thoughts about thinking

It's been a while since I did something a bit different, a bit more experimental, so. This is a reading around the general theme of Why do I tend to cling/fixate so much on negative thoughts about myself? Rather than doing the usual process, though, this is going to be an exercise in free association - write down any thoughts as they come about each card, one sentence per idea. Also, it somehow turned into exercise in the second person...

3 of Cups

You tend to think less negatively when doing things with friends - it's a chance to get out of your head, to distract yourself with something enjoyable.

On the other hand, there is feeling alone even surrounded by people you know and like, and wondering why am I always like this?

Like many people, you can't help comparing yourself to the people around you, and noting the shortcomings on your part.

There is pretending you feel what they do, all of you drinking from your cups and talking about this or that, nodding, and not saying so much, never talking about so many things.

Sometimes, surrounded by people, you feel unreal; seeing them, and knowing yourself as only you can, you wonder if you are even really a person.

You enjoy time with people, the talking, the contact, caring and being cared about but there are limits - you are the one dressed in the monochrome, sitting a bit apart from the others.

You like to be amused and amusing, use humor to mask darker things, learn the language of minimization - make your problems sound not so bad, not so concerning, choose words carefully.

You enjoy the meetings and celebrations and interactions, but there is a burden to everything that needs to be left unsaid, the distance it creates, the juxtaposition of the you that drinks from the cup and laughs and chats and the you that they are not allowed to see.

The Empress

She walks through a field ripe with grain, with plenty, but there is something melancholy about this Empress, something detached or even uncaring about her demeanor.

No matter how rich and fortuitous and pleasing your surroundings and material circumstances might be, they cannot fix your internal troubles; there is a real limit to how much they can even improve your mood.

The symbolism here is a bit funny for you - pregnancy is supposed to represent positive things - giving birth to new endeavors, the act of creation - but you have always been profoundly uncomfortable certain aspects of the stereotypical feminine.

You have always been uncomfortable with the way some would reduce your function, your purpose, to that of baby-making machine; the idea of you yourself inhabiting the body of this Empress makes you want to scream.

There are so many small things about being a woman, and what that should mean and what that de-facto means and what certain old white dudes would like to say about it that you hate, that you rebel against intellectually and viscerally, and yet you wonder how much of that has shaped you anyway.

Sometimes you wonder if you'd have ended up the same way, if you'd been born a man.

Going back to the intended metaphor, you wonder too you are even capable of creating much of anything anymore and that bothers you, in a small, constant way.

Strength

The expression of Strength mirrors that of the Empress, but seems subtly different - calm but more positive, trusting, perhaps.

There is a difference between confidence and trust, and apathy and indifference, though the external expression of the two feelings may indeed look the same.

The lion is calm too, eyes closed, following, trusting, at peace. The woman's hand rests on his brow, connection, work.

If the lion is the beast of unconscious thought, of cogs of the mind that spin as they will, the woman has trained it, has learned to work with it, knows the nature of the beast and has learned to control it.

Knowledge and action are two different things entirely, and you have only ever excelled at the former; self-awareness does not mean self-control, and you have never been good at bridging that gap.

An animal does not become obedient naturally, by itself, without concentrated, focused effort over an extended period of time. Are thoughts too, then, trainable? If so, how much have you really tried, to train them, to relearn patterns? How much effort have you been willing to extend?

Though the lion, lets not's not forget, is a dangerous beast with sharp claws and teeth, and training and controlling one is hardly a safe and easy prospect. 

significance of vivid dreams

I've always had occasional instances of dreams that are...particularly vivid, extended, detailed. I remember these dreams long after I wake up, unlike the usual dreams that fade away, except for perhaps bits and pieces, a few hours after waking. In fact, they stay with me almost like...memories, in their realness, memories of a dream flashing across my consciousness even a day or two afterwards. In the past, these almost only ever happened when I  stayed in bed hours longer than my body really needs...

