{"id":62624,"date":"2012-12-16T14:20:17","date_gmt":"2012-12-16T19:20:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=62624"},"modified":"2012-12-16T14:33:53","modified_gmt":"2012-12-16T19:33:53","slug":"the-weekend-tarot-reading-sunday-december-16-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/reading-tarot\/the-weekend-tarot-reading-sunday-december-16-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, December 16, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

In the aftermath of the Connecticut shooting, I had felt that I didn’t want to do a tarot reading. It didn’t feel like something that I could ignore or write around; it would have been the elephant in the living room. Definitely my living room, anyway. I cannot begin to imagine, or believe that I can relate to, being someone who has lost a son, or a daughter, or a mother, a sister, a cousin, a nephew or niece. But as the mother of a near-six-year-old, the grief cut deeper than usual. <\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Lovers, Seven of Pentacles, The Fool from the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck, created by A E Waite and painted by Pamela Colman Smith. Click on the image for a larger version.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It seemed wrong to pretend that what had happened, had not. I wrote to Eric letting him know that I didn’t feel up to writing today. Eric wrote back and suggested that not only do I write, but I write about the incident itself.<\/p>\n

And so this is what I am going to do, bearing in mind that the only scant, painfully limited power I have is to reach my heart out to those I do not know. As woman, mother, human being, that is all I have. But I also work with the understanding that the tarot offers something more if we feel we want to accept it — something that is connected to a sense of depth and belonging that can lift us up and hold us in a way that nothing else can. And we need not choose to accept it. The choice is ours entirely; the cards are there if we need them.<\/p>\n

Therefore, this weekend’s reading is going to be succinct. It will say as much as it needs to say, and I hope that my words can do it some justice.<\/p>\n

I drew three cards: the current situation<\/em> at centre; at left, what we bring into this<\/em>; at right, what we take away from this<\/em>. They were surprising to me in some respects — especially the card on the left — but I come away from the reading with a sense of wisdom that challenged what I thought would be the ‘right’ cards, what I had assumed would show me the path to justice. No. We are all in this together.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The current situation is marked by the Seven of Pentacles. This card describes a striving against all odds, in a dry and uninviting environment, where we tend to something that is growing, but which demands our vigilance and care. <\/p>\n

It is up to us entirely: we cannot assume that someone else is there to help us. The figure is youthful. He is not dressed richly: this is a time of toil and trial. He cannot rest on his laurels (he’s trying to grow them!). The foliage of the vine before him is in parts green and fertile, in others brown and teetering on the edge of life. The phrase that comes to me while writing — not an unfamiliar phrase: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.” (John 15:1)<\/p>\n

What does not work is seared away through heat; what works, lasts. But there is hope; there is harvest. The single pentacle at the young man’s feet is proof of this. Life grows in the most desolate and uninviting of places. Life endures in spite of loss. When we tend to the true vine, we are in the garden of the Father. Loss can bring us closer to truth; loss brings us closer to Him. These words by themselves might be glib. It is the experiencing of them through the lens of our lives that gives them a meaning that has depth and which offers us more than empty words. We tend to the fragility of what grows inside, and we connect with that meaning.<\/p>\n

What we bring into these circumstances is The Lovers. We cannot separate ourselves from the other. We are in relationship to everything that feels opposite to us. We are united under a force that accepts the darkest in us along with the light. In The Lovers, we are able to look across at what is our counterpart and find in that a sense of love. <\/p>\n

It also offers us a choice — which part of love do we choose to express as a result? How are we in relationship to others? Where is it that we can hold space for the very things that might make us recoil in other circumstances? Where are we being shown our obligations as humans? And by ‘obligation’ I mean something that is inevitable: we can choose to ignore it, to look away, to pretend that there is no one there in front of us that mirrors what we are not able to see in ourselves.<\/p>\n

The Lovers is the first card of the major arcana that describes the state of polarity. In The Lovers, we finally meet with contrast. This contrast is both beautiful and terrifying — it holds everything that we have thus far failed to acknowledge in ourselves. And yet this union is blessed: the angel above says no less. The angel’s hair embodies both flame and foliage: it is a synthesis of both. We are synthesis expressed as separateness, and that can feel both divine and demonic. What do we all bring to our present experience? What do we decide to look at? What can we not look at?<\/p>\n

And finally, The Fool. A stepping out into the unknown. I read The Fool two ways. The first is The Fool who remembers nothing, who reverts to a childlike state of no responsibility, who starts again — only to follow a path that leads to a destination that has different details but the same outcome. The cycle is repeated without significant change. And there is nothing wrong with that. <\/p>\n

The other is The Fool where we step out again on a journey in which we bring enough with us in our handkerchiefs to equip us to walk a new path. Yes, we will meet The Lovers again. And the Seven of Pentacles. We always do. But if life affords us the gift of choice — and that is what is laid out before us now — which gift will we choose next time?<\/p>\n

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free\u00a0tarot spread generator<\/a>\u00a0using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread.\u00a0This article<\/a>\u00a0explains how to use the spread.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Sarah Taylor In the aftermath of the Connecticut shooting, I had felt that I didn’t want to do a tarot reading. It didn’t feel like something that I could ignore or write around; it would have been the elephant in the living room. Definitely my living room, anyway. I cannot begin to imagine, or believe … 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\/62624"}],"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=62624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62624\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}