Flower Speaks: Silent, not Awkward

I can't wait for 2013 to be over. What a dreadful year! Like a proper Saturn year, it tested my family and I in all ways possible and, when we thought we would finally be able to breath, Old Father Time came and took my beloved Grandfather with him. Yes, my dear grandpa, the man who was often closer to me than my own father. He had been battling leukaemia for almost an year and a half. He was strong, he fought bravely, but in the end... he was only extending his suffering, and he deserved his rest. I hope he's in peace now.

Saturn is not only the bestower of trials and obstacles, but he's also the one who helps us to recognise our limitation and persevere when all seems lost. And I know that for the last couple of years he has been here with me, testing me, forcing me to face reality and get up to fulfil my responsibilities when all I wanted was to lie down and forget. But Saturn sometimes makes us too critical and a bit awkward when we should relax. In the moments we really oughta let go... we get overstrung. We are unable to go with the flow, to expand, to let life bring what it may. Walking too long with Saturn kills a bit our flexibility, no doubt.

Later today I'm going to travel, to spend the New Year holidays with my dad & his family. I already know some problems wait for me there (my stepmother being one of them), all of which easily make me fall into a downward spiral of self-criticism, until I'm suddenly hating myself and feeling utterly inadequate.

Surviving the holidays seems hard enough, but how will I survive my own negative self-talk? So I decided to get some advice from the Flower Speaks, asking how can I become more positive towards myself.

 

The Peladan Spread

I learnt the Peladan Spread from a book written by the Brazilian tarot reader Nei Naiff, almost 10 years ago. It was one of the first spreads I learnt, and it remains to this day one of my favourites for its simplicity and straightforward way of analysing a situation. It's very concise and yet very informative.

It's not very good for general questions though. I recommend using it with an objective question in mind.

1. What is the situation about?
2. What is the situation not about?
3. How will the situation develop.
4. How will the situation end - the final result.
5. Synthesis - how does the querent feels about the situation OR an advice to the querent.

Dream: My sweet and tender crocodile

Have you ever seen a crocodile smile?

I have, last Friday. In a dream.

In this dream, my sister and my mother found a poor crocodile in a frozen lake, nearly dying due to the cold. They took pity on him and brought him home. They went so far as to give him a little, hum, crocodile sweater, so he'd get warm.

We kind of kept him around as a pet, but after a while I realised he was sort of in love with me. He lay down by my side, asked for attention (not with words, obviously, a bit like a dog), followed me around... and smiled. And then there was a moment in which I was lying down and he came and started to brush my hair - with his teeth!

I liked him, but I was also terrified. I couldn't help it but to think that at any moment he would recall he was a wild animal and would then chomp down on my head! I couldn't relax at all, even though the croc was showing me affection. At some point of the dream he disappeared, and when I started looking I found him on the outside of my bedroom, hungry and tired and waiting for me to let him in.

My brain is a bit dramatic, it seems.

Weekly Reading: Spit what you cannot chew

No black cards this week, but it doesn't make this reading any lighter. The sheer excess of these two cards - the 10♦ and the 9♥ - tells me that something has worn out its welcome in our lives. Powerful emotions are holding us, obsessing us, keeping us from moving on - and soon they will burn us out. If they are not released, or channelled into something productive, they will drag us under.

Too much emotion, too much intensity over something that is dying, or already dead. We need to acknowledge that these feelings exist, and try to release them in a healthy way - through art, or counselling, or even through a physical activity. Perhaps we even need to cry out tears, allow ourselves to grieve over something that has not gone the way we hoped.

Tendra always speaks to me of things we drag with us even though they are just baggage. It's like carrying a corpse with you, hoping that it will love you or give you what you need... only it's dead. It ain't coming back any time soon. Also, it's about being a control-freak - hindering the flow of life because one needs to have everything under control.

And Gilles de Rais, the 9♥, is a very interesting card for this week. Last Wednesday we had a PCO "Underworld" meeting, and this was one of the cards we discussed. For me, it's always about powerful emotions that seek to be expressed... or threaten to drown us! I think it's no coincidence this card showed up... I'm curious to learn more about it, see how it will manifest. It's a scary card, but also filled with potentials, in my opinion.

