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I used a pyramidal synthetic spread where an array of influences are spread across a bottom row, and then higher rows show the interactions of those influences. It's been my go-to for a while now, and I like that it's scalable.
I asked the deck for two influences within my personal life, particularly my desire to re-establish a social group and find new lovers, and two influences regarding my work. Here's the spread.
______
| IV |
|swords|
------
_____ ______
| VII | | X |
|wands| |swords|
----- ------
_____ ____ _____ ______
| VI| |III | | VIII| |knight|
|wands| |cups| |penta| |penta |
----- ---- ----- ------
I'm using the "Wild Unknown" tarot, whose art I particularly like.
This is the first of my two personal life cards. I take this card to represent a kind of rebirth into life following the "death" i experienced after being assaulted. that death that I died was that of my way of relating to people; i am recognizing more and more how irritable I have become and how uncharitable I've been with my loved ones, especially when the assault and my feelings about it are being discussed. my sexual fantasies now suffer the risk of "infection" from the sense-memory of my assault, and I feel unfree. the metamorphosis symbolism of the butterfly is rarely lost on a trans occultist. curiously, the butterfly is solitary. Paradoxically, I regain independence through forming new connections. Perhaps connecting with a casual but kind and patient lover will help me regain confidence in my sexuality.
Second personal life card. I haven't spent a lot of time with others since it happened. certainly not with more than one or two people at a time. Besides work, obviously, but I am "present" there in a very different way. My first step (maybe in a few years, come to think of it, since the dissolution of my trans group home) towards rediscovering being-in-community was the hardcore show last week. I met some people and had a good time, moshed for the first time, but still was not super social, as to be expected since i'm so out of practice. But it felt good.
I need not just a few friends that I keep up with, I need a hive. Honestly, playing persona 5 has made me want to try harder to fill my life with friendship. I want to be there for others again.
Back in the day, I assembled my little hive by matching with every trans person I could on tinder and inviting them all over to party. Maybe I should take what worked from that approach and reinvent it for where I am now. Maybe it's as simple as getting the pals back together. It's probably both.
The synthesis of the two personal life cards. As the butterfly escaped the branches, I take the branches to represent what holds me back, the hangups, inhibitions, and neuroses that endanger my flourishing. Here, their bright destruction is foretold, although it is not guaranteed that the fire will spread to the other sticks.
Fire is the oldest of alchemies. Turning lead to gold is no stranger a proposition than turning wood into light and heat. In the card's art, it is unclear how this fire was started.
Fire appears as a substance in itself, yet at the same time is no more than an expression of its fuel. My trauma will not be incinerated by some destroying angel from without, but rather its burning will be an unfolding of its own nature when placed in favorable conditions. What attachments does my pain indicate? Where do they go now?
How will my pain alchemize? What will it illuminate, and for whom? There is a lot stacked against me right now; a new covid wave, capitalist atomization, incipient trans genocide, rape culture; courage is needed.
this card remains quite mysterious to me. I will be paying more attention to it as the week unfolds.
In the first few weeks of school, I told my students that their minds are like spiderwebs; information doesn't stick unless it is supported by a robust network of associations. If the connections students make to a word is its dictionary definition, it is hanging only by one strand; that fly will escape the web with a minimum of agitation. If it is embedded in a variety of contexts both semantic, morphological, and phonological, then it will stick.
That pedagogical insight calls for a systematic and methodical approach to teaching. That approach is one I have very much failed to impliment so far. I've been improvising this web, filling in gaps here and there, starting out this way and that, without the deliberation which would yield a sound structure.
It's time to awaken my craftsmanship. It's time to engage my arachnid talents, cover all contingencies, move with purpose, spiral back to previous material and fit it into one big picture, and do due diligence at every step; one weak point undermines the entire web.
The bummer thing here is that this won't happen without a lot of weekday evenings and weekend time sacrificed to the task. Plus, the satisfaction of a job well done is most often denied to teachers, since students' success depends on many factors outside our control and the true influence we have on students may not be apparent until many years after they've left our lives. The spider is methodical and vigilant, but does it feel accomplishment?
I've seen spiders build some dumb-ass webs in my time. Like, inside shoes and on car doors and the like. They can't possibly know why these spots are such bad ideas. It's so far beyond them. Our best efforts do not always yield results. This is not our fault. Our efforts must be their own reward in such uncertain milieux.
"Work alone is thy privilege, never the fruits thereof." (Bhagavad Gita).
My thoughts have unwittingly taken me to a perfect transition to the next card.
The dark night of the soul. Bright ideals in twilight. Money in partial triumph over the good and true. In these shadows is my faith tested.
He is lonely, downcast, and saddened, but unbroken. There is no masculine swagger here, no defiance, only the whispered dignity of a burden adequately borne. I want to hug him.
That mystic sun cannot fully be covered. In the dark, I light my way by the twinkling of its memory.
huh. well that doesn't look good. I guess school's gonna fuck me up, huh? I mean, it already has. It is currently doing so.
I'm curious about the "melodrama" aspect named in the booklet. I usually associate that word with frivolity or hysterics. The solemnity of the death scene tinged with the drama of the overkill.
As soon as I flipped over the card, a sentence and the idea it names dropped seemingly out of nowhere into my mind: enlightenment is perfectly ordinary. It is not without. It is not somewhere else. It's right here in everyday cognition. There's nowhere else for it to be.
The lamb looks as if he is smiling at the viewer's concern for him in the way that we would laugh seeing a child scared of a shadow puppet about to eat mommy. It knows one of two things: either that the swords will remain suspended, or that they will fall and all will still be as it should.
With the addition of the flaming wand, the slain bison becomes the precarious (but curiously content) lamb. If I don't heal and grow as a social being, work will be all I have, and it will kill me quite gratuitously. If I find the conditions to light the fire, the swords no longer menace. That flame becomes the fire of the mind. Despite all the doom and chaos and darkness, I will have tranquility at the heart of it. Rest in motion. An engaged and successful spiritual life consists of nothing more.