Wishing on a Star
Welcome to the latest Tarot Blog Hop hosted by Ania M
Happy Happy Joy Joy! and all that festive stuff! 🙂
The prompt given was:
Which card(s) best represent or celebrate your past year and which best represent your wishes for the year ahead. You can either select the cards you think fit best, or draw them randomly and see what the Tarot thinks.
The past year has been somewhat of a blur… paradoxically I find myself too quickly in mid-December yet January feels to be many lifetimes ago and so to rest my weary brain and to save myself the effort of trawling through the scribbles in my diary to tease out the edited highlights, I’ll delegate the choice of card to potluck and see what the Tarot thinks I should be celebrating…
THE FOOL
Ok… so that could be any of very many things. This year has seen me leap into various situations that have challenged my delicate Virgo bowels… though fortunately not to the point where I have literally crapped myself… ok ok yup TMI!
Let me try and regain a little dignity and share with you a recent experience. So… in the last week of November, I found myself on a 5-day residential course with 25 strangers all with the common goal of exploring Spirit through art.
Now there seems to be a popular misconception that I’m a gregarious person… the truth is hmmm… well it’s not that I dislike company it’s maybe more that I don’t enjoy all the social expectations that go along with being in company… you know, things like having to string together a coherent sentence at 8am… or feeling obliged to put your bra on… or rather resisting the urge to whip if off via the armhole of your shirt half way through the day because the damned thing is literally getting on your tits… so… I had spent the two weeks before going, wondering why on earth I would put myself through this communal living that had timetables and lights out at midnight, and days punctuated by cups of tea served at set hours… but it occurred to me that maybe it would be interesting to be somewhere where nobody knows you…
I guess at the time of booking my thoughts were around how my artwork would develop in an immersive environment, removed from the outside world and everyday distractions. As it happened the art kind of went backward to mostly primitive scribbles as the new way of working to pick out messages took a strange hold… (or as my autocorrect tries to insist… a stranglehold…)
When I work with Tarot, it’s fast and fluent and the symbols and metaphors that flood my head are filled with in-jokes and flashbacks of past readings that whizz through my mental roller deck of references to pull the right phrase for each card… Information feels to stream in from various angles around the right-hand side of my head… Faced with exercises that called for a mediumistic approach, the sensations around my head were not so much new but something I’d not really noticed before… the left-hand side of my head stirred to life… a strange outward probing, slowly sweeping and groping into a violet haze… like trying to feel the way through fog… to find the way home blindly on a route well travelled but with now no visible path… a slow, heart thumping test of faith between the inhale and the exhale… trusting that words would come… Images would come in abstract forms and words were strewn and scattered to be gathered and finally linked…
Mid-week, I sit with blank page and pastels and wait and wait until my hand feels the urge to pull colours and make shapes… I watch the lines appear and they take a life of their own but what does it mean? My patience is tested… I resist the urge to scrap the image and start again… and I ask myself – who is this for? I cast my eye around the far end of the room and let my gaze rest upon each person… no…no…no… I feel defeated so I sit and pause and turn to the other end of the room… I see a silver flash of light above a man’s head… the same kind of flash I’ve seen when choosing a crystal to work with so I take the plunge and go introduce myself and say that I think the drawing is for him… I relay the abstract thoughts that I had whilst drawing and he agrees that it does indeed feel to be for him… we talk at length but I won’t divulge that part of the conversation.
I go to leave and he says… hey, just on the off chance, maybe the one I drew is for you, do you want to take a look?
I look and hold back a silent gasp. I see something instantly that is deeply personal and relevant to me but I say nothing and wait to see what he says… he looks a little hesitant then says… well… I’m not sure how to explain this really but it’s a like I’m in space… I’m up there amongst the stars and there’s this big bunch of planets all together… there’s energy flying everywhere and they all talk to one another… but then over here on the opposite side, towards the bottom… there’s Saturn… like some kind of anchor… and up here… look there’s some kind of symbol that looks like it crowns everything…what do you make of that?
