{"id":45642,"date":"2011-09-18T12:56:04","date_gmt":"2011-09-18T16:56:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=45642"},"modified":"2011-09-18T12:56:04","modified_gmt":"2011-09-18T16:56:04","slug":"the-weekend-tarot-reading-sunday-september-18-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/reading-tarot\/the-weekend-tarot-reading-sunday-september-18-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, September 18, 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

By Sarah Taylor<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Love is asking us to work with it — this is this week’s message, clear and simple as it is. It is offered to us, so that we can align with it and bring it into this world, with the understanding that everything has its season, but that true love is unchanging and limitless.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Empress, The Star, Ace of Cups from the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck. Click on the image for a larger version.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first thing that I feel when looking at this reading is that it is a very feminine spread. It also feels important to keep in mind from the outset that the idea of feminine<\/em> is something that everyone holds within them, no matter their gender. There is nothing exclusive about this reading. On the contrary, it is inclusive, expansive, expressive.<\/p>\n

The first card we come to, moving from left to right, is The Empress. She is the counterpart to The Emperor — the yin to his yang, if you will — who consorts with him to create balance. Whereas the world of The Emperor is the world of action, battle and single-mindedness, the world that The Empress inhabits is one of receptivity, and it is cyclical. The Empress understands that the rules of engagement that we have with the world and with each other can only carry us so far, and that there comes a time when we learn that letting go and moving with a greater understanding of the underlying rhythm of life can open us up to mysteries far beyond what we know with our five senses. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I see this sense of opening in her body language: She is at ease, subtly inclined, side- (as opposed to head-) on, her legs slightly apart — her position emphasised by her left hand resting on her left knee. However, she is far from submissive. Her gaze meets ours fully, and in her right hand she holds up a sceptre. This is her domain, and she is intimately acquainted with its workings.<\/p>\n

Unlike The Empress, who is very much a part of physical reality, the female figure in The Star bridges the world and the heavens. The planes of the top half of her body move in line with the stars that curve down from the sky above her. Her left knee rests on the land, her right foot seems to sit on top of the water. She belongs to neither. She is otherworldly. I see her nudity as testament to this: She has no need of the vestments with which we clothe ourselves to hide our shame and to shape our identities. She is unselfconscious; there is no ‘self’ to be conscious about. She is flow, pure and simple.<\/p>\n

Third, we move to the Ace of Cups: the Holy Grail. From it, water springs in five streams into the lake underneath. These five streams are echoed in The Star; they are what the figure in The Star is working with. As with all the Aces, the cup is brought by a hand that emanates from a cloud. It is the hand of the creator, however you choose to understand him\/her\/it. Nothing feeds the cup because the cup is source itself, self-replenishing, infinite. The Ace of Cups is the divine feminine as container.<\/p>\n

And so, moving back from right to left, we move with the idea of birth. With the Ace we witness pure potential before life draws its first breath; it is the receptacle for the seed of life, offered to us unconditionally. Next, in The Star, we enter the birth canal, enabling what is given in the Ace to be brought into being, into consciousness. Finally, in The Empress, we are born into a world of polarity, where both life and death have their place, but where the purity of what is coming through can still be expressed in these rhythms.<\/p>\n

And what is being brought through? Love. All-encompassing love, or agape<\/em> love. This is love expressed in service to something greater than we are. The figure in The Star bows at the feet of The Empress, and in this gesture I am reminded of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. What is given is received; what is received is given. Look how the pool of water at the bottom of the cascade in The Empress feeds into the pool into which the cup in the right hand of the figure of The Star pours. Look how the cup in the left hand pours seemingly onto the ground — and yet rivulets feed back into the pool at her feet, and into the body of water beneath the Ace of Cups.<\/p>\n

Notice, also, how water pours from both cups in The Star where we might typically expect one to be giving water, while one receives it. It might seem strange, but then this is the nature of love. It cannot be used up. In fact, the more that is given, the more there is.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is an invitation to us to see love differently from how we are often used to seeing it: not as a finite resource that we can mete out, control, or that we can turn on and off. Rather, as an infinite, unchanging energy that we can embody right here, right now, where we are; which is with us through growth and decline, entrances and exits; which asks nothing of us in return, but which could enrich our own lives beyond imagining.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 Love is … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":470,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[183],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45642"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/470"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}