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Human incarnation is intense, and it's not surprising that we feel that intensity at times. We feel it in the uneasy balance of light and dark in ourselves, our lives, our world, the feelings of possibility and loss, the battles of will and inertia, metamorphosis and stagnation, light and dark. The intensity of aliveness is an alchemical cauldron bubbling within us. Some of the bubbles that break the surface are sulfurous and agonizing, and others expand with glorious, shimmering energy.

Sometimes we feel the intensity as catastrophic, as an overwhelming wrongness in the whole reality. Social conditioning encourages the illusion that to be normal and healthy means to be on an even keel, a feeling of upbeat and productive contentment, like a thirty-year-old yuppie in a TV ad who seems to be getting it all together thanks to his latest purchase.

But life isn't like the world of TV commercials and glossy magazine ads. It is not always a Kodak moment. There are more feelings than the chipper euphoria of a good-looking TV commercial yuppie who just got a promotion plus a seven-dollar frappe and prances about in a hyper, upbeat, caffeinated universe of workaholic consumerism.

It is a gift to be one of the mutants able to feel the intensity of life, its tension and struggle, its unexpected meaningfulness, and its swirling possibilities of love and tragedy. Feel the intensity, and recognize it as the feeling of aliveness. Even the fear of annihilation is a part of that aliveness. Feelings of loss, abandonment, tragic depths, and stinging anxieties are all part of the intensity of aliveness. Accept the intensity, embrace it, and though it can feel overwhelming, keep yourself together. Use the intensity to be a warrior, not a victim. You can feel the intensity and be all the more focused because of it, all the more precise and potent in word and deed because of it.

Or you can choose the path of diminishment, the path of medicating the intensity, the path of being comfortably and uncomfortably numb, the path of finding a cure for aliveness and swallowing that cure again and again and again. There are paths of cheap and shoddy all-encompassing truths, paths of seeking the golden ego identity, Mr. or Ms. Right plus the perfect circumstances, the sparkly carrot on the stick dangling just up ahead. There are so many false paths. One can take the path of billions who have surrendered their aliveness to fundamentalisms where daddies and rulebooks give all the answers to manage and govern aliveness and direct it toward the group aims. There is also the path of "success" as defined by others. Advertisements are its stained-glass windows, the path of racing toward the flat, gold stars that are awarded for good behavior. So many paths lead toward the harvesting of your aliveness by others.

Feeling the intensity of being alive is a blessing. But sometimes blessings are hard to recognize because we forget that they don't have to be warm and fuzzy, don't have to look like gold stars, and aren't usually wrapped in ribbons and bows. Blessings and divine gifts come woven, like all the tapestries of life, with threads of light and dark, threads of every color and texture.

Anxiety may be such a blessing. Rollo May defines anxiety as "being asserting itself against nonbeing." Anxiety can be useful, heliotropic, spiritual feedback discouraging us from that which takes us away from the experience of meaning.

It can be hard to feel the intensity of life and stay with it, to stay with the intensity of aliveness without escaping into the well-worn paths of diminishment, the allure of tragic magic, and the darkling glamour of death energy. To stay with the intensity requires some of the great and infrequently recognized life skills — the ability to accept ambivalence and ambiguity, to accept uncontrolled and unknowable wild-card variables, the many vulnerabilities of mortality, the staggering range of feeling and experience.

Strengthen and enliven yourself by accepting the full spectrum, the complexities, and uncertainties of this blooming, buzzing world, its ambivalence and ambiguity, its tragedies and blessings, its dark and light.

Receiving this card means that this is an auspicious time to accept the strange and various blessings of aliveness, a time of immersion and engagement, a time of feeling the intensity.