Lately though, they've been happening more frequently, and without any over-sleep on my part. I decided to pull some cards about...the significance of this, what to make of it, what to do with it, whatever. The first card to come up was the Queen of Cups, which I admit seeps rather apt, given the issue. She holds a cup in her hands, out of which a butterfly is flying out. A bit of whimsy there - this card can stand for dreams, but also sometimes psychic influences...to me the butterfly would seem to say that this isn't really to do with the latter, which given the subject matter of the dreams, rather makes sense. Not a message for me about the future or any such, but rather...the butterfly, transformation, whimsy, flight. Behind her we see a beautiful dawn or dusk sky, a tree and some hills that look as if they came from a painted picture. Creativity there, no, artistry? The dawn sky, the same red-orange palette as we see on the queen herself, and her surroundings...it reminds me of a part of the most recent of my dreams. Towards the end, I found myself in a place that a dream enemy had called the 'pink world' a sort of narrow strip between two far larger dimensions, a place with narrow streets and low-strung buildings. The streets were dusty when we walked and the sky, the sky in this place was always and only ever that color, the red-orange-pink shades of dusk and dawn...

The Empress next to the queen clarifies this further, for me. Again we have the emphasis on creativity, on creation, on nurturing. I am reminded of how much of a vivid imagination I have, have always had, how intensely and rapidly and visually it likes to work. Give me a word and I can write you a story off the top of my head. Sometimes I'll tell or hear a funny joke or read something amusing and laugh far longer than anyone else, simply because I cannot get the very vivid IMAGE of that idea out of my head....

These dreams don't feel like normal dreams because they aren't really about fantasies or fears of mine but rather - they feel like stories. Like being in a book or a movie or a video game. The latest one even had point of view shifts and interludes - there were parts where I had an omniscient narrator view and other times when I was a character with limited knowledge, only the vague shadow of an idea that there was so much more going on that I wasn't aware of... These dreams have characters and worlds and a plot, all the structures of a complex story. Childhood adventures in a castle filled with magical relics but also high tech elevators; magical powers tied to trinkets like pig shaped piggy banks that must be carefully guarded; an attack, a dream-father calling forth waves only to have someone else, far more powerful, summon lightening - the image of an entire beach full of water electrified, death by electric shock borne by tides coming towards us; learning of another dimension, ying and yang; losing the father and the guide in an inter-dimensional space made up of black void and dimly glowing white walls of a maze and terribly powerful rushing water, inky black; taking refuge after, desperately confused, in the dawn-sky place....

I have a lot of imagination and creative, even artistic inclination in me. But the fact is, I rather deliberately chose to go into a field, in academia and hopefully professionally after that, that requires very little of those - that is to say, only in a very disciplined, controlled context. A bit of creativity and imagination can lead to a stronger, more original analysis; writing skill can be adjusted and tweaked to provide good academic work as well as good creative work. The stories, though, the characters, the worlds, the colors and images...so much of that has no use here.

I read about genocides and war crimes, write papers about counter-terrorism measures and preventing the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and economic analysis of sub-state violence and this and that, and I enjoy my work, I do. When I am feeling particularly overwhelmed by personal/mental difficulties, focusing on that is just about all I can manage anyway. Apparently though, when I start to feel even a bit better...it isn't enough, to work only on that, no matter how much I enjoy it. My mind wants to do creative things too. Stories, art, poems, something. So it comes out in dreams - unusual, interesting, sometimes distracting dreams. I suppose it would make sense to make some time for purely creative pursuits in my life, even if it does feel very full right now with other tasks, responsibilities.

social stress

We have an interesting juxtaposition in these two cards, one that I find resonates with me particularly just about now. In the first, the three of cups, we see two figures, dancers moving gracefully betweeen three champagne flutes. They are free, they are full of energy, and they are engaged, each following their own steps, but in tandem. Celebrating and enjoying themselves. A productive, beautiful kind of socialization.

Meanwhile, the Empress...she nurtures and creates, certainly, and yet here we have an aspect to this card that is very rarely shown in a tarot deck...the tired, overwhelmed mother surrounded by her brood. Each of them is wonderful, special in his or her way and yet, all together, demanding attention, making noise, getting into all sorts of trouble, and she already pregnant with another, hardly any time for so much as a thought to herself...while not something I've had the opportunity to experience myself, I've no doubt most parents know this feeling well...

How do these come together, then? Well, I've a friend, a former college roommate, coming down from Boston to visit me tomorrow night. She's staying until Monday morning. A good friend this is, yes, one of my closest. And yet I find that, rather than feeling excitement for the time we'll get to spend together, mostly I feel like this Empress. Too many things to do and not enough time or energy to get them done. I still need to clean, do laundry, set up the air mattress I had to go out and buy, and so much schoolwork to do and how will I keep up with that without leaving her to feel bored, and so on.

