{"id":54887,"date":"2012-03-25T13:26:32","date_gmt":"2012-03-25T17:26:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=54887"},"modified":"2012-03-25T17:14:16","modified_gmt":"2012-03-25T21:14:16","slug":"the-weekend-tarot-reading-sunday-march-25-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/reading-tarot\/the-weekend-tarot-reading-sunday-march-25-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, March 25, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Sarah Taylor<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

This week, we have three minor arcana cards in our reading: the Three of Cups, Two of Wands, and Eight of Swords. The first thing that this tells us is that we are in the realm of the quotidian<\/em>. This doesn’t mean that the reading can be construed as less important than those that contain major arcana or court cards, like last week’s reading<\/a>. Rather, it means that the focus is on the practical steps that overlay our psychological, emotional and spiritual development. And this reading is nothing if not practical.<\/p>\n

\"Three<\/a>
Three of Cups, Two of Wands, Eight of Swords from the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck. Click on the image for a larger version.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Its message to us? We can either choose to stay trapped, perhaps seeing ourselves as victims of circumstance, or we can free ourselves to dance with life<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Three of Cups and the Eight of Swords represent two creative choices, the Two of Wands representing the ‘fulcrum’ between each choice, each of the wands in visual association to its adjacent card. The Twos in tarot also denote duality, and duality is experienced through contrast<\/em>. And here there are two contrasting states: heart, mind; abundance, barrenness; participation, isolation.<\/p>\n

Unlike The Hanged Man, where we are ‘strung up’ for a period of time without the option of escape, the Eight of Swords puts the power in the figure’s hands: her bonds are pretty flimsy, and if she moved enough, she would be able to free herself from them, remove her blindfold, and see that the swords are neither being brandished by adversaries, nor are they encircling her completely. Water lies in shallow puddles by her feet; the emotions are not being engaged — there is no connection to heart. Instead, what feel closer are her thoughts, what she believes, where she elects to focus her mind.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the Three of Cups, we encounter the dance with life that I mentioned in the opening paragraphs. This is a card that, on the surface, speaks of joy — but I feel there is a deeper meaning to the idea of ‘joy’ in the context of this reading. How about we substitute the word ‘joy’ with ‘exaltation’, which is about an elevation of feeling rather than one where the meaning is narrowed to a sense of pleasure. When it feels like things are not going our way — worse, when life offers us a raw blade — we have the opportunity to view life from an elevated perspective.<\/p>\n

Amanda Painter wrote this comment on an article on the Threes in tarot<\/a> in 2010:<\/p>\n

the threes seemed to be bearing this out perfectly (even the three of wands carries the tension\/apprehension of releasing the ships to the wide world, fate unknown) except for the three of cups.<\/p>\n

“harmony?!” i thought. “harmony doesn\u2019t jive with the tension theory!”<\/p>\n

and then i thought of music: of three-part harmony, specifically. that seems a more functional equivalent to the three of cups. it\u2019s not tension in a negative sense, but a functional tension akin perhaps to the tension that makes a triangle a stable geometric shape.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Maybe it is the stability offered to us by the Three of Cups that can support us more than anything else in times when we feel we are falling — or the surrender to a rhythm that might not make sense to our ears, but which is there nonetheless. In joining the dance, we rise above our circumstances and open ourselves to the possibility that there is an organising principle that for the most part remains hidden from us, glimpsed in moments and sensed through the eyes of our intuition.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the reading today is being quite prescriptive as to which of the two outside cards we are being directed to: the figure in the Two of Wands is turning his back on the Eight of Swords while holding the world up to the Three of Cups. Not that it wasn’t a no-brainer to start with, but the presence of the Two of Wands serves as an emphasis: this isn’t a ‘both\/and’; it’s an ‘either\/or’, because we cannot be in both states at the same time. We either dance with life, or we resist it; we either trust and move with the rhythm, or we become stuck; we either see ourselves as helpless and alone, or we see ourselves as surrounded by support. We choose the former and we become active participants in the shaping of our experience of the world — and, by extension, the shaping of the world itself.<\/p>\n

“It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.”<\/em>
\n“What you resist, persists.”<\/em><\/p>\n

— Carl Jung<\/em><\/p>\n

“The moment I let go of it was the moment<\/em>
\n I got more than I could handle.<\/em>
\n The moment I jumped off of it<\/em>
\n Was the moment that I touched down.”<\/em><\/p>\n

— Alanis Morissette, Thank U<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Sarah Taylor This week, we have three minor arcana cards in our reading: the Three of Cups, Two of Wands, and Eight of Swords. The first thing that this tells us is that we are in the realm of the quotidian. This doesn’t mean that the reading can be construed as less important than those … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":470,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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\/54887"}],"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=54887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54887\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}