Tarot Reading for Today

Six of Cups  The intellect sifts out what is true; the will reaches out for what is good.  But there is a third dimension to reality: Beauty.  Our whole being resonates with what is beautiful.  When we experience beauty, we start to speak about emotions, and the more we are touched on an emotional level, the more we seek to celebrate the experience, and it’s there that we begin to create ritual.  Benedictine Monk David Steindl-Rast writes that all rituals have to do with, and celebrate, belonging.

The tenderness of the image on the Six of Cups cards tells a secret.  

What if, all I’m trying to do here is to create rituals that have the potential to mark, preserve, and facilitate a return to emotional experiences that are sacred to us?

To feel safe is sacred.  

To be soothed is sacred.

I am a lover of beauty and belonging.  I am a lover of deep emotional resonance.  I am just trying to recall some sacred feeling.  

I am exploring new ways to recall those feelings – and new rituals for feeling safe and soothed.

Page of Wands: Childlike Enthusiasm, Innocence, Wonder, Youth.  Knowing absolutely what I like and don’t like.  According to James Hillman (along with Bert Hellinger): We each come into the world with a calling.

There is something (apart from nature/nurture) unique about each of us – a part of our being that is connected to our “daemon,” which was similar to the Roman concept of genius: Something that you are, that you have, that is not the same as the personality you think you are.

Mythologist Martin Shaw: as adults, too many of us have become “heavily defended against experiences of our own beauty.”

What do I love? 

What captivates my attention?

What grips me?

What lights me up?  What claims me?

Invitation to reconnect with something raw and original within us, something many of us relinquish as we cross the threshold into adulthood.

My specific calling is never far from reach.

Wands show me how to protect the spark and keep it safe so that it can warm me, and also warm whole villages.

Nine of Cups 

Values Clarification.  If I’m going to do the hard work of change, what will make it worth it?  A life compass.  Am I moving toward or away from what is precious?

Knowing what you want is deceptively challenging.  

Exploring what we desire can be hard because:

1. Often the physical reality of our lives doesn’t line up with what we desire.
   • To accept what we want requires us also to accept the pain of not having it.
2. Identifying what’s personally meaningful and articulating desires from that place is often in and of itself a whole healing process.
3. Making a wish sounds like fun until you realize you have no idea what you want.  Until you realize you’re not even sure what it feels like to truly want something and are not convinced you’d know it if you felt it.  This experience of finding a void where a wish ought to be can be profoundly distressing.
4. Not knowing what you want can bring up shame.  “I’m 60 years old.  I should know who I am by now.”

Making a wish might be hard because:

1. Your feelings were constantly invalidated, so you don’t trust your own sense of what you like and long for.
2. You’ve experienced a lot of frustration trying to get your needs met in life, which makes it difficult to want to try.  Feeling hopeless about or quickly shutting down anything you have an inkling of really wanting is how you’ve learned to feel safe.
3. The people you relied on in childhood were unpredictable or erratic, so you developed the skill of scanning and tending to other people’s needs at the expense of your own needs as being necessarily dictated by the needs of others, so it’s hard to untangle them.
4. You developed a protective strategy commonly known as perfectionism, which means you organize your life around avoiding contact with any potential indications of being inadequate, defective, or unlovable.  Wishing for or trying new things is a direct threat to that defense.
5. When you were growing up, no one around you had any coping skills, so you didn’t get any, either, and instead you carry an intense fear of the feelings that come with wanting something and not getting it. Fused with a belief that those feelings are unmanageable, the stakes of having a true wish are simply too high.
6. A heart’s desire sprouts from a sense of self that’s sturdy enough to have preferences independent of external factors.

There are so many factors that go into the maturation of a budding sense of self, and probably infinite ways to botch it, so even though adolescence is technically the time when we are “supposed” to be doing the work of figuring out who we are and what we like, there are enormous swaths of us doing it in all decades of life.  And we’re often doing it not just once but over and over again as the conditions of our lives change, and with them, our wants and needs.

Sometimes, learning to make a good wish is the work.

Credit goes to Jessica Dore, author of Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-care, Acceptance and Growth