I think being a host to most kinds of social events is like this, to some degree, depending on circumstances and temperament of those involved. Whether you are having out of town guests, or hosting a party, or a wedding, anything really...I remember as a kid I hated when we had guests because my virgo mother would shift into MUST CLEAN ALL THE THINGS mode and really, most of the time, whatever the social thing we were doing was, it never really seemed worth all the energy and stress that went into preparing for it.

Casual social things tend to be much nicer. Go out, meet up with someone, do a few things. No champagne flutes or fancy dances needed.

Something rather different!

So I attended a local tarot society meetup last Saturday, and there procured a set of Arcana Stones. These are a nifty take on divination - Rachel chose 22 different crystals to represent all of the major arcana in the tarot. The stones are a self-contained method of divination, with a drop sheet based on the astrological houses to use with them. But seeing as a) I haven't had time yet to have a proper read through of Rachel's booklet about the houses and b) I really like using tarot cards themselves, I thought up a combined method of divination that uses both a tarot deck (the Thoth, specifically) and the stones.

Since I just finished up my last exam today, I decided to do a reading for myself on the topic of Advice for the next few weeks/What I should focus on between now and when I leave for my adventure in Tunisia.

What follows is my attempt at explaining the method/reading, which hopefully will make as much sense in words as it does to me in my head. ;]

So first, I shuffle/cut/fan the deck according to my usual reading method, and lay out a certain number of cards, face down. I like evenness when doing this, so either multiples of two (4, 6, 8) or a nice square made up of nine cards. Mostly this just depends on how many cards I want to potentially have in a reading/how big of a spread I feel like dealing with. For this, I decided six cards would work for me. After I have the cards out, I take the black satin bag with the stones, shake them up, and with eyes closed grab a small handful and drop them, without looking, down on the cards.

Stones can either be directly on top of one card, or linking two cards together. Any stones that don't fall on a card get removed; any cards without a stone on them are likewise removed. Then, the cards are turned over, with the stones left on them. Cards are read normally, but with the stones and the arcana they represent adding additional layers of meaning to the cards they are on or the cards that they are linking. Rather than a formal spread, I read the message intuitively.

So, we basically see two separate but related messages here, as the visual shows. On the left we have the Aeon and the 10 of Swords. The fiery reddish tones definitely a theme here. Essentially, the Aeon, Thoth's counterpart to Judgement, is a card of decision, of the fading of the old to make way for the new. We see have illustrated the ancient Egyptian belief about the dusk and dawn, the rebirth of the sun each day. It's a dynamic card, movement towards a new age. And indeed, a lot of things are obviously in flux for me. The end of the school year, the end of my living situation, the beginning of a long summer full of many new things to do, plans. Connected to this card in the 10 of swords, which is also a change...of sorts. Ruin, destruction, the end of things which must end, pain and chaos. the piercing of that heart in the center of the swords...As I have mentioned before, this has rather been a year of highs and lows, and there are definitely aspects of my own actions, approach to things that have been less than positive, that I would be rather better off leaving behind as I go into that sea of change that is the Aeon...

And indeed, the stone that links these two cards is the Rose Quartz, representing Temperance, or Art in the Thoth. Art is an alchemist, a mad scientist, a healer. It's a card of synthesis, of combining and taking away, of healing, of a more moderate, balanced approach to things, experimenting and renewing and..yes, an ongoing process, and one to keep in mind as I move ahead. I have done new things, lived with old, familiar things...and now, with all this changing and packing and sorting, what better a time to decide what would be best to keep and what to let go of? A time for balancing, for equilibrium seeking; and indeed, the stone of the Aeon card is Aventurine, representing justice. The cool blue-green tones to balance out all the red...balance, using my mind to figure out what is worth taking with me into the new 'age' of the next few months and what best to leave behind. What will serve me and what will hold me back? What kind of chaos am I ready to let go of?

The second set of three cards enforce this theme on a more practical level, which makes sense given the disks suit we see here. We have at the bottom the 6 of disks, for success, especially materially. the balanced glow of that star, the rose at the center. This I see as the school year completed, half of my Masters program behind me, difficult classes and assignments and all of that, the sense of accomplishment and relief because finally, finally I am DONE. But the stone on top of this card is Mahogany Obsidian, representing Death. Yes, transformation, evolution - I barely have time to dwell on this success, because already there are all these new important things I MUST focus on because there is so little time to get them done in. It is time for a shift in focus, away from what I have gotten done and towards the new. In fact,this card is connected to the next with Botswana Agate, which represents the Wheel: what clearer way to emphasize that things are rolling forward?

