Questions Snapshot Exercise: Who Am I?

So another idea for an interesting tarot exercise. Around the question words again, except this time...do 5-6 separate, one card readings, each focusing on one of the questions through the lens of 'snapshot at this moment in time'.

Who Am I?

Appropriate as always, this card. As a snapshot of current moment in time, this is quite how I feel, actually. The red background - danger, conflict, difficult things in the external environment and I am supposed to face them, but how can I? My sword is broken, snapped. Worse yet, I feel like I am dissolving...

Dissolving, yes, physically falling apart. There, look, my legs are turning to dust, to ash. How can I move forward without them? There, behold, the crumbling of my thighs, my knees? And what am I suppose to DO about all that? Oh I am trying, trying, but can my limited attempts really make a dent in the momentum of years worth of action coming to culmination?

Impossible to stop this destruction, falling apart. Perhaps if I was in a field, in some nice calm place with no stress and no recurring problems, maybe I could figure out how to fix myself up a bit, somehow; but instead I am here, with the cold stone floor and the red pulsing everything at things constantly going wrong, demands and attacks or PROBLEMS, and somehow I am supposed to deal with that, and keep myself from crumbling at the same time and how, how? Perhaps it is time to let myself fall to the ground, a pile of ash, apologies for my failure.

Except of course, that this card came up reversed which...not quite the same meaning, is it? Failure is very often not a final thing. If you fail and give up, than what you and/or everyone else remembers is the failure, right? But if afterwards you somehow pick yourself up, glue yourself together somehow, haphazardly, and going on to try again or try at different things or move to different places...if you do better, then that will be remembered too, might even overshadow the earlier problematic...after all, memory works in interesting ways.

A snapshot is a moment in time, only a moment. Keeping that perspective of TIME, even at the lowest points, is important. Yes things may feel utterly unbearably terrible NOW, at this current moment in time. Within you, around you, everything. But even from this card there is the possibility of forward motion, upward motion. After all, despite everything, the Fey still has his wings right? Still the option of trying to fly away, find calm in a better place, something...

reflecting on the week: how to approach a maze

So I decided to do a quick little draw with the question/theme of something for me to reflect on about this past week...

So yeah, Hermit and 3 of swords here. The young fey man, blue-skinned and sad, stands alone in the water, the turbulent waves, the red-tinged and dark cloudy sky. Wind, cold wind it looks like, blows at him, his wings and his hair. It looks pretty uncomfortable there actually, the cold air and water, but the man looks too distressed to really care. That bright red sword, pointing downwards on his chest; something weighing so heavily on his mind that physical discomfort seems utterly irrelevant.

The lonely quality to the card. And of course that's only emphasized by the Hermit next to him. The Hermit, making his way along in the stairwell maze that looks like something out of Alice in Wonderland. He has a torch to illuminate his wave, awareness of his situation, maybe even a pretty good idea of where he is going, and yet....just LOOK at the crazy way those stairwells wind and twist about. How is he supposed to know which stair to take, and when, and for how long? He looks pretty damned confused, this Hermit, and who wouldn't be, trying to navigate through something like that alone? Of course, sometimes a journey like that through the maze can be quite enjoyable, wondering about any which way, seeing interesting things for their own sake. But sometimes, when you really need to get TO or AWAY from something, it's just damned frustrating.

These images do speak quite well to my week. See, love as I do to write and tl;dr all over the internet about whatever, when it comes to my most serious issues I tend to be rather private, secretive. Do not speak of them by name; do not speak of them much if at all even to most close friends. So as a result, I do spend more time than you might think with the blind stumbling about, struggling with things while public laughing smile fine fine. More specifically to the last week, though....well I spent the first half of it dealing with what was a rather frustrating finalized break with  a former therapist...and she refused to refer me to someone new....and when I decided to be proactive and responsible and find someone for myself...no one seems around/available until mid March, and so. These cards kind of describe how I feel about the situation quite aptly: frustration and demoralization because here I am, actually TRYING to make some kind of real effort, and with regards to one particular issue, more of a concrete effort than I have in YEARS and in terms of 'qualified'/'professional' support...it's just not there. And hell if the whole situation doesn't feel just like that impossibly complicated maze sometimes.

