Discarded Oracle

And so I come to the final card in the D.O.

Yesterday, I looked at the image and took in the shadows of the Norns looking over the newborn baby… I thought about how this card was a very obvious extension of ‘What’s In A Web…’ The image where the 3 Norns stand looking at the foetus… My working title for this card was ‘Sparta Baby’. A test of survival… infant thrown out on to the mountainside to die or return to the clan. But that’s not really what we’re looking at here… The Norns observe… They name the child… They look for the potential. What do we have here? A warrior? A farmer? A smith? A noble? A poet? A slave? Norns appearing at birth, determining fates of men and Gods? Norns… benevolent and malevolent… The Norns, the shadows on the left… but who were the figures above the child’s head..? I decided that if I was supposed to know then the answer would find me. I put the card aside…

Later in the evening, Mr S told me he was recording a programme for me because he liked the title and he didn’t know what it meant but it might mean something to me. I asked him what the title was and he told me ‘The Disir‘. Hmmm… interesting… Mr S knew nothing of my earlier thoughts and I sunk into feeling out the vibe… baby surrounded by Norns and Disir… Saying nothing to him, I pulled out the card… ‘Hey! One word! What do you see?’

“Dakinis!”

“What’s that?”

“Hmmm… I’m not entirely sure…”

I head off for a quick Wikihunt and discover – Dakinis are energetic beings in female form, evocative of the movement of energy in space. In this context, the sky or space indicates śūnyatā, the insubstantiality of all phenomena, which is, at the same time, the pure potentiality for all possible manifestations.

Oh! Nice one Mr S! That’s so spot-on for the story I’ve been brewing…

English people are not good at blowing their own trumpets… We’re bred to downplay ourselves or be scathingly self-mocking… During field trips with C we one day considered that if we were going to write a book then we’d have to write a bio on ourselves… We both cringed at the thought of it and wrestled the idea until deciding that maybe it would be easier or even a good/interesting exercise if instead of autobios, we wrote bios for each other… Bios were written and exchanged. I’m not sharing them in entirety here, they’re pegged for the book… (YES! Everybody shut up now! I will finally be writing a book! even if it’s just a LWB). But I will (soon) share a little snippet of something C wrote about me, as in many ways, I feel that it also describes this card.

This card to me, has a Fool like quality in that it kind of belongs everywhere with the all of the other cards being an expression of a facet of this card’s essence… whilst it also has the freedom of the Fool to slot itself into any position it likes in the sequence… the first? The last? Somewhere along the way? It’s an ‘everywhere and nowhere baby’ mode of transport…

Back to C’s words…

Karen Sealey is (redacted to spare my blushes). She is all of these things and none of these things, in fact, any effort to label Karen leads to further metamorphosis.

So, I look as this card as the Titular of the D.O. Deck.

The Discarded Oracle. Who is the Discarded Oracle? Is it me? Is it you? Yes and no and both and neither! The Discarded Oracle is the recognising and reclaiming of Self AS the oracle… The reconnection to source that reminds us that even in our greatest adversities, we are never alone… We are plugged in… we are a tiny cell living and breathing as part of the great cosmic organism… We don’t need cards, runes, gurus, gods, (though gods probably need us, as if no-one believes then they pop out of existence…??) The Discarded Oracle… The answers already present, that we lost the ability to hear when we made ‘progress’ into modern worlds…

The Discarded Oracle is learning how to Listen again… To throw out the question, knowing that if you listen well, the answer arrives…

We talk of Norns and Fate… Of Disirs and Dakinis… (Desires and Daquiris…) We describe ourselves by how we are born under the stars… But really, is that Who we are? Sure oftentimes, such tools are useful analogies and help us to make sense of our own perceived insanities… But are we bound to be defined by our birth for the whole of eternity?

One of my favourite films is Gattaca and as I final thought, I will leave you with the tagline…

“There is no gene for the human spirit.”

Gene? Just another word for fate?

You decide! I’ve got a book books to write!