How? Well, we have the Empress. Time to nurture, to grow, to focus on creativity, on inspiration, on using my inner resources to make things happen. I will need some ingenuity to get things done, and well, once I get the bulk of logistics preparation done with, I do hope much of my summer and my time in Tunisia will be a time where I can really focus on doing creative things and things that inspire me - taking pictures, writing, reading, working with tarot, exploring, teaching myself new things. I am also struck by the idea that the whole nurturing message - if I made more of an effort to take care of myself better now that I have more time to...well, easier to get things done if you feel physically healthier, right? As for the stone on the Empress, the Fluorite represents the Hermit, which makes perfect sense: by and large, much of what I am going to be doing, and what I have to do, is going to be me going at it solo. Motivating myself, and getting the most out of these experiences by myself, is a good thing to aim for. At the same time, Hermit can also sometimes indicate a guide or mentor, that shining light - don't be afraid to ask for help when appropriate, if doing so will make moving forward easier.

Finally, we have 5 of disks, Worry. No stone directly on this card, which I take to mean that it's more of an addendum than a strong message in itself - and well, yes, the whole reason that I am doing a reading on this subject is because I feel a bit stress, overwhelmed, and worried about all that I have to do in the next few weeks, the material realm logistics of everything...I always have this feeling that I am 'good' at academics but less capable at 'life skills' and so much of what I have to do falls under umbrella of the latter...but the connecting stone between this and the Empress is Carnelian, which represents the Emperor: organization, self-discipline, a strict, methodical, no-nonsense approach to things. Combined with the raw creativity and inspiration of the Empress, this approach WILL lead to getting things done, thus addressing the concerns of this card. Just...really need to channel that organization and self-discipline, the Aries energy, fire.

-
So yes, I quite like this reading method and will likely be playing with it more in the future. Though possibly with fewer cards because even just the five...this was a bit long to type up, and in addition to being lazy, I wonder too if this makes for over-long tl;dr reading.

Why Do I Collect Decks?

So I wrote a post response to a question on AT, and I liked what came to mind enough to want to expand on the idea here so....

Collecting Decks

So I have some 30+ tarot decks at the current moment, which I do not think is a particularly notable number by the standards of Aeclectic membership but which is, by the standards of the wider world, quite enough to be called a 'collection' and to qualify me as someone who can reasonably say that I collect tarot decks.

And I suppose I do, though for various reasons I don't really think of myself as a Collector the way some people are: I keep all my decks in simple bags in a large sack (after fire last fall, I like the idea of being able to quickly grab and take them all in an emergency), and care about boxes not at all - the only reason I keep those these days is for possible trading purposes, as other people seem to like keeping their decks in proper boxes with proper LWBs. I don't care about keeping my decks in 'mint' condition, even some of the rarer, OOP ones - if I think it will look better trimmed, I trim away, and gilt them too. I do not keep decks I cannot or do not want to read with, no matter how pretty or rare - all of my decks must be reading decks, working decks, because what the hell do I have them for, if not to read with?

And yet, nonetheless, I have enough that one might reasonable ask: why so many decks? Couldn't you read just as well with one or two? Does anyone ever need over thirty tarot decks? And to be fair, no I do not need them. And yet I am an INTP, and there is some underlying logic with which I justify my purchases. It comes down, I guess, to that one great love of mine in life - the love of learning, of gaining knowledge, expanding what I know and how I can think about the things I know of.

See, we all call it 'tarot reading' but in many ways that seems to be mostly a metaphor, figurative language. Do we really think of it as the equivalent of reading a newspaper, a book? And yet, the more I think about it, the more I want to say...perhaps yes. What is written language, after all? From the earliest pictographs to modern, current alphabets in a way, if you think about it broadly, writing is about visually representing abstract concepts. We have these little symbols we call letters, and we string them together this way and that, and suddenly that MEANS something to us, because we have been trained to automatically interpret them as such. So when you come across DOG, you do not see random squiggles: your mind automatically brings up the image or the idea of a certain canine animal. And when you learn other languages, you apply the same concepts. PIES brings to mind the same animal for me, because my mind has been trained to make that associated. So does كلب because again, written language acquisition is about training the mind to correlate visual symbols with sounds with abstract ideas.