But the lesson here, I think is that...well if you let yourself feel so sad and aggrieved and demoralized as that blue fey...of course trying to navigate through that maze, even if you can scrounge up the energy, is going to be a torture. If you keep thinking about whatever it is that made you feel like that 3 of Swords, keep turning it over in your mind, keep bothering yourself with how little concrete progress you are making...it's going to be very lame maze-exploring times indeed. It doesn't have to be though. The whole idea of enjoying the journey. Even if the situation you are trying to get away from is kind of objectively serious/desperate...if your only option at the moment IS confused stumbling, and there is nothing, at the current period of time, that you can do to change that...then let yourself confused stumble. Enjoy the wonder, the little interesting tidbits you can pick up and see in that maze. Let go of the negative and make the best of the situation. See and learn what you can. Do the best that you can. Mindfulness, make the best of the current moment, being fully aware of yourself in the current moment. You might find, when the right time comes to reassess and make some more changes, that you've actually stumbled a bit further in the right direction than you might of expected....

cards and poetry associations

"Giggling, poking fun, everyone's darling,
The carefree sinner of Tsarskoye Selo
If only you could have foreseen
What life would do with you -
That you would stand, parcel in hand,
Beneath the Crosses, three hundredth in
line,
Burning the new year's ice
With your hot tears.
Back and forth the prison poplar sways
With not a sound - how many innocent
Blameless lives are being taken away. . ."

-Excerpt from Requiem by Anna Akhmatova

more memory & card exercise

Yep, having another go with this idea because it led to interesting things last time and why not try it again with a different deck? So...

This is, I must say first, an interesting take on the Hierophant, but it does make a kind of sense. After all, what is religion and institutions if not that which is written and that which is ruled by old men? Ok, so maybe a bit of a cynical take, that, and yet...

It does bring to mind though, my own experience of religion and writing, way back when. See, my parents were/are Catholic, so we went to church and all that. From the youngest of ages I always just found the whole thing massively boring. Mostly I just daydreamed stories in my head the entire time and tuned it all out. At about age twelve or so, though, I'd gotten to thinking a bit more, and it was then that I actually tried to really LISTEN to what the priest was saying. And I realized I disagreed with all of it, that I was sure that he was just wrong, that what he was saying was completely at odds with my own moral values, and that therefore, this religion was not for me.

Young INTP that I was, this didn't cause me any angst. Ok, then, if you are supposed to have a religion, and this religion is not for me, time to research alternatives. So I went to my local library and started browsing books about religion and found a few about Wicca. Youngster that I was, long-time fan of fantasy stories and comics and tv shows, of course I was intrigued. So of course I read and learned about "real" witches and pagans and so much of it DID make logical and moral sense to me that I decided that yes, I would learn and practice THIS religion. I got a friend interested as well, and that was kind of how I spent most of middle school.

I got a red folder/notebook thing which I called my "Folder of Shadows" because every Wiccan was of course supposed to have a "Book of Shadows" or equivalent, right? I doodled the triple goddess emblem all over the front. And I read and read as many books about Wicca as I could find in the public library system of NYC and in Barnes and Noble occasionally and of course, online. I printed things out and copied diagrams and color coded and chose those parts that made sense to me and omitted what didn't because that was the cool thing about Wicca: you could choose exactly what worked and didn't work for you, there was no book you HAD to read and take at face value whether you agreed with all of it or not, no, you got to WRITE your own, do your own research, put together your own rituals, and wasn't that just the best? So I filled it up, that folder, wrote and wrote. It certainly kept my young brain occupied, if nothing else.

Interesting times, interesting times. Of course, a few years later I realized that no matter how much a religion's tenets might make sense to me, I was still fundamentally incapable of believing in any kind of higher powers or supernatural forces of concepts of an afterlife. Again, this didn't distress me. Ok, I guess I'm an atheist then, and so it was. Being a packrat, the folder still lives somewhere in my closet in my parents' house. It was, if nothing else, and interesting and amusing experience to reflect on from the perspective of an adult...

judging and changing

So another interesting idea to work with/try out. A singular, short reading done by drawing cards from two different decks and then reading them together normally.

So the idea of death as change and all that...familiar enough (at least to tarot readers). beautifully illustrated here. Yes, there definitely come times when we must cut short this or that thread, let the flower wither and die, let the scorpion do his thing. There are times when the situation really does just call for and end, and extending things further is only doing yourself (or possibly, others) a disservice.

The process can be a pain, and difficult, and frightening, but good things come as a result: new growth, new life, new possibilities. The void created by the death can now be filled with something more appropriate. Change is necessary and constant in life and in death and so it goes.

