Saturday, March 9, 2013

Tarot Reading 3.9.13

I pull a few cards about once a week, generally three in a past, present, future kind of way.  I've been doing this for about the last ten years.  Sometimes if things seem muddy or the message not quite discernible I will add a few more.  Usually, though those additional cards just muddy it further, so I have learned to accept that sometimes it's muddy and move on.  I have an affinity for actual mud, so maybe that makes it easier somehow.  But I doubt it.

I like to sit with the cards and see how the reading shifts until the next one.  After an indeterminate amount of time the cards feel stale and I draw new ones.  I don't give in anymore to the temptation to re-draw cards when I don't like what the originals say to me.  The Universe has a way of deploying the Ever Bigger Hammer Experiment when I do that.  Best to stick with the small hammer if I can.

Today's reading featured the three of cups in the Past position.  I love this card in every deck I have.  It is the essence of lightness and joy.  This particular deck has three dancing cranes and my heart momentarily takes flight with them.

The second, Present, card is the Magician or in this deck the Green Man.  I love this card too.  The idea of magic, of making something as if out of nothing intrigues me.  The Green Man weaves into the current novel in progress and just sits there, spinning out all kinds of unexplainable magics.  I could not love this reading more.

Maybe I should have stopped there.....but I didn't.  It's three cards and it will be three cards.  There was not even a sense in the moment of stopping at two.  Too either/or the number two.

So I drew the third and just burst into tears.  The Ten of Bows/Wands, titled in this deck, Responsibility.  The image of the man sagging under the weight of his burden trying to climb the rock is just too much.  My heart wants to refuse the card and put it back.  My future cannot be summed up as only that Responsibility.  Can it?  Please tell me there is more than that coming at me?  And not even the good/fun kind but the burdensome and weighty kind.  I can't do any more of this.  Nor can I manage what I am doing for much longer.

Blue is about to break.

I have my little tear fest.  I feel better.  I clean.  I wander about the apartment.  I eventually wander back to the desk where the cards are sitting.  I pick up that 10 of Bows and really look at it.  I hate when a little piece of cardboard makes me cry.  What was it in the image that set me off?  And in assigning it a meaning related to my mom, to work, did I somehow miss a more subtle meaning?  Perhaps misinterpret it altogether?

I sit with the card a long time seeing only the man, the sticks, the hill.

But then it shifts.  I no longer see just a man, but a man in the story I am writing.  I no longer see sticks, but apprentice staffs.  I see Externsteine, where I saw hill.  And perhaps the responsibility the cards show me as my future is to those characters I have brought into the world, to keep them moving forward, upward even when things seem hard.

Especially when things seem hard.

But then how hard can it really be?  The magician and the cranes are on my side.

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