Reading tarot is, in a lot of ways, is just the same. You have 78 cards with distinct images, and each card has a range of meanings attached to it - the exact details depend on which system(s) you follow, whether you read intuitively or whether you are deep into studying historical esoteric symbolism or whatever, and so on. In any case though, its a recognizable system with widely applicable card meanings, and as you get more experienced with working with the cards, and more familiar with them, the process of eliciting messages from the cards becomes easier. When you first start off, you draw a card and look at the picture, and maybe you have some vague concept of what it could maybe mean, but you aren't quite sure, and so you check in the LWB or whatever book you have, and you read the keywords and then you kind of stumble along, in broad strokes, trying to make some kind of connection that makes sense to you. The image and the abstract ideas are still separate and you are trying to bridge that gulf.

Later on, it just comes. I draw the 6 of cups and I automatically think of nostalgia, of childhood, of looking backwards, of longing, of people you used to know and things you used to do. I draw the 10 of coins and I think of houses, of families, of the people you love and the people you are tied to, of responsibilities and duties and burdens. A draw an Ace of Wands and I think of opportunities, of growth, of creative energy ready to be channeled, of new projects, of starting thinks, taking the plunge, boldness. I do not have to sit there and struggle to remember - it simply comes when I look at the image in front of me. The images of the cards you see, have been married to a whole range of concepts in my mind. It really is quite analogous to reading, except that what you are reading is a deck of cards...

Which brings us back to the idea of why so many decks? If you have a deck with which you have grown familiar enough to have that kind of connection, isn't that enough?

But you see, to me it does make a difference that what you are reading is not words but images, ART. Art, which can be created in so many different styles and mediums, which is both so inherently personal and so universal...Having many decks means working with the same core concept represented in a plethora of different ways. It really does broaden the scope of your knowledge, the pool of meaning from which you draw when you read. You'll see a card you feel you know so well drawn in a different way and it will trigger something in your mind, another way that you could approach the idea. It adds nuance and shade. Working with the Thoth so much recently has been doing that a lot for me - it really isn't so far removed from the RWS meanings, and yet it comes at them from different angles and perspectives and it makes me really THINK. It widens how I see the cards. Like Aeon instead of Judgement opened up that card for me in a way I never really got just from the standard christianity-based images of the Angel blowing the trumpet and resurrection. Or the post the other night about the Wheel of Fortune and the idea that life is made up of many wheels - wheel of career, wheel of love, wheel of emotional health - that all move at their own pace. These are ideas that would have never occurred to me if I had just been working with the ONE deck, and which once they do I can internalize and apply to all my future working with tarot, regardless of which deck it is that I happen to be reading at the current time.

And yeah, in a way each deck is also it's own 'dialect' because each one has it's own artistic take, little details that you can pick and pull apart as you interpret. Sometimes the answers the cards give can be QUITE literal, and that staircase or the hat or whatever in the deck you are working with happens to be exactly applicable - it wouldn't be there in another deck, but its here, in this one, an answer just for you.

Besides that, decks draw on all kinds of influences - each other, early 20th century occultist groups, ancient mythology, various cultural practices, astrology, numerology, qabbalah, various animal groups, whatever, and they do so in various ways and proportions and so, having many decks can also be a nice way to become at least a little bit familiar with other ideas or systems or whatever which for me - well, more learning is always, always a plus.

And so that is my overly long explanation about both what I think tarot is and how I justify spending all kinds of money on tarot decks when, one might argue one or two would be more than enough :D

a very appropriate quick draw

What can I say? I drew a pair of cards today, a very rushed/casual thing done with the intent to have something to ponder on throughout the day. what do i get? i perfect, perfect reflection and description of the story of my life right now, not just in the themes of the cards but quite literally in the imagery. a lot of this has to do with things that are more the territory of my personal journal/that I don't want to get into in detail here, so i'll keep this succint...

last night, two in the morning, chechen dude article finally written, finished. for a number of reasons, physically and mentally exhausted. staring at the brightly lit computer screen, so tired you want to cry except that doing so would take too much energy. tired of feeling like drowning, of so many silly self-defeating tendencies...

but you've a list. reading you very much need to do. arabic vocab to study. more info you need to absorb. work you need to go to, do with some basic level of competence. and more, higher goals. dizzy with exhaustion you distract yourself by playing artistically with old pictures in photoshop. need to get batteries, you say, for the camera - thinking of more images to capture.