Except sometimes, things get a bit more complicated than that, don't they? Sometimes it's not quite so straightforward as THIS IS BAD, SNIP SNIP and everything taken care of. Sometimes, a part of you KNOWS that you need this end, and yet hesitates: sometimes another part of your mind argues, insists that no, you should give this old situation a chance, not take the risk, avoid the difficulties that come hand in hand with the process of this death.

And sometimes it isn't just in your mind. Sometimes there may be others involved, well meaning or looking after their own interests or some combination of those. Others who will question whether you should change things. Others who might not know how bad the situation really is and might say, no, why shake things up, you have a good thing going on there.

Or they will agree that the situation needs that death-change, might even feel about is more strongly than you do: you need to do it NOW, must do it THIS way, must do it suddenly and completely. This is bad and also this and it would be best if...

And maybe they are totally off base. And maybe they have a point, and you recognize the wisdom in some of what they are saying, but knowing the situation as you do, and knowing yourself, you also know that what they are saying will never work, will never happen - you just CANNOT do it that way.

There are many doors, archway, windows in shadow and lights, ways to go forward, and not all of them can be right for a given situation and if you allow yourself to be distracted by them all...sometimes you need a bit of that metaphorical blindness, deafness. Push away everything else. look deep within yourself, the inner you, the real you, your third eye, your intuition and instincts: what is it that you really want? How do you want to achieve it? Feel the feather of justice, of rightness in your grasp and THINK on it. What is too heavy right now? What do you want to hold onto for a bit longer. What is really, to you, the fairest solution? The most balanced? Sustainable?

If you are going to go ahead and face death, you certainly have the right to do it on your own terms. Not only choosing to do the snipping but also how much, when, how quickly, with who - listen to advice, and listen to your own mind, and then make the BALANCED choice. Not everything your own thoughts and feelings tell you is correct; certainly not everything others can tell you can be. There is some truth in both of those things. Use your objective logic and your instincts and find the right balance and then yes, proceed, proceed.

My Favorite Majors: The Magician

So continuing on with this whole little excercise/series thing. Next up is the Magician, card number one in the major arcana. Funny thing about this one: in going through my decks and trying to decided which cards to choose...I realized that, though this is actually one of the majors I feel most comfortable with, it's not a card that tends to stand out. Like, none of the Magician cards in my most favorite decks tend to stand out to me, and it actually took me a lot of browsing through my decks to find the two Magician cards I thought best represented the concepts and appealed to me visually...

Without further ado/tl;dr then...

I. Magician

Favorite:

I made a very concerted effort to procure this deck when I was in Sweden, as I'd admired the art for a while and the chance to have a real Swedish edition with Swedish language subtitles certainly appealed. To be honest, other than giving it a much-needed trim, haven't gotten around to reading much with the deck yet. However, be that as it is, this Magician really really does appeal to me. I love the art style of this deck overall, and I feel this card does a great job in incorporating some of the traditional RWS aspects of the Magician card (body position, alter etc) with its own style and just...the lightening, the animal symbolism, the pentacles on the garment, just the general atmosphere of this card...

I look at it and I can FEEL the power of this Magician, that sense of taking control, getting things done by force of will, self-realization. It's really a great representation of the major, methinks. Also, the colors and just the exotic feel of this, which is really this deck throughout...very nice.

Runner Up:

I kind of suprised myself in choosing this as the runner up best Magician. The Fey is another deck I've gotten, trimmed, but haven't worked with much yet. I like it: it's light-hearted, fun, pretty. But...I really didn't expect it to be the source of a FAVORITE card, to be honest. This one though...It's not super traditional, to be sure, but...that's kind of what makes it work so well for me. It's a bit of a different aspect of the Magician: here he is, confident in his powers, his showy ability, look what I can do - that kind of arrogance that comes with precociousness. He's experimenting on mice, living creatures, and while yes, it does show how talented he is...it also shows the limitations of the Magician. It is, after all, number one in the arcana, the begining of the journey. There's a certain selfishness to this card, the charlatan aspects, willingness to decieve, a self-centered outlook that limits what he can achieve: he isn't thinking about the effect of his magic on the mice, doesn't consider whether what he is doing is ethical. He just goes. Has he considered all the consequences, what could go wrong?

In other words, this could open up a lot of deep/interesting interpretations in a reading. Also, the art, like the rest of the deck, is quirky, fun, appeals to the childish fantasy-lover in me, so yes. This be my second pick. :]