So… I like to draw cards… I’ve been pulling from tarot decks for more years than I care to remember, but for almost a year now, I have been drawing cards in the more literal sense, to find out what they mean to me. Occasionally, cards come to visit me… the images just pop to mind and hang in the air for me to see. During the last few weeks or maybe longer I have had frequent visits from the 5 of Cups.
Now this particular 5 of Cups offers sage advice about floating above emotional weather and spying your magical treasure within… If you want to read that more eloquently put, then I suggest you go visit http://jordanhoggard.wordpress.com/ … I won’t tell you where to look… That place is way more fun when you get lost and find your own stuff 🙂
So… I’ve had the old 5 of C flap by frequently and each time, I’ve thought – you know what? GO AWAY!!!
yeah, yeah, yeah… that’s all great… But life is hitting me with wave after wave at the moment and it is less the size and more the frequency that takes my breath away… and right now… I feel like I am drowning and the only reason that seagull has shown up, is to sh*t in my eye if I look up… Don’t talk to me of bloody treasure… No! Not even in a pirate voice!
Then I thought – you know what Karen? This is not like you… Sit down! Get grounded! Plant your fat ass on the grass and feel the sun on your face…
Then I saw the 5 of C again… Though this time I LOL because it occurs to me that I feel as though I am drowning metaphorically, and now I pause… I recall 5 times where I thought I was drowning physically… Ok… Let’s get those cards out and see what I find…
So there sits the 5 of C to help me find my treasure and then a card for each time I’ve found myself under water…
So… the edited highlights of my five misadventures…
VIII – Justice… or… a goat’s gonna do what a goat’s gonna do…
So this is when I landed up or should that be down? in a duck pond. I don’t know whether or not goats are familiar with the expression ‘never bite the hand that feeds you’? But seems they have no morals whatsoever with regards to headbutting wee girls who can’t swim…
One minute I’m happy in the sun, next I’m sinking fast in inky black… in a very calm and peaceful fashion of …. oh… this is new…hey! it’s quiet! ooooooh it’s dark…hey… I’m sinking…sinking… whoa!!!! somebody has grabbed me! up! up! up!!
Ok… not my time to go…
X The Wheel… or… Good Old St Agnes…
So… this finds me in Cornwall in a little bay called St Agnes – which is a bit of a surfer’s paradise and me being the sort never to think things through further than hey! that sounds like a good idea… well of course I’m going to say yes when someone asks me if I want to play on their surfboard 😀 Because in my little mind – if you can imagine something, then of course you can do it… Learning? Practice? Experience? What’s that then?
So… one minute I’m trying to scramble up onto a board… next… whirling and swirling caught in waves and no sense of what is up or down… and at first I’m thrashing about but then I’m lost in the colours of how many blues? and look at all these pretty weeds… hey! I’m a tiny bead in a kaleidoscope … it’s pretty cool here…. OUCH!!! I’m suddenly rudely spewed onto the pebbly beach. Other people were much more panicked than I was, so I’m guessing I got lucky there.
The 8 of Wands… or… I’ll give you a punchline…
Now this happened in what you would assume to be the relative safety of a public swimming pool, but there’s no accounting for other people’s ideas of what constitutes fun…
So… I’m swimming along minding my own business and a girl dive bombs me. She managed to land and straddle my shoulders and I’m sinking to the bottom with some bird’s thigh wrapped around my face, which although that may be some people’s idea of heaven, I can assure you, in that time and place, for me, it was less than fun. I hit the bottom with my knees and start thrashing in all directions and eventually I’ve freed myself of her and I’m standing up and facing her and I’m so fueled with adrenalin… BAM!! I slap her a good one with my right… She said… GOD!!!! I’m only playing!!! Where’s your sense of humour? and laughs. I says…oh… OK… you want to hear something really funny? I have a joke but I only remember the punchline…
She says – give me the punchline…
BAM!!!! I slap her with my left…
III The Empress… or… Beware of Greeks bearing gifts…
I’m going to gloss right over this one… Suffice to say Mediterranean sea, muscly tanned man with misplaced sense of humour… Skip to an irate 20 year old me rearing myself to my full height of 5’2″ and shaking various parts of anatomy, and booming – For God’s sake MAN! How do you confuse this, with one of the boys from your water polo team… Argghhhh!! Treat me like a Goddess!!!
The 9 of Wands…or… I’m not as daft as I thought…
Fingers crossed, this is the final encounter with water for me…
Again, I skipped merrily along with what I imagined to be a good idea… This time windsurfing 😀 I have no idea what made me think I’d enjoy that! So I go along with a whole group of people and we do a dry practice on the land of how to lift the sail up etc etc… and the instructor tells me – Oh… you’re not very tall… you’ll find it really hard to pull the sail up when you are on the water – give it all you’ve got.
Turns out he’s not taken into account the tidy amount of muscle i’m packing under a wet suit… I used to have a serious gym habit… so when I took him at his word and gave it all I’d got… The sail flew out of the water and I launched myself in a spectacular fashion, backwards into the water and flipping everything over as I went. That was a shock! A very cold one… and again I’m sinking down into inky black… and that surprises me, because I have a life jacket on, so it is not equating in my mind that I should sink, I’m more ???? why am I not floating??? And I think oh F*ck iT! They’ll find your body eventually… Then I’m floating up until my nose is pressed to underside of the sail …But not a problem… The arms I flung myself in with soon flung that away…
So… have I learnt anything?
Maybe? Maybe not? 😀
Though…
If you’re panicking and thrashing… you’re not drowning…
I’m quite happy when I get myself into trouble… when I’m dragged by other people, that’s a different ball game…
Each time I’ve resigned myself to drowning… It worked out OK…
Someone helped…
I got lucky…
Or turns out, I was well equipped to handle the situation…
I guess there’s another outcome that I’ve so far managed to dodge and I imagine it may go something like this…
I refer to the petunias, I live like the whale most days…
The pure and blessed way 