehow knows she needs to grow something in order to grow herself.

Detail: Mary tending to a growing rose in the moors of Yorkshire

Her parents neglected her in favor of glamorous parties and charming, beautiful things; Mary was neither charming nor beautiful. Her disagreeableness reflects her justified anger, for no child should be ignored and unloved, whether they are “good” or “plain.”

When she arrives at Misselthwaite Manor, she is still overlooked — until she befriends a cheery robin and a kind boy named Dickon. Through them, she discovers a hidden, neglected garden as starved for care as she is. With Dickon’s guidance, she learns how attention, patience, and hard work can coax life from even the most forgotten bit of earth.

In nurturing the garden, Mary cultivates her own transformation, emerging as a healthy, rosy-cheeked child with all the charm and beauty her mother once wished for, but never tended to grow.

Having Empathy for Yourself

When I reread my own journals I am as repelled by my younger self as I was initially repelled by Mary’s character. Resentment and bitterness seep through my words.  Unlike Mary, my teenage self took great pains to mask and intellectualize these unpleasant emotions away. I would bring up some grievance- like maybe my ex said something about his new girlfriend that irked me- but then spend pages trying to justify the outsized emotion I had felt. Other times I would try and coach myself into being more reasonable-minimizing my emotion to fit the grievance. Reading thes pages back it feels as if I am trying to hide the Mary in me, whose anger might have been misplaced but it was powerful none the less.  I wrote that I was more evolved, special, more mature than others. Being angry, resentful or bitter did not fit this evolved vision of myself so I wouldn't accept that I was feeling these emotions. This more than anything made me cringe at my younger self’s immaturity.

I was desperate to be Dickon- the magical child who soothed animals and made green things grow with his gentleness. Or if not Dickon, at least let me be the Mary who has been transformed… anything but that sour despised child at the beginning of the novel. But does that make me like Mary’s mother who saw a ugly, unpleasant child and could not love her? 

The Lessons of The Moon Tarot

As I dig into further into The Moon tarot card, I find it has so much to teach me about myself. One of the most defining lessons of my life has been to accept the inconsistencies in myself. Like many high school seniors, I spent time defining and distilling who I was into college essays. I truly believed in that idealized version of myself that I had created (More like Dickon and not at all like Mary.) I had a full on existential crisis in my freshman year of college when I found that I did not know the boundaries of myself as well as a thought. (This was also painfully recorded in my old journals) By suppressing and refusing to acknowledge the parts of me that felt anger, resentment and bitterness I condemned an important part of myself. 

Charcoal from 2007 depicting my mind and body as separate little girls.

Around that time I had a powerful dream where I was the beheaded Medusa, a body disconnected from her head. In the course of the dream my head and body became two separate little girls running from whatever was chasing them. I have often felt this divide- separating the aspects of myself that did not fit my idealized self concept.  I have created art about this dream many times and even now am working on a graphic novel that explores it.

In the Moon tarot card I depicted Mary as two girls, the feral child who was sour and neglected, but who wouldn’t let her anger and pain go unnoticed with her rude unpleasant demeanor, and a child who had learned about friendship, and how to care for something besides herself, and about the wonders of the natural world. The lesson I keep learning and relearning despite the shame it brings me is that I am both, and it is okay to be both. Even in her most unpleasant state Mary deserved to be loved and cared for, and if I wish to flourish and grow as Mary did in the Secret Garden, I must love and have empathy for the disagreeable child in me, just as much as the healed. 

Perhaps this is the work the moon is asking of me: to tend my own neglected places the way Mary learned to tend her garden. To see the sour parts of myself not as proof of my unworthiness, but as signs of where I most need care. Can I meet my own anger with patience? Can I love the unlovely, in myself and in others? If I can, perhaps the garden will grow.