Sometimes happiness is something you have to do on purpose.
The energy today, at the start of the weekend, continues along the same thread that we saw at the start of the week in the “Strive to Abide” week-ahead reading.
This card comes from the Alleyway Oracle of Secrets by Seven Dane Asmund. The Alleyman card (art by voidbug) is intended to represent awe and wonderment, as is often found with a chance encounter with a mysterious embodiment of the Alleyman within the original deck’s fictional lore.
If you like thought provoking fiction I highly recommend The Alleyman Podcast.
But back to today’s card.
If you can strive to abide, then you can choose happy.
Deliberately. On purpose. In the middle of disaster.
It’s not easy. I wouldn’t want to imply that it is. It is a black belt level fight with yourself.
I read somewhere that we humans are hardwired to spot threats and dangers long before we process the good things. It’s evolutionary survival.
But so is happiness. It’s hard to survive when your mental, emotional, and physical health is disintegrated by constant stress, pessimism and negativity.
If you aren’t feeling it – ok. Abide. Feelings are temporary. Feelings can be influenced. Causes have effects and you can be the cause that has the effect of you feeling a little better.
The mind body connection flows both ways. Decreasing stress can improve physical health, and caring for your physical being can improve your mood.
If memory serves, it is a Buddhist premise with some solid physiology sprinkled in.
Arrange your face. The face is highly innervated. Arrange your face into a small Mona Lisa smile and keep it that way for a few minutes. The feeling represented by the facial expression and body posture you’ve adopted can sleep into your emotions however you were feeling at the outset. That may be why Buddhist teachers mention posture and facial expression as a part of beginning to meditate. It sets up a positive feedback loop. Body posture improves meditation which reduces stress which improves physical health which improves mood….you get the idea.
It may not be our first instinct to see beauty and good things. We are wired to focus on threats so we can avoid or mitigate them. Today’s card is a reminder (akin to the high priestess card in the RWS Tarot) to use our big old homo sapiens brains and step in and deliberately appreciate the good that saturates our existence. If it wasn’t there, we wouldn’t exist to appreciate anything. Look around. You aren’t actively in danger right now, are you? (If you are, what the hell are you doing staring at a screen reading this?!)
Take a breath.
That is a life giving miracle, right there.
Do you have the means for your next meal? Are you wearing clothes? Obviously you have an electronic device to entertain you and connect you to other people. This train of thought reminds me of the scene from the 1990s Robin Hood where Morgan Freeman’s character tells Kevin Costner’s Robin of Loxley “You whine like a mule – you are still alive!”
I can’t remember where I saw it, or if there is any logic or facts or data behind it, but I think I’m latching on to the memory of a 2 second social media clip because there is some level of truth to it….bursts of emotions, even the most painful ones, last 90 seconds unless we mentally grab onto them and keep replaying them in our mind.
If the Chariot card from Monday reminds us that we can choose to abide then today’s Alleyman card reminds us the world is full of wonder that we choose to see.
Thanks for reading! See you at the next sip
Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot 
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