Day 5/12

Today marks the fifth day of the 12 Days of Dreaming. This is a day that turns our attention toward community, reciprocity, and the quiet responsibilities we hold toward one another.

In older traditions, this day was devoted to hospitality; not as politeness, but as survival. To offer food, warmth, and welcome was to acknowledge our shared vulnerability. You never knew when you might be the traveler. You never knew when you would need the door opened for you.

Seen through a modern lens, hospitality becomes something more internal as well. It is how we show up for family and friends. How we hold space. How we allow ourselves to be both a good host and a gracious guest and giving without self-erasure, receiving without guilt.

Community is not built through obligation alone. It is sustained through mutual presence.

As we reflect on this today, our gaze turns toward May a month traditionally associated with vitality, fertility, and shared abundance. The Maypole, drawn from the woods into the center of the village, symbolizes life force brought into relationship. Growth was never meant to happen in isolation. It was meant to be witnessed, celebrated, and held by the collective.

The tarot card drawn for May is Art—also known as Temperance.

If March taught me how to move and April taught me what I carry, May asks how I hold it in relationship.

Art is the card of alchemy.

It is not balance as restraint, but balance as integration. It speaks to the work of taking opposing forces like joy and grief, innocence and experience, strength and tenderness and blending them into something more resilient than either could be alone.

In the Fool’s journey, Art sits between Death and The Devil. Death marks the great transformation, the ending that reshapes us. Art is the pause afterward. The breath. The tempering. It is where what has been survived becomes internalized wisdom.

The Fool is no longer naive here. They have been through the fire. They are prepared.

In religious language, this might be called the aftermath of the refiner’s fire. The heat has already done its work. What remains is not purity through suffering, but coherence. The lessons embodied rather than endured.

This is a card of light, but not the kind that denies shadow.

Art does not promise freedom from future trials. It promises discernment. When the Devil appears, you will recognize the trappings. You will not be so easily swayed or consumed. You will act differently because you are different.

I found myself reflecting on how Art differs from Adjustment. Both speak of balance. Both require intention. But Adjustment feels like the ongoing, moment-to-moment recalibration. Those small corrections made in real time. Art is the deeper work. The alchemical synthesis. The integration of everything that has been learned so far into how one moves forward.

To transmute.

And yet, there is fear here for me.

I know the trials I have faced. The hurts I have carried. I have carried them so well, so lightly, that I convinced myself they didn’t matter. It wasn’t until last August, lying alone in a tent, that the weight surfaced from a deep reservoir I hadn’t known I was still holding.

In those formative middle school and high school years I sat in youth group and I was taught to be grateful for pain. To thank it for the lessons. To endure refinement with a smile. The language mirrors this card closely.

But now I question that framing.

I don’t believe pain is something we owe gratitude to. I believe we transmute it because we must. Because survival requires meaning. Because moving forward demands coherence.

And sometimes, insisting that pain “had to mean something” doesn’t feel like wisdom it feels, instead, like retroactive permission… permission granted to people who did not treat me with care, who mistook my openness for naivety, my hope for foolishness.

Perhaps May brings a deeper understanding? Not justification, but clarity.

Not forgiveness that excuses, but integration that frees.

The Fool does not disappear after the fire. She emerges tempered. Able to love, to host, and to belong without abandoning herself.

Affirmation:
“I integrate what I have survived into wisdom. I welcome connection without sacrificing my truth.“

Always,
Your Trusted Friend ✨