The Playing Card Oracles © Ana Cortez & C.J. Freeman

PCO: Imagination isn't always wise...

Every now and then it happens again. I see myself eagerly giving away my personal power to an unreliable person, usually a man who has been much embellished by my own imagination. This particular man is unreachable and impossible in my case and I know it - I've been trying to stay away from him - but the magnetism is too strong and there are times I find myself wanting to drift away to my dream in which "impossible" is a matter of point of view.

That's when the crows caw caw me back to reality.
It's annoying as hell the sound they make, but it's much needed.

I don't often use the PCO to read for myself nowadays. But today, after much suffering over something that just can't be solved, I picked my deck and laid some cards for me using The Bridge spread Ana Cortez teaches in her book.

Now, I hate these crows of the 5♠. It's spells trouble whenever they show up... but the funny thing here is that the 5♠ is in the "Gifts of the Present" position. What I am supposed to carry with me. How can such a bad card be a "gift"?

Hell well. It's a warning.

Hear the crows? They are like those dragons in the unknown corners of an old map saying "here be monsters". Don't tell them you haven't been warned, 'cause the are cawing their lungs out trying to make you stop on your tracks before you turn a little problem into a big mistake.

The other interesting point of this spread is the Jack of Clubs - Lancelot himself! - sitting in the position that points to the "Obstacle of the Present". One can't feel luckier when the gift is a bunch of crows and the obstacle is Mr. Apparently Perfect, but that's the case. The J♣ here unites with the Q♣, Leah (who is in the Past position of the spread) to show me that a lot of the problem is in my head. I've been dreaming and daydreaming and building castles in the air. I have let my imagination take control and now I want something I cannot have - because it does not exist.

Imagination is wonderful but it isn't always wise. 

My mind, for instance, is extremely skilled in taking a small bud of an idea and running away with it. When I come back to myself I have a huge tree in front of me; in fact, I am tangled in its roots.

I am like Leah, the Q♣, being carried away by my dream. Only instead of flying, I'm about to fall on my head, like her, who in this spread appears upside down.

But the crows choose this moment to come and caw caw caw caw until I pay attention. And that brings me to the last card, the future, at the same time painful and hopeful. The 7♥, Sword of Healing, tells me that healing is possible. But I have no choice. If I am to stop giving away my personal power, I'll have to cut the tree, extirpate this dream no matter how much comfort I find in it. 

The fruit of imagination - the kind that is never manifested - is always bitter. My personal power and self-esteem will not heal until I cut away the users, instead of giving them access to my resources because my imagination has given them the shiny veneer of a possible dream.

The Playing Card Oracles © Ana Cortez & C.J. Freeman

The Flower Speaks: Gotta burn to be reborn?

I've been stuck in rut.

Okay. I bet you are tired of reading this.
Go ahead and hit the back button, no hard feelings. No, I mean it. Really.

Or you can stay anyway. For no reason other this is a nice deck and I got both the Tower and the Judgement in a single reading (though it's not immediately visible because in this deck the cards have names of flowers) and I want to talk about them. And because instead of my usual "woe is me" speech, I have actually begun to look for solutions.

So, I am stuck. I am afraid I don't really have plans for the future. I have a nice job but that doesn't stimulate my creativity at all (in fact it often overstimulates my boredom). I still write and play piano because I need to stay sane. But don't really know what to do with all these poems and short stories I write, and I'm a crappy piano player at best. So, yeah, it's a general dry spell concerning all areas that involve creating anything.

I believe that when it comes to creative endeavours, there's a domino effect tendency. You get stuck in one aspect and then all other related ones begin to follow. Creative juices stop running and then disappear altogether. So I decided to ask my cards for some insight. I chose the Flower Speaks deck because I think it's a wonderful healing/self-analysis tool.

My question was: How can I unblock myself?

