The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, July 24, 2011

Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

When you feel trapped and overwhelmed by your thoughts and feelings, know that support is there for you. It is a sense of self that emanates from within, and which connects you to everything and everyone else. You are doing your best; and your best is good enough.

How many times have we had the Six of Wands in our Weekend Tarot Reading? Enough for it to be markedly significant — to have our attention drawn to it for more than a fleeting moment.

I feel that this is a message to us: that in spite of everything that we might believe, or that we might look at to prove otherwise, we are doing well. In fact, we are doing our very best; and it is good enough. We are good enough. Apart from the people in the background in the Six of Wands, the main figures in all three cards are alone. This doesn’t mean that we sit at the centre of the universe, and that nothing else matters. Rather, it speaks of a period where we are withdrawn from the world while we are called to deal with our inner lives.

The Six of Wands is about recognition for something — although even here a sense of separateness is palpable: of the faces we can just about see in the small crowd flanking him, only one seems to be directed towards the rider. It’s not that they have no interest in what he is doing. It just seems that there are other things that are demanding their attention. It is the rider’s own comportment that suggests a mood of celebration more than anything else. Yes, the wands around him are raised; yes, the skies are blue and the colours bright. Yes, there is acknowledgement from an outside source — otherwise there would be no need for a parade in the first place. However, if we look at the rider, it is he who embodies a sense of victory: he sits upright on his horse, chest out, shoulders back; he is the one who bears two laurel wreaths; it is on his wand that the red ribbon is tied.

The outward support is evident, and it feels important. What feels more important is the esteem that the figure has for himself. It is a consciousness that starts with him. This is not self-aggrandizing braggadocio. It is self-regard, dignity, a holding of power. These are the tools that will accompany him and stand him in good stead through the fog and self-absorbed pain of the Nine of Swords and the Five of Cups.

The Nine of Swords is no stranger to these pages either. I find it interesting that in both it and the Five of Cups, the figure has his head lowered, and is holding it in his hands in the Swords. There is no outward gaze. The suffering that seems so palpable in each card holds the figure in its thrall — so much so, that with his current perspective he will struggle to see anything clearly. In the Nine of Swords, the sharp blades of his thoughts hang behind him as if interfering with his mind. They seem to be all that is there and all that matters to him.

If he were to open his hands just a crack, however, he would be able to look down and see the cover that lies over his legs, blanketing him. It contains a mixture of roses — love, compassion, life — and the symbols of astrology that can act as a guiding principle and which connect us to the larger patterns of life and to the cosmos. When we understand this — that all life is connected — then we are no longer alone in a dark room with our thoughts: we are coursing with life-blood that beats through our bodies, the rhythm of which pulses in time with the rhythm of the universe, something that we can access when we liberate ourselves from what binds our minds.

There is a similar scenario in the Five of Cups, although this time the pain is emotional. From a therapeutic point of view, this is often seen as progress: where intellectual pain — the idea of pain — is replaced by raw feeling. The black background in the Nine of Swords is now cloaked around the figure: he wears it rather than its simply being a backdrop to his experience. It has become, in essence, a part of him even while it can be removed: it is not his true self — it might just feel very much like it. And it is heavy to wear. His shoulders hunch under its weight, his focus fixed downward at the three overturned cups at his feet. There is some ease from the Swords where he could see nothing but the insides of his hands; but his perspective is still limited. What he sees are the spilled contents of something that he held dear.

What he does not yet see is the river flowing past him. Unlike the contents of his cups, the water is alive, part of a larger system that replenishes it, able to support life around it. He doesn’t see the bridge over the water leading to a building surrounded by trees, which could supply him with shelter and nourishment. And he doesn’t see the two remaining cups behind him, standing there by his side like guardian angels, quietly waiting for him to turn around and notice them. Three cups might no longer be viable, but there are two left. Two cups; the Two of Cups; love in partnership, a union of polarities.

And so I move back to the tools offered by the Six of Wands: self-regard, dignity, a holding of power. Yes, it is these tools that are there for us to retrieve and to apply when our thoughts block us, when our emotions over loss bring us to a standstill. Then, remembering who it is that we are and what we are capable of, we can lower our hands from our eyes and turn our attention to what has been there all along. You are, indeed, worthy of acknowledgement — especially your own.