Adjustment - Queen of Swords = 8 of Cups
Well then: if you remove those Queen of Swords tendencies from a delicately balanced situation, you will fall into indolence, bleakness.
As always with this deck, the message is perfectly apt for me personally, but also interesting to ponder on more in the abstract. I do identify a lot with the Queen of Swords personally, both in positive and negative respects. Logic logic - you can get quite far following cold, hard logic. I like logic because, well, it makes SENSE. If your premises are true, you have access to appropriate information, and your reasoning is sound, you WILL get the right answer if you approach the problem with logic. Your heart and your jerkbrain tendencies can tell you all kinds of things, but if you accept those, listen to them and say: thank you for telling me this is impossible, that there is no way I can do this; logic suggests otherwise, however, and so I am going to go with that... Well, you can make a good bit of progress through life even in the most difficult of circumstances.
The Queen of Swords is cold, logical, and when necessary, ruthless. Sometimes she lacks compassion - for others, and for herself. Sometimes she can grow bitter. Sometimes she might chop away a good bit more or quickly than actually necessary. She might fall prey to all or nothing type reasoning, a kind of tunnel vision, that can be limiting. Approaching ALL situations from her perspective is most definitely NOT a recipe for a healthy, fulfilling life.
And yet nonetheless. The situation from which the subtraction is happening here is Adjustment - another take on my year card, and actually, a title I feel is perhaps even more appropriate than the RWS tradition Justice. Justice has so many connotations of legal systems and established moral or ethnic codes, the idea that something must be 'right' and something else 'wrong'. Adjustment is more of a FORCE, more impersonal, less socially constructed and more simply part of the world. There is a balance here, but it is precarious - standing on tip-toes, everything positioned just so: the slightest change in weight, the littlest shift could send it all tumbling. It requires grace, patience and wisdom to keep it up, adjusted properly. But then, aren't all situations of equilibrium like that? Its that one certain POINT where everything matches up properly, equals out: just a little bit above and below and you have problems again. How many economists have spent how many countless hours calculating equilibrium points for this and that?
Sometimes life situations are certainly like that. You are juggling so many feelings and responsibilities, duties, obligations, needs and wants and problems that you are trying to keep under wraps and people who demand this or that of you - the key to handling those is to find some kind of system that works for you, that lets you work out some kind of balance. For me, this is based heavily on logic, logic, constantly ruthlessly telling myself that no, despite what I feel, I WILL do this or that because I MUST, etc. The queen is a harsh mistress though, and sometimes it could be tempting to just...let go, to just say whatever, screw it, I want to do what I want to do and so I will do it!
But in these particular circumstances it looks like, that would not be a good idea at all. Subtract the Queen and we have the 8 of Cups, Indolence. We have dark skies, thick murky water that would just pull us under, make us slow and heavy and useless. We have no enough water, not enough resources to fill all the cups - scarcity surrounded by plenty but not for us, no. We have dwelling on negativity, on problems rather than acting to find solutions. Self-pity, self-indulgence. It is a miserable experience, waiting in this card, though an easier one: easier to sit around weeping about you troubles and how everything is too complicated and hard so why bother, waiting for someone else to come save you, whatever. Much harder to pick up the sword, force yourself to think of a reasonable game plan to fix the situation, break it down into manageable steps, and then give yourself the kick you need to actually go do it.
Yes, the Queen is useful to keep in the mind sometimes, quite. No subtracting logic, for that leads to bad things.
