I like the way the card is drawn on the Spiral deck. The woman is walking in the rain, holding a rose over her heart, and a guy is running away in the other direction.
The rain is good. I always loved the rain. It has always been my favorite season, in California where I grew up it didn't rain very often, and more often than not, we were in a drought. The rain also meant long awaited relief from the dreadful edict to "play outside". When the rain came, the air smelled good, and there was a romantic melancholy in the air that was so beautiful.
Growing up "under-traumatized" in dry, history-less California, the rain, like a little sorrow was long-sought contact with something like the soul. ..the rain comes and fills up the reservoirs, we can drink! And when say the heart is "full" we mean, of feeling, it could be happiness, or sadness, sometimes we don't know the difference. Tears give new life and allow the soul to flow again.
How different black anguish of the nine of swords.
The romantic poets, painters and musicians (Tschaikowsky in particular) found beauty in pain, or more precisely in melancholy. When I was six years old, I would run home from school, to put the needle on the record player, and start up "Swan Lake" by Tshaikowsky, and cry. Why? it was so beautiful! !! I couldn't resist. Especially that violin solo in the white pas de deux.
Yes, the swords in the heart are contact! They reach in from the outside. They "cut the bull", "pierce to the heart of the matter". It is something like that lightning bolt of love at first sight, that gaze which pierces through every layer, and melts every resistance. It is that feeling of being emotionally reached, at last, at last.
If the experience is one of sorrow, this sorrow is however the life-giving grief, that only comes to one who has the strength, and the energy to to feel.