City-Wood tarot

City-Wood

A key idea behind the deck is that the City and the Wood are co-extensive: they are each other.

Many of the trump cards make this explicit, for example:

the Temple is made of stone and living tree, the two substances merge and change into each other
the Homing Bird flies between the urban and rural, its wings transforming brick to leaf and leaf to brick - a two-way passage which we can follow
the Island shows a group of trees apparently standing still in the centre of a grey urban whirl, rather than the buildings being the fixtures and the trees changing and ephemeral

All of the people, places, and beings shown on the cards are present on some level even in the midst of the modern, solid, technological city. This level can be called memory, imagination, potential, or spirit. One name for this level is underworld, which can be defined as an innerworld of your birth locality.

It is possible to move backwards and forwards between the two seemingly separate worlds - or two levels of reality. The Wood is not lost, destroyed, and forsaken, but a constant underpresence which we can access by intentional redirection of attention or by dreaming. This doesn't mean that conservation and ecological campaigning are unnecessary, but that we need not despair, feel abandoned or exiled from the Wood, or consign all thoughts of the Wood to escapist fantasy. The relation between the City and the Wood is a relation between us as intentional beings and wider magical and non-human worlds.

City-Wood dream