reverse reading: new starts

So usually tarot reading is about drawing cards and interpreting them.

Thought it would be interesting, just in an experimental, change things up type of way, to reverse that. You know, as a way of training brain to thinking more intuitively in images and all that.

So last night I did a short reading with cards giving me advice for the new semester.

Now I do a reverse - choosing cards to represent my current attitude, outlook, hopes for the new semester, for the spring, for the new year. This is how I want to approach things. This is the kind of new start I want this to be. This is how I want to act in regards to the world around me. This is how I think it would be best to approach things.

With energy, with creativity, with inspiration, and unafraid to venture out into the unknown type of attitude. Hardness creativity, energy, drive into new things, approach with an open mind, even a bit of whimsy, and most of all with POSITIVITY.

Yes, intellectually a new start, learning to things, but also take it as time to try to leave certain nonsense behind, mentally. Try to conciously work on a new attitude, a new approach. Envision success. Bring some discipline to your mental life, both in school and in personal life. Strive for GOOD logic i how you think about everything

A logically driven inspired approach to new things, then, aye?

Says the INTP, ha :]

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.

Another go at '5 Ws and an H' exercise

So decided I felt like giving this one another try. I do like doing things with tarot that are a bit intellectually challenging, so why not giving this one another shot with a different deck. Trying to be briefer this time with my responses, perhaps?

Again, found the exercise on Zanna Starr's blog, where her directions for it are as follows:

"For the 5W's and an H exercise, we use one Tarot card to answer the questions Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? As an additional requirement, each answer can be only one phrase or sentence. The idea is to respond intuitively, without a lot of description or explanation."

Swedish Witch Tarot - Wheel of Fortune

Who?
Someone going through some major life transition or personal transformation. Someone in the process of moving between major phases of their life, whether for the better or for the worse.

What?
A major change, a new phase of things beginning. A cycle. Rising from the ashes or falling from a pedestal. Movement, lots of movement, lows and highs. Something showy.

When?
When there are lots of changes going on, physical or mental or both. When things are moving forward, leaving the past behind. When its time to move on.

Where?
A place of movement, transition, perhaps literally so - a place of wheels, vehicles and such? A place of personal significance, where some major life change happened in the past - or, alternatively, a brand new place for a fresh new start.

Why?
No reason, randomnosity, because shit happens sometimes whether you deserve it or not. Fortune, random, chance - not justice well weighed, here. Life moves, wheel spins, sometimes you win sometimes you lose just roll with it, that's why.

How?
Quite naturally, forces will ensure that wheel spins. Out of your hands, out of your power. The change will happen, good or bad, the old will end the new will begin, unstoppable.

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 :]

dealing with disappointment

Another interesting little quick reading/draw i felt was worth writing up here. Planning on putting away the Silicon Dawn for a bit and working with some other decks that I haven't really got to reading with yet, so decided to do this as a kind of final for now read with that deck.

So basically, I applied to this State Dept. Critical Language Scholarship thing a few months ago. I'm studying Arabic, see, and though I knew it was highly unlikely that I would actually succeed and get it, it was free to apply, and if I had gotten it, would of meant several months all expenses paid studying of the language in a country in the Middle East or North Africa. Basically, nothing to lose for trying and much to gain if I actually got it, so why not, right?

Well, I got an email yesterday informing me that I had not, in fact, been selected. As I said, this was pretty much the expected outcome. I had, as I always do, deliberately maintained a fatalistic/realistic attitude and low expectations, so the disappointment factor was limited.

Which is not to say I didn't feel any at all. Been working on this quite useful self help book recently, which works for me because it kinda incorporates aspects of Buddhist philosophy and such also, and one of them that makes lots of sense is about letting yourself feel your emotions, not suppressing/avoiding things, etc. etc. So yes, I was disappointed some. After all, it was a chance to study a language I love learning in a country I very much want to visit/live in, to travel which is one of my favorite things, would have really helped me advance much more in my language skills, etc etc.

But you know, it's pointless to dwell on that which cannot be changed, so I thought it would be useful instead to use this as an opportunity to draw cards with advice on a more generally useful aspect of the situation - how to deal with disappointment.

Again Justice pops up. This is turning into a bit of a theme, isn't it? (I tried out this quarterly spread from Zanna Starr's blog at a tarot meetup today and guess what turned out to be my Quintessence card for the year??) Makes sense though, in this pair.

See, if you want to get anywhere, if you want to lead an interesting and fulfilling life, you need to take risks, take leaps of faith, give things a go because the opportunity is there and well, it's worth a shot. If a man on a dragon appears promising to fly you somewhere amazing, do you really want to say no and stay locked up in the same old boring routine blah blah? So you jump on and go for it. And sometimes it works out. And sometimes you fall on your ass in the cold wet snow. So it goes.