I pulled two cards. One Flower Arcana card and one Guidance Card. It's not really a surprise that I got the Fireweed (the Tower) and the Pistil & Stamen card (which is all about creativity and sexuality).

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

I was touched by the amount of supportive messages I got in my last post, written so many months ago. People from all walks of life shared their experiences, offered advice and prayers and sent me light and love.

Thank you. Thank very much, to all of you.

That the post seemed to resonate with some people. Maybe it's my Sagittarius bigmouth doing its thing, but I have the tendency to verbalise what hangs in the air but goes unsaid. It annoys my colleagues (and my family) many times, because behind my sarcasm there's often an uncomfortable truth. I have learnt to shut up when I must, but sometimes it's stronger than me.

The truth that perhaps I talked about in that post, and that I saw reflected in many of the responses, is that the path of personal growth, independently of what it's made of, usually involves a great deal of pain and disappointment. That's it. But they don't tell you that when you pick up your first book on spirituality or self-knowledge. They mention pain, but usually as a small prelude to the great enlightenment that will make it all worth it.

Piece of cake? Depends on how you like your cake - with an extra-thick sugar crust or not.

You are going to call your gods and find they have turned a deaf ear to you. You'll look for comfort in old and tried methods only to find that you get none. You'll throw your hands up to the sky and ask why, and get no answer.

You'll wonder "why the hell do I bother", and you won't know.

It's the unravelling of all off-the-rack opinions and answers. And all the books that told you things that were so easily to believe in will suddenly stop making any sense. And you'll think, as I have thought in days of great despair, why must I continue? Why not end this? There's nothing to it, it's all rotting flesh. We're all dying, why wait?

But there's something. Something inside that keeps you going. An unconquerable thing, one that refuses to bow, refuses to give up. One that know that if it falls down and stays down it will not rise again. So it rises, no matter how battered and weak.

Days of denouement in the belly of the whale

I came back, but I didn't really come back.

I created this blog in as moment of my journey in which it made sense to me to dedicate a place to my divination/spiritual practises. And I liked the results so much that I kept it alive even when I had to step away to pick my broken self off the ground. This blog is a cosy little den that I built, clumsily at some points, but nevertheless with love.

But then I left because I had to leave, and later I came back because I had the urge... and now I begin realise that I'm not really back. I'm not because although I have returned to the same place, I'm no longer the same person.

I have pretty much outgrown my deck hoarder self. My collection is kept intact by sheer inertia (and I'm honestly thinking about selling a large part of it). But that's not what is worrying me. I have also been possessed by an unrelenting disbelief.

I have had other times of crisis, and some of them have been shared here. But never one so powerful, never one that has filled my very bones with doubt, making me mistrust everything about the world and about myself.

Like Jonah in the biblical story, I feel like I have been thrown overboard from a ship and then engulfed by a huge whale. Only I don't know how long I'm staying in its belly, and I have no idea what I must do in order to leave. It's possible that, also like Jonah, I have been sailing in the opposite direction to where I should be going, and now my Self is demanding that I spend some time in the darkness until my purpose is revealed. Or until I learn to grope my way in the dark.

All this is a metaphorical way to say... I am not sure if I should maintain this blog. Because now all the things that it stands for seem unreal to me.

Just so you won't think I haven't learnt anything...

Yeah, those readings I did last Wednesday were pretty much a headache, but I did learn something from them. I mean, aside from deciding that I'm not a Fortune Vending Machine, I have found new ways to look at old cards & card combinations, which is something that always amuses me.

How can the same pictures come up in a reading and surprise us by representing something completely different than what we are used to?

This is one of the marvels of card reading, one of the reasons I never grow tired of it.

So, some new combinations I have learnt during my ordeal. Remember that I use the Playing Card Oracles method created by Ana Cortez, so these combinations probably only make sense within this system.

Q♦ + 5♥  – She who is not what she seems - specially someone hiding behind a kind and compromising mask. In fact any court card accompanied by the 5♥ can represent a person who is hiding their true face, so to speak, but it's specially dangerous when people are pretending to support you when in fact they are not.

