Thursday, January 5, 2012

Exercise 3:1 from "21 Ways to Read a Tarot Card"

I like Mary K. Greer's books. Find them to be quite interesting and helpful. Tarot Reversals, for example, has turned into my all purpose go to reference, for reversals as well as upright meanings, for being so succinctly thorough. I got 21 Ways to Read a Tarot Card sometime last year, as it seemed like great way to expand interaction with cards, challenge the mind, etc. Haven't had the time/attention span to really work with it yet, though. So I figure, with this blog and all, why not work on a few exercises from it here now and then. In no particular order....

Decided to do the Activity 3:1 exercise from the 3rd section/step of the book, Emotions. A summed up version of the directions, from Aeclectic:

What emotions are evoked with this card that we have each chosen? First, describe the emotions and feelings on the card for the character(s) involved and the environment they are within. Second, repeat this step but put your description in the "first person." Third, relate a personal and real-life situation which involved similar feelings and qualities which you have just described.

It's hot. Desert-time. Rocky and barren, not unbearable but dry and hot, monotonous plains of dust stretching out as far as the eye can see... But she isn't looking at all that. She isn't paying any of that any mind. No, she stands here, next to that little somehow still sprouting up plant. New life, new ideas, and yes so it is. Look at the way her cheeks color, blush. Look at how she stares at that flame, watches in burn with possibility, with ideas. Her body language- she wants to grab at it and run, she wants to do something with it, she knows that power it has, what it represents for her, empowerment. Yes, empowerment. This is a girl that wants to go out into the world and do something, and now she can.

Isn't it dazzling? Yes, watching the flames cackle and dance and the staff burn, burn, dangerous a little perhaps sure but isn't it just...amazing? Look at it there, in my hand. Mine to grasp to hold look at that light, that heat, that energy. There's something in it for me. I can do something now. Something creative, something original, something important. I want to, I've always wanted to but how, how can I, I'd ask, crawling through this dust, the hills, so much more the same and then I find this, illumination, my sign. So many ideas spinning madly around in my head, so-called implausible` dreams, but now I can choose one of them, something specific, and do it. I can feel the power of possibility in my hands. I'm excited, impatient, I want to run and jump and scream and go do something right now, right this very second, but I know that even with the burning staff it doesn't work like that, not really. So, with poise, I grab it, barely contained energy, excitement. It is time now, yes.

And it occurs to me, that for all my grumbling sometimes about life is pointless and lack of energy/motivation and whatever, I really do nonetheless have a tendency to be a bit... adventurous. Idea wise moreso - sometimes they are less realistic ones, such as my current obsession with "running away to Australia" but...well. That moment of realizing that of all the vague and jumbled idealistic ideas running through brain one or two are hey, actually concrete and doable and what's more, you can get to trying to do them RIGHT NOW. Recent examples? Deciding on a kind of whim to apply to take GRE, and actually doing well, and applying to grad schools, and actually getting into some, and figuring out how to finance that, and finding an apartment, and actually going! Deciding to take a cousin up on offer to visit her in Sweden, actually making plans and visiting Sweden and Poland and even seeing a bit of Copenhagen. Mentioning to another cousin in Stockholm that I wanted to go skydiving, and her saying are you serious and me saying yes and actually GOING AND DOING IT AND HAVING AN AMAZING TIME. Deciding I wanted a tattoo and finding a design and researching a tattoo place and walking there and getting it done because I wanted to and could. And even the creative process of schoolwork, that moment of realizing I DO know what to write for that essay, and getting it now in an outline and writing a rough draft and that haha progress I can do this feeling. 

Life adventures, intellectual adventures, starting new things. Not letting other people, or your own issues or hang ups, hold you back.

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