There's no use dwelling on it, really, on beating yourself, on focusing on that negative. It was worth a shot and a shot was what you gave it. As for why it didn't work out? Justice, impartial logic, impartial justice. As in, do not take it personally. It was not meant as some judgement of why you, as a person, or terrible or worthless or anything like that. There were simply many applications, limited slots, and to an impartial judge yours just didn't make the cut. So it goes. There is no point in resenting cold logical sword of justice, is there?

So take a balanced approach. Be fair to yourself, fair to whoever or whatever person or force disappointed you. Equanimity. You lose some, you win some, right? No one can succeed all the time, win at everything. No one is perfect, and if they did or were that would hardly be balanced either. Which is not to say don't take anything from experience. Look objectively, logically, at your own performance or actions, and learn for next time - is there anything you could have done better, handled better? Anything to keep in mind for next time?

Look forward, no back. Focus on the unspilt cups. If someone else, a friend or family member rather than you had been disappointed, had failed, would you berate them for days on end? No? Then don't do it to yourself either. Balance. Ok, you win some, you lose some. This was a lose. Fair enough. I'll keep some lessons in mind for next time, and otherwise shrug, alright, pick myself up and try my hand at something else. So it goes.

2012 Year Card

So, just out of idle intellectual curiosity, decided to calculate my personal year card for 2012, plus 2011 while I was at it, since that year is over now, to see how applicable it in fact was. Pretty simple really, add your day and month of birth to the year in question and voila, there be your card for that year.

It turns out that my year card for 2011 was the Wheel of Fortune - you know, the card that speaks of life's ups and downs, fortunes changing for the worse, then for the better again...in this sense, describes the year pretty well for me on a micro level. I had some really good experiences, and some really difficult times as well. Some experiences were even kind of both, in different ways. This card also speaks a lot about changes - like, major life changes - and again, as I've mentioned in previous posts here, that way very much a 2011 thing. In fact, on my personal journal I kind of wrote out a list of major things that happened in 2011 for me and yeah, there were a lot of moves, shifts, new things happening, trying or doing things for the very first time. I ended the year in a different city, in a new school, in a different job, in a different social situation, with a whole list of new things I'd done, compared to the begining of the year. Mentally too, though less drastically, I think it was a year of some shifting 'wheel-turning' as it were, so yes. I can totally see this as being an appropriate card to describe 2011, in retrospect.

Which brings us to 2012. The year card for this new year is apparently Justice.

So what exactly should I take this to mean, then? Well, Justice is really in a lot of ways a card that speaks to balance, equilibrium, getting things the way they should be and maintaining that. It's objective right, fairness - cold logic. The logic of the sword, sharp and intellectual and unyeilding. It's about deferring to yes, this the right, objectively so, rather than whatever you may feel about the matter. It's connected to society, the people around you, morals as influenced by your surroundings rather than only your own beliefs. It's about doing right - not being judged for it afterwards, really (that's Judgement) but the actual act of DOING it...Setting things right according to objective standards...

This does make a certain sense. There are areas in my life where my approach has certainly been less than balance. See, I have a remarkable ability to be very fair and understanding and empathtic towards other people, and very harsh, judgemental, illogical in my approach to myself, my own actions. There are reasons for that, which this isn't the place for getting into, but suffice to say this is an area that I could very much benefit from working on. I like the objectivity and logic aspect of this especially. I am, as I often state, and INTP. I like logic very much. Many of my actions are dictated by it, and in general I find that doing the thing I know is logical rather than the thing I feel like doing tends to be for the best. So in broad strokes - do that more. Try to bring more balance, more fairness to myself, more equilibrium into my life.

Trying to think too, what this card might mean more externally. I can't imagine it's really a reference to any legal matters, as there are none of those in my life right now (though, I guess, you never know). I suppose again, more proper balance in school, work, social relationships...

A year of...gradual, steady improvement and not too many dramatic changes or shocks, inshallah.

(Incidentally, the last time I had a Justice year was apparently 2003. I was still pretty young then, but I very much remember that as a pretty craptastic year where a lot of things went to hell, so to speak, especially personally/mentally. So uh, I suppose that was a year in which balance was in the forefront for its lack?) In any case, yeah, inshallah in 2012 there will be plenty, not dearth :]

Exercise 3:1 from "21 Ways to Read a Tarot Card"

I like Mary K. Greer's books. Find them to be quite interesting and helpful. Tarot Reversals, for example, has turned into my all purpose go to reference, for reversals as well as upright meanings, for being so succinctly thorough. I got 21 Ways to Read a Tarot Card sometime last year, as it seemed like great way to expand interaction with cards, challenge the mind, etc. Haven't had the time/attention span to really work with it yet, though. So I figure, with this blog and all, why not work on a few exercises from it here now and then. In no particular order....