9♠ + 5♦  –  While reading, I usually took this combination as 'beware of whom you trust'. But a comment from one of my friends who was in the room brought another aspect of this combination to light: that of someone who is making their life dry by mistrusting everybody. Of course, the context of the reading made this interpretation possible. A third possibility would be when someone is manipulating you into putting your butt on the line, so to speak. But for readings about romance, I found that the second meaning tends to be more common.

I am not a Zoltar machine!

Wednesday night. One of my best friends is moving to a new house and she invited the girls to a "good bye" pizza. After a few pieces of wonderful vegetarian pizza and long conversations about love-spirituality-work and everything in between, they all decided they wanted card readings.

Very well. I was rather tired to be honest - unlike some of them, who are on vacations, I have to wake up everyday at 7 am to work. Even my body was achy due to exhaustion but, not wanting to be the one to disappoint the girls, I sat down with my cards and agreed to read for each of them.

Bad idea. Bad idea.

You shouldn't read when you're almost falling flat on your face, but that is not the reason why I considered that night a cartomantic disaster. Nope. The problem is that none of them had actual questions. They all wanted to know about their love lives, of course, but... there was no intention behind their enquiries. In fact, they would copy the question of the last person, because there was nothing they really wanted to know about.

A long time ago I wrote a post about the importance of intention when doing card readings. When you approach the cards with a vague, mildly unimportant question, the cards don't give your their best. They give you equally vague, and sometimes rather unimportant answers.

That's what happened. There I was, sitting on an old mattress and frying my surviving brain cells in a pitiful attempt to give them meaningful readings. My eyeballs were about to pop out of my skull due to an insidious headache that began to spread when I realised the next hour would be dedicated to "wot's comin' up in my love life?" sort of questions. And not only that. When the answer appeared vague, and I was having a bit of a hard time trying to pinpoint exactly which aspect of their love lives the cards were focusing on, I could feel that aura of disappointment growing quite thick around me.

Mea culpa. I shouldn't agree to read when I'm nearly at the melting point in mental fatigue.

When I got home at 2 am, I was so exhausted that my mind actually felt empty. This is serious coming from a person whose mind is usually rushing at 120 mph.

No, don't turn on your (virtual) heels. Not yet. There is a purpose behind this jeremiad.

Strangers on this road we are on...

Last Tuesday I went with a friend to a bar downtown, close to a small lake where the hippies, the rockers, the gypsies, the hipsters and the mystics meet. There, under the trees, people sit on sarongs, play guitar, talk in groups, sell beads, share beers, smoke joints and cigarettes.

I went there with this friend because we are both single and coming from emotional dead-ends. Since there's a very slim chance of the pizza guy being our prince, we might as well go out and meet new people.

I took with me a sarong to sit on and a normal playing deck of cards (I always carry one). I chose this deck because it tends to go unnoticed by the crowd, and also because I enjoy reading with very simple playing cards sometimes. It helps me to focus on the essential. My friend asked me for a reading, and right after I finished it two guys approached us and began to ask me about the cards.

After I explained what I was doing, they wanted readings too. I was unsure but my friend spurred me on and told them I was a witch (imagine that!).

And so it happened: my first two readings to complete strangers. And I do mean complete strangers, 'cause I can't even recall their names (I just remember that one guy was a Leo and the other was an Aquarius). They seemed very shocked by the things I told them - apparently I was quite accurate, much to my own surprise. I am not so sure about one of them (the Leo), because he was obviously hitting on us so it wouldn't be absurd to think he was just flattering me (I happen to be rather impervious to flattery, so it didn't work).

But the other guy (the Aquarius) was not, and he was wide-eyed as I told him he was feeling very lost and confused because he was being forced to leave behind a relationship that had been very good. Turns out he had just divorced his long-time wife.  I told him he needed to be careful to not seek too much comfort on food or drink, because this is not the kind of thing that would nourish his heart. (Curious? His is the reading that is decorating this post).