wake up in the morning, three hours of sleep. bleary-eyed, force yourself to read about computer network defense. no time to eat, bits of poetry drifting around your in head in the shower. character ideas, magic systems, story worlds floating about as you drag yourself outside, force tired body to walk over cobblestone sidewalks. this morning is so pretty. the weather is so nice. wishing you could paint, because these things your eyes see look so beautiful.

the ten of swords does not inspire the empress, but neither does it stifle her, really. that juxtaposition: how much of a garden can you grow with stubborn will and limited water and limited sun?

card for a first day

so yeah, I do not do daily draws because...I don't have the attention span to do that with any regularity, and also, I just don't see the need to draw a card for every day of my life.

sometimes though, there is a day where I do want to do a draw. tomorrow is the first day of classes for my second/spring semester in grad school. schedule is shifted due to the holiday on Monday, so I have Monday classes tomorrow which means...three classes back to back, from 2pm-9pm basically. fun welcome back, eh?

a quick one card draw with message/advice for my first day. not longer because uh, I still have a ton of reading for my Ethnic Conflict/Civil War class to finish up. xD

Interesting, my favorite empress again shows her face on this blog.

I see this foremost as a gentle reminder to try to take care of myself. Already I'm seeing myself sliding into the comfortable ol' routine of sleep, who needs sleep, oh well looks like i don't have time to eat all day lalala caffeine caffeine caffeine and well, yes. nurturing, caring, treating self well would no doubt mean better, or at least easier to come by/less stressful use of full cognitive capacity.

Besides that? Inspiration, growth, fresh new things to learn, to read about and discuss and engage with. Channel that feeling, that inspired feeling, the metaphorical spring of the intellect. That's what you like best about school...not all the stress, certainly not competition or grades, but LEARNING, ENGAGING, the intellectual challenge of it all, the chance to really use your mind at full capacity and discuss what interests you with others who actually know what your are talking about. Focus and hold onto that feeling, let it drive you.

Lastly, have a bunch of ideas, little projects related to school/career-oriented things, errands around school I need to run. I actually have the motivation/inspiration to conceive of these things right now, no doubt because new beginnings always have a bit of inspirational effect on me...hold onto that. Nurture that as well. Follow through. See your life and mind as a pretty garden and make the best of it.

My Favorite Majors: The Empress

So, the Empress is definitely not one of the Major Arcana that I super relate with in any way. I'm not really much the mothering/nurturing type, either in desire to be mothered/nurtured nor in any desire to do aforementioned activities. Never have identified very much with traditional feminine roles or socially assigned female gender roles either instinctively or intellectually and...yeah. Which is not to say I have an real dislike/aversion/prejudice towards this card, per se, but...yeah, not one I feel very close to. That said, though, it wasn't hard to decide on my favorites for this one.

III. Empress

Favorite:

This card was seriously one of the main reasons why I became obsessed with getting my paws on a copy of Robert Place's Alchemical Renewed tarot, which took a while before it became a reality, but yeah. I love the art style of the whole deck, as well as its theme, but this card especially... Visually, I just love it. The lush, verdant green of the background, the way the figures are drawn..the colors. It just works for me. Also I think the combination of the flora and the child really represents the growth and nurturing aspects of this card. It makes perfect sense for the empress to be nude, in my mind and...I like the absence of wheat. I know that's a bit random, but the traditional RWS image and a lot of derivative decks have that in there and the correlation between a woman's body and harvest just...rubs me the wrong way. Call it my own issues with uh, yeah, thanks but just because I'm a woman doesn't make me a baby-making machine or whatnot, but there you have it. Also why cards with pregnant ladies, while perfectly appropriate symbolically, don't super work for me personally. But yeah, artistically especially, I just find this such a beautiful Empress card.

Runner Up: 

I also really like this one. Like the rest of the Nusantara deck, I love the colors, the art style, the figure and the clothes and all that. What I really like about it though is that it sticks pretty closely to the traditional RWS take of the card - which honestly, I rather like the arrangement of - while getting rid of all the aspects I liked less. I love all the green with the right amount of red/orange/yellow highlights - a perfect color scheme for this card. No wheat, no pomegranate dress, but familiar, comfortable. Basically it really nicely brings to mind the meanings of this card for me without bringing up icky gender issue touchiness and yeah. It's pretty :]