New Year’s Tarot Challenge
My New Year’s Day post was shaping up to be about the challenges of year long readings. After a few paragraphs, I took a deep breath. While everything I had written was true - and I’ll happily share it with you some other time - writing about the mechanics of reading and the limits of some forms left me feeling mechanical and limited. And while I do my own year long inquiries on my birthday, this is the day when we’ve all agreed - Gregorianly - to start fresh. Couldn’t I come up with something fresh to write ?
When I started teaching Tarot classes, I expanded my collection of decks, so I shuffled through my wicker basket for a seldom used deck and picked the Zerner-Farber. All the cards were originally done in fabric and other fibers with generous stitching and beading to create resplendent images, many unique in their interpretation. I shuffled, I looked through the deck and I thought not - what do I really want to know, but what do my readers and my clients - if they’re reading - really want to know this year ? That I can answer. In this post.
Because the answer had to be universal not individual, I laid The World on my table. To keep things simple and familiar, I decided to use an age old format, the year by month as a circle around the center card. And then I did something I never ever do, I took all the minor arcana and court cards and put them aside. Because if you’re going to enter uncharted territory why not go all the way ? Given the parameters, the question became apparent (and paradoxically the answer.)
In each month of 2007, where is the space for the most growth ?
We begin at the twelve o-clock position, that would be midnight last night with the month of January, brought to us by The Devil Reversed, an apt card for all of us makers of New Year’s Resolutions. We can’t make resolutions without looking long and hard at what is working and what is not. Making a resolution means we want to change something that we believe is in our power to change and that means it was always in our power to change and up until this moment we haven’t. Very few realizations leave us so vulnerable, so bare and naked and tender before ourselves and before others if we choose to share our struggle with them. In the Zerner Farber deck The Devil is a mask and when the card is reversed and the mask is removed we see all the ways our flaw caused us or others stress or pain or inconvenience. We are determined to remedy this. But change one thing and we change everything. Resolutions and vows can become quickly overwhelming, but instead of treating ourselves as vulnerable and tender and in need of encouragement, we berate ourselves for the failure to change enough quickly enough or consistently enough. Where we can grow this January with The Devil Reversed is recognizing that forgiveness is the friend not the enemy of resolve.
February is ruled by The Emperor, the builder of foundations. The Emperor is all the laws of the father, social contracts, government of nations and countries and counties but also families. I am always reminded of that archaic slang of “governor” for “father”. When The Emperor appears we are called to assume authority and responsibility. If we don’t like the way our government behaves, if we don’t like the way we interact with our families, then we have to act change the existing laws and the unspoken rules. February is a short month, so we probably cannot end poverty of resources or emotions in every venue in those 28 days, but we can define what contracts serve us and others best and which serve us poorly. February is the last of the comtemplative months before we leave our hearths for longer sunnier days. The creations of the Spring and Summer will be stronger if we begin with a firm foundation in what we will and will not do.
March brings Spring and Spring brings The Empress, the awakening of the earth. Imagination and vision becomes manifest with the flowers. Where I grew up March is the months that smells of the dirt turned by the plow. The Empress demands we get out of heads and into our bodies as the increasing sun calls us out of our houses. March looks easy. We can grow and expand in March by giving reign to what we love.
The Star graces April. Our intuition guides us. Coincidences, synchronicity, a song stuck in our head. The Star is clarity in the midst of the confusion. Clarity is not always directive. Quite often the experience of The Star is one of recognition not decision. We can navigate by The Star as our ancestors navigated by the stars, but the drawing of the chart is not the making of the voyage.
In May, Judgement Reversed brings us down to earth and reminds us that while we are the same stuff as the stars, we are also the same stuff as our next door neighbor and the person who cut us off in traffic. Our vision of our work here on this earth may be the things of which Nobel Prizes are made, but in May it’s time to recognize our limits as well as our talents and get down to the work of what we can do instead of what we can imagine. There are always fine things to be done, in our homes and our offices, in our classrooms and communities. The call to responsibility is daily and in the details and the divine is expressed in each and every one of us. At the root of all great and small callings is the remembrance of that shown here in a giant hand reaching up from beneath green rolling hills and the hand of an angel reaching down to touch those same hills.
Under The Moon in June we’ll spoon and croon - deep in our subconscious where both castles and dragons lie. I never see The Moon that I don’t advise keeping a dream journal and mining the rich stories we tell in our sleep for a better understanding of our waking world. With The Star in April and The Moon in June, the crops sown this season are within us more than without us.
One of the things I like about the Zerner Farber deck is the lack of crayfish or lobster on The Moon. While The Moon is associated with the astrological sign Cancer, crabs are not crayfish or lobsters and I always find the shellfish imagery more confusing than naught. This Moon cards gives us a crescent moon shedding a tear and surrounded by wispy clouds while a girl looks to a manor in the distance and her dog looks away from it.
And with that, I am concluding the first six months of the year 2007. I didn’t expect one of the challenges of this challenge to be staying awake long enough to write it. Or starting a fire, which I also failed to do three times in the midst of the composition.