He left in a daze. And I found that a certain nonchalance is helpful when reading. Not that you are careless about the message, or about expressing it (you are dealing with people, care and empathy are a requirement), but you don't worry so much about the mechanics. You let it flow, you go with your first impressions. It's like singing - if you are forcing it, you ain't doing it the best way.



Highlanders 1864 Poker Deck © US Games System, Inc.

...and I become Terrene.

When I read the Playing Card Oracles book for the first time, I remember wondering which card I'd use to represent myself in the Lost Man Spread. It's a spread that needs a significator - which card could symbolise me?

As young girl, my attention went to the 10s - the ladies of the pack. The first obvious choice would be Tendra, 10♦ (to whom I have dedicated a post in the past). I'm Sagittarius Sun / Sagittarius Rising / Aries Moon - that is plenty of fire for one person. But for some reason, I didn't identify very much with Tendra's general personality... I was kinda wussy compared to her. It didn't feel right. 

Next in line was Fortuna (10♣). She is lovely, but not like me at all. I'm at best a fake carefree. Behind these smiling eyes there is stress, breathing-down-your-neck stress and anxiety. Tsk tsk. That won't do it.

Then I came across Allegra, the 10♥. According to Ana Cortez, she is passionate, romantic, young at heart, vulnerable, risk-taking, impulsive, emotional, moody. Hey - that was me to the bone!

And thus Allegra became my PCO avatar for the next six years. Picture us running across a sunset-lit beach, meeting each other in a hug of joyous recognition. The end. Credits.

...wait a tic. This is not how it ends.

This is not how it ends because it doesn't end. I mean, it will end when I die, but until then I'm subject to the Wheel of Fortune just like the next fellow. And that means being subject to change.

And lately, much to my surprise, it seems the Powers have decided to change my own significator for me. Shouldn't I be surprised when, in the few readings I have done for myself lately, I constantly see Lady Terrene, the 10♠, showing me where I am? The only lady I didn't even consider when first choosing a significator for myself.

Who is this girl? Again, according to Ana Cortez: earthy, grounded (uh...), serving or subservient (eh?), melancholic (alright but...), nuturing, protecting, sensual (yeah, right), practical (wha--?), meek or modest (WHAT!?).

As you can see, I did not quite agree with the choice. *shakes fist at the heavens* You crazy bro'?

It's getting harder to read for myself...

...but I actually see this as an evolution in my journey as a card-reader!

For the longest time I could do readings for myself with a certain level of tranquillity, whereas reading for other people almost made me faint with anxiety. For the record - it still does.

But I've noticed that it's becoming... easier to read for others. For some reason, when reading for them the message comes more directly to me, because it doesn't get so tangled up in my own web of emotional attachment. I care about my sitter, but I'm not in their skin. My own feelings and ideas don't get in the way, because it's not my message - it's theirs.

Now, it's not easy and it's not perfect. I don't sit quietly like a swami guru while a stream of consummate wisdom flows from my lips. Nope. Very often the message comes in strange ways, in words and metaphors that make my querent raise an eyebrow (and that make me feel like the silliest card reader in history).

But sometimes... sometimes, while I'm talking in my usual quirky style, I notice the sitter staring intently at me. And I feel they are getting the message, even if right now they can't connect to the words themselves. They will, when it's time. As for me, I'm still learning to trust myself as a messenger.

On the other hand, reading to myself has become a real disaster. I lay the cards and... most of time it makes no sense. Of course, there are readings that fall on my head like bird poop and just can't be ignored, but the ones that need greater emotional subtlety (and a certain impartiality) make me utterly lost.

Maybe it's the contrast between the clarity I get when reading for others (of course, I still get some anxiety-fuelled blank-spots) and the muddiness I get when trying to read for myself. My own judgement and expectations definitely make it harder for me to fully accept the cards' message.

I haven't started reading for complete strangers yet but some of my sitters are distant acquaintances, friends of friends whom I'm meeting for the first time etc. For shy, self-critical little me it's a helluva improvement! And it happened in the moment I stopped giving a damn. When I was so down in the dumps that people asked for readings and I gave them just so they would stop asking.

When my perfectionism got out of the way, I found myself able to move forwards.