Tag: evolution

Conquest Through Surrender

TaoCraft Tarot Short Sip is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. Today: Conquest through surrender with the Death and Hawkmoth cards

Welcome to Tao Craft Short Sip. I’m glad you are here.

Today’s card is a new one for me. It is the Hawkmoth card created by Literal Crow for the Literal Crow Tarot and used here in the Alleyman’s Tarot deck.

This is a new card for me. So far this has been one of the most easily readable decks I’ve owned yet. Maybe it’s because it’s Monday, but I had to look this one up to even begin. The Alleyman’s notebook begins by connecting this to the death card and the life cycle of insects. Like the death card, this card is about change but with less foresight.

It reminds me a little bit of insect related quotes.

I’m not sure who actually wrote it, but the Morticia Addams character said “Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”

Author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach wrote “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly.”

One of my favorite quotes lately is related, but thankfully leaves out the bugs. Adam Savage reminds us to “follow the process, not the plan.”

In essence, change is inevitable. With the death card, the change is a foreseeable, knowable thing. I’ve seen the death card most often at bachlorette parties of all things. Not because marriage is death or any such 1950’s tropes like that. It’s because marriage is a life altering change. You’ll never be an unmarried single person again. Even if the marriage ends you are not single again, you are divorced or what have you. The death card speaks to a known, forward looking albeit life altering change. The quality we assign to the change is beside the point. Marriage is a perfect example. The old single you is gone forever, but old dies to make way for something wonderful.

I think the Hawkmoth card is less deliberate. It is about a change that blind-sides you. It is about blurry, unplanned, undirected change. If the Death card walks up and lops your head off, the Hawkmoth card is change by a thousand paper cuts. It is about long term, gradual, almost imperceptible molding of a new you.

For a new you to emerge from that process, it takes a degree of surrender. In a cave, stalagtites and staligmites don’t fight the dripping water, they surrender to change and process that builds them up and makes them strong.

Some changes require our evolution. Some changes require that we surrender to them in order to conquer the greatest challenge of them all:

ourselves.

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TaoCraft Short Sip Tarot: Silent Light

Thank you for watching, reading and listening to TaoCraft Short Sip: Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your favorite morning drink.

Today’s Card is the Hermit from the major arcana

Light is silent.

The thing making the light might make a sound, like a crackling fire or humming street light, but the light itself is utterly silent.

Most, if not all, Hermit cards have a lantern or some symbol for light on them. Hermits choose to be alone. This combination brings to mind classic tropes like the candy suggesting guru on a mountaintop or the tea plucking wise master in a bottled tea commercial. It also brings to mind the mythic association between silence, solitude and enlightenment. Gautama Buddha meditated alone at night under a bohdi tree. Bohdidharma meditated alone facing a cave wall. Micheo Usui meditated alone to realize the Reiki symbols, and so on.

Enlightenment is a quiet thing.

Evangelism is, however, not. It is a normal human thing to be noisy and enthusiastic and want to tell everyone about this nifty new thing you found so the people you care about can benefit from it too. It’s primal. It makes evolutionary sense to put up a screech when you find the clear water stream or the full fruit tree. That’s great that you care enough about people that you want to share your best found treasures with them. But at some point it has to grow up beyond that. At some point it has to ripen from the joy of discovery to the depth and security of lived experience. At some point, deep truths become a silent stream of light lest they be reduced to pearls before swine or gnats around the heads of others.

Some days it is a service to shout to the tribe about the good that you have found. Lights are a signal in the dark as much as a shout. Sometimes the best signal is a silent light.