A Sip of Tarot: nourish

Today’s card is the Lovers from the major arcana

Just like the Death card, The Lovers has a TV & movie reputation apart from the card’s actual, traditional meaning. Everyone loves the Lovers. But it isn’t always about finding the love of your life or a grand romance.

The Lovers card is about any deep down desire, not necessarily the torrid romance novel kind. Often in a reading this card will advise figuring out what you really want in order to take steps toward it. Choice is less popular as a card meaning, but it has been associated with the Lovers across many decks and references.

Not only do you choose who and what you love, you choose TO love at all.

There is a quote attributed to Sitting Bull*: “Inside of me there are two dogs. One is mean and evil and the other is good and they fight each other all the time. When asked which one wins I answer, the one I feed the most.”

Put that with today’s card and you get the message to, metaphorically speaking, choose the dog you feed.

If you have followed the blog over the past year or so, we’ve talked about general zeitgeist cultural energies, and how all those stresses had affected energy sensitive people. The fear surrounding the pandemic and political upheaval here in the U.S. had been ringing a lot of peoples bells so to speak.

That general energy resonance is still fairly strong, but it has changed. It’s been shifting for a while now. The resonant bell-ringing among clients seems a little less widespread. The focus has shifted from the collective to the individual, from external to the internal, from practical physical realm survival to internal emotional and spiritual quality of life. It is a time for choosing the dog we feed.

And I have to emphasize the part where Sitting Bull describes it as an internal struggle. If it is projected as anything but a personal internal choice, the adage can go entirely off the rails.

My mind is also drawn to the Tina Turner song “We Don’t Need Another Hero” from the 1980s movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome . We’ve survived the energy and emotional thunderdome of 2020-21.

We have a once in a lifetime chance to choose how we step out of the dome and move beyond it. Every moment of every day we have a chance to choose which parts of ourselves we nourish. Today’s card suggests that we choose love.

Today’s Tarot: Stand by the Van

There were a lot of things that sprang to mind with this card today. I’d just been watching the news, and the draconian law in Texas was still fresh in mind of course. Young social activists came to mind: Greta Thunberg, Yolanda Renee King, the March for our Lives Rally and more.

But the card isn’t speaking TO them, it is speaking to the rest of us ABOUT them. Listen to them. Help them. Protect them. The king is leadership and sometimes leadership means putting someone else better suited to the job in charge. Sometimes leadership is showing others who to follow by following them.

I’m old.

I’m on the leading edge of the GenX cohort. THAT’s who I want to talk to today, because brothers and sisters, we have fucked up. As we came of age in the Reagan era, we failed to vote. We failed to do what these kids are doing and if we had we might not have eliminated their problem but we certainly could have lessened the desperation that we all now face.

We blew a lot of things on our watch…not that it’s over. There is no hope that I can see of winning the hearts and minds of boomers. All we can do there is to listen to and support the few badasses that generation has left. We may have blew our chance to be the vanguard of real progress, so now is our time to kick down the doors and get out of the way of the kids who are.

The sword on the card speaks of protection. The king image speaks of decision and leadership. It falls to us to protect and facilitate and lend any scrap of wisdom or insight we might posses as a new wave of activism comes crashing in behind us.

You might have thought we were beyond it, but welcome to the bigger Thunderdome, GenX. We aren’t the children of the apocalypse. We are Mad Max now. We don’t need a hero. We need to BE the hero. Our time has come to fly these kids out of the hellscape we allowed to happen.

Be the hero you’ve been waiting for.

Wear Your Experience

Daily meditation style one card tarot reading with the nine of wands.

“Wear your experience, you’ve earned your scars.” comes through here.

It isn’t to say wallow in past experiences or let past injuries dominate your mind now. There is a difference between release and denial. We can’t deny extant fact. Our experiences don’t disappear. They are part of the path that brought us to where we are now. They are in part of us. The difference lies in how those things are integrated. They are part of us, yes, but what part, how big of a part and what part that part plays in our current life are malleable.

I also relate this to a mental image that came through near to New Year’s Day. The swarm of small tornadoes across a USA map outline is still there, but not as strong, as if the lines are drawn in grey instead of black. The sense of taking stock, of crawling out of the wreckage to begin to survey the damage is starting to strengthen. Here I mentally/intuitively ‘hear’ the song “Beyond Thunderdome” by Tina Turner from the movie of the same name. In particular, the lyrics “Out of the ruins, out of the wreckage, can’t make the same mistake this time” come to mind. Granted, this is one of my favorite movies and songs from the mid 80s, but it fits this time, and this energy.

Whatever your Thunderdome has been, you don’t have to live in it. Walk out and walk free, move beyond it, but own the fact that you were there.