I look to where he points and I see the glyph for Jupiter…
I feel the smile spreading across my face…and I tell him that he’s drawn my chart, which confuses him as he knows nothing of Astrology… I talk him through briefly about my Sagittarius ascendant… my cluster of planets that sit astride the cusp of the 9th and 10th house and how my Saturn lurks all alone across yonder in my 4th house… I ask about all the blue on the right-hand side and he tells me… oh… that was another story… it’s like there is a portal that you travel through, across a stream to open fields to speak to beings on another plane…
He goes on to describe a project that I’ve spent considerable time on but which has been put into stasis for over a year now…
Now all of that is something that I’m still assimilating and digesting… The reason for celebration is the profound sense of peace that came with this…
A few years ago, I paid an Astrologer friend to hand draw my chart… let’s not go into details other than to say that I never got my chart, I lost my money and what used to be a beautiful friendship got fucked beyond repair… Always in the back of my mind was a dim hope that one day this person would do the right thing and one day in the post my chart would arrive… this dim thought was kept alive by numerous card pulls both by myself and others that insisted repeatedly that my chart would indeed arrive…
The stranger who by now had become a new friend gifted me the piece of art and finally that dark whine in some dusty but not quite forgotten corner of my mind… it suddenly and finally fell silent… The cessation of that gnawing pain and sadness for a lost friend laid to rest and THAT is a good a cause for celebration as any…
My card moving forwards… another random pull…
THE CHARIOT
My wish for next year… to get both sides of my brain working together and bringing all these new ways of working into line and up to speed with my tried and tested workhorse…
I’m not entirely sure where it will go yet but with the Fool as my back seat driver, I’m sure my Chariot will travel to exactly where it needs to take me… Though I’m just having a wry chuckle and seeing the Fool jumped off and the workhorse grew wings… Plus I’m fairly certain that equestrian lady just flung her bra off…
If you’d like to take the flight to another blog then jump on one of the links…
The pure and blessed way 
I thought it was just me that wasn’t socially functional until at least 9am, having done the residential thing myself long ago in the dim and distant, this made me giggle a little. Thank you ❤
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The only thing I can perfect pre 11am is a thousand yard stare… 😉 I’m an owl! I’m not designed for muggle hours!
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That was an amazing story of your art for him and his for you. Thank you.
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Thanks Arwen. It was one of those moments where you don’t quite know what is happening but you know that you should notice something is happening…
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Wow, another fascinating story, Karen. Although it sparks the idea that perhaps you’ll start doing intuitive readings by first drawing something and then interpreting it for your querent. What a great reading that would be.
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It is something that I’ve accidentally dabbled/drifted into before and I do feel as though I want to focus more in that direction…
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Your posts need to come with a “don’t read this whilst drinking or eating” warning! My poor laptop nearly got spatted with Cointreau & Coke! 😛 Loving your images, thanks for sharing!
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Lol good tip about the caution! Though maybe I’ll advise that you wrap your electronics in cling film as I’d hate to come between anyone and their tipple! 🙂
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Lol! I managed to save both the tech and the tipple 👍
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Phew! 😂
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That story is beautiful. I hope that has helped you move on better from that bad experience.
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Thanks Casper. Yes it has 🙂
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I always enjoy reading your stories and I love that things came together like that for you 🙂
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Thanks Ania 😊
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That’s an amazing story…!
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Thanks Alison!
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I also read stranglehold first, autocorrect and I think alike. Retreats are a funny thing that often twist my mind and usually let me reflect on the habits I have and what I find challenging vs. what other people find challenging. Scribbles for 10 days also sounds really appealing right now. Was it your first doing something so scheduled like that?
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The first time of doing something so scheduled in that kind of environment… The most challenging thing was that there was an odd rule about you having to sit at the same seat for every meal and I made the mistake of sitting next to the only person in the building who complained about every single meal…
I think the positive that I took from rigid schedule is recognising that taking a break pauses the flow rather than stops it.
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Wonderful! Both sides of the brain! Nice thing about retreats, I suppose, is that they do disrupt the usual so we can see what we might not be using. The gift of your astrological chart in artistic form was totally brilliant. Sense of peace, indeed.
Admittedly, I found the flinging off of bras bit to be most wonderful, as I find the things incredibly uncomfortable mostly (being somewhat well-endowed myself). Freedom!
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The nice thing, which I’d not really considered prior was that there were people from all over the world on the course, so it was interesting to see how art overrides language barriers…
Ah yes the freedom of the bra fling! That lights up both sides of my brain! 😂
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Wow! That was an amazing post. I love how you got your chart in such a roundabout way. Thank you for sharing.
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Yes… I think the roundabout way probably gave a better result than the direct route would have done… Thanks for stopping by 😊
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