Decided to do the Activity 3:1 exercise from the 3rd section/step of the book, Emotions. A summed up version of the directions, from Aeclectic:

What emotions are evoked with this card that we have each chosen? First, describe the emotions and feelings on the card for the character(s) involved and the environment they are within. Second, repeat this step but put your description in the "first person." Third, relate a personal and real-life situation which involved similar feelings and qualities which you have just described.

It's hot. Desert-time. Rocky and barren, not unbearable but dry and hot, monotonous plains of dust stretching out as far as the eye can see... But she isn't looking at all that. She isn't paying any of that any mind. No, she stands here, next to that little somehow still sprouting up plant. New life, new ideas, and yes so it is. Look at the way her cheeks color, blush. Look at how she stares at that flame, watches in burn with possibility, with ideas. Her body language- she wants to grab at it and run, she wants to do something with it, she knows that power it has, what it represents for her, empowerment. Yes, empowerment. This is a girl that wants to go out into the world and do something, and now she can.

Isn't it dazzling? Yes, watching the flames cackle and dance and the staff burn, burn, dangerous a little perhaps sure but isn't it just...amazing? Look at it there, in my hand. Mine to grasp to hold look at that light, that heat, that energy. There's something in it for me. I can do something now. Something creative, something original, something important. I want to, I've always wanted to but how, how can I, I'd ask, crawling through this dust, the hills, so much more the same and then I find this, illumination, my sign. So many ideas spinning madly around in my head, so-called implausible` dreams, but now I can choose one of them, something specific, and do it. I can feel the power of possibility in my hands. I'm excited, impatient, I want to run and jump and scream and go do something right now, right this very second, but I know that even with the burning staff it doesn't work like that, not really. So, with poise, I grab it, barely contained energy, excitement. It is time now, yes.

And it occurs to me, that for all my grumbling sometimes about life is pointless and lack of energy/motivation and whatever, I really do nonetheless have a tendency to be a bit... adventurous. Idea wise moreso - sometimes they are less realistic ones, such as my current obsession with "running away to Australia" but...well. That moment of realizing that of all the vague and jumbled idealistic ideas running through brain one or two are hey, actually concrete and doable and what's more, you can get to trying to do them RIGHT NOW. Recent examples? Deciding on a kind of whim to apply to take GRE, and actually doing well, and applying to grad schools, and actually getting into some, and figuring out how to finance that, and finding an apartment, and actually going! Deciding to take a cousin up on offer to visit her in Sweden, actually making plans and visiting Sweden and Poland and even seeing a bit of Copenhagen. Mentioning to another cousin in Stockholm that I wanted to go skydiving, and her saying are you serious and me saying yes and actually GOING AND DOING IT AND HAVING AN AMAZING TIME. Deciding I wanted a tattoo and finding a design and researching a tattoo place and walking there and getting it done because I wanted to and could. And even the creative process of schoolwork, that moment of realizing I DO know what to write for that essay, and getting it now in an outline and writing a rough draft and that haha progress I can do this feeling. 

Life adventures, intellectual adventures, starting new things. Not letting other people, or your own issues or hang ups, hold you back.

drawing for the day/extrapolated life lesson

I was pretty sure of what I wanted to do today, but after hearing a certain comment from someone, did start wondering just a bit. So decided to draw a few cards this morning, before going out and about with my day. There was two ways I thought to interpret these, so decided to see how the day played out, and I did, and afterwards I have this to say...

Life is short, relatively speaking. Years when you are healthy enough and mobile and free are even briefer. If there is something you want to do, something you know is within your abilities and means, something that you know will make you happier, more fulfilled, more satisfied with yourself or with life...go for it. Just do it. Do what you need to do - save up, make the plans, do the legwork, gather up the courage. If you can imagine it, if you can get it down to tangible specifics...just do it.

Forget what people might say to you, even people you are close to, people you care about. If you know it doesn't actually HURT other people, and you know that YOU will like it, YOU will be happy with it...just do it. Forget about potential conflict. Forget about what people may think of you, judgement, disapproval. Life is short, and living it to please others is not worth the sacrifice if doing so makes you unhappy. Life is short, and it can be difficult and miserable and trying...don't give up so easily on things that make it better for you.

If you can imagine it, dream it, and if you can conceptualize those dreams into a tangible, realistically obtainable reality...just do it. Don't push it off until later, until one day, until maybe this or maybe that...sometimes it really is better to just apologize afterwards than to ask permission beforehand. Especially if the pleasure it brings you far outweighs, objectively speaking, the displeasure it may cause anyone else. People who might judge your choices aren't living in your skin. You are. If it will fulfill you, just do it.

Just do it, and enjoy it. Enjoy every moment of the experience. Hang onto that feeling. Hang onto it afterwards, and let the words of others, if they really do come, slide off of you. Be polite of course, be nice. If you don't like conflict, perhaps even be discreet so as to avoid it. Hang onto that feeling, let it fill your soul, and it will be worth it.