Aim high, but stand firm

Book of Shadows, Moore

'What do I most need to work on today?' I asked the Book of Shadows tarot first thing this morning. I drew 8 of Earth. Like most of the Book of Shadows card, this one is dark in its artwork. You really have to peer at it until the details start to come through. I don't know if this is an issue with print quality or intentional. It does seem to me that some images published online seem brighter than the deck in hand.

The 8 of Earth appears to be from the perspective of being up in the top of a tree. We are fairly high off the ground. If we look straight down, we can see a little gnome looking up at us. If we look around ourselves at the tree branches, there is a bird building its nest, a bee busily gathering pollen from a flower, a butterfly emerging from a crysalis. There a few new leaves on the tree's mostly bare branches. Perched around us in the tree are a few more gnomes. In the air overhead, large black birds are in flight. (You may be able to tell from my blog how I feel about all corvids and blackbirds. They are special to me). The sky is enriching itself with the colours of the rising sun. It's a beautiful image of dawn in all its guises, really.

It doesn't even really occur to me when looking at cards in this deck to consider them in relation to traditional tarot meanings, but for sake of a thorough examination, the 8 of Coins usually depicts someone hard at work churning out products, or a master training a youth, and the card is often interpreted to mean hard graft, more or less. I suppose you could see that type of industry here, nature producing and reproducing. However, it doesn't suggest to me hard graft so much as getting on with a natural progression.


I consulted the LWB: 'Air creatures: Reach higher, stretch farther, and dream bigger; you are nowhere near your highest potential. Reaching too far, unrealistic expectations, pride goes before fall.' (p. 13). 

Actually, all day yesterday I had a feeling inside...not anxious or worried. But I feel an increased awareness of myself in an important life crisis. You see, the other night we watched a programme about Jeff Lynne, musician and producer in Electric Light Orchestra. Tremendously talented and successful. And at the end of the programme, I was left feeling a bit empty. I envied him, not his talent or even his wealth, but the seeming great fulfillment he seems to have had in his life. In the programme, he describes how he reached a point in his early life where he had to make a choice between 'climbing to the top of the bus' every day to 'go to work for 8 hours a day', or to pursue the love of music that began with a £2 guitar and a reel to reel tape recorder. 'I couldn't believe I got paid to practice every day, to do the thing I love,' he says. And when he describes the morning he announced to his mother that he wasn't getting up for work today or any other day for the rest of his life, because he was now a 'professional musician', I felt really envious. I can't say that I've take such delight or fulfillment from anything in my life. I certainly have pursued nothing with such narrowly focused, single-minded zeal that Jeff Lynne did. I cannot articulate my feelings about this, it is just a big question mark over my head, and I realise I'm caught in the classic Generativity vs Stagnation, the second-to-last stage in Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development.

The card seemed to put words to my vague feeling: 'Reach higher. Stretch farther. You are nowhere near your highest potential.' Gong! But...what is my highest potential?

I decided to do my Lenormand Daily Draw: 4 of 7 -- What is happening with me today? (Obviously, I'm thinking about 'stuff', and 'stuff' in your head all day can be a dangerous proposition...)

Titania's Fortune Cards, Titania Harding

AM (6.05)
Key focus: Lily--harmony, peace
Prediction: The answer to finding peace is to stay grounded.

It's all well and good to reach high. But when thought of the heights gets too dizzying, feel the ground under your feet. That is my plan for today.

PM (19.27)
What happened in relation to the cards: We worked out. I had a lovely shower, we walked to the store and I observed the leaves. We saw some lovely dogs along the way. We did a bit of shopping, bought some blueberry soya ice cream. I baked a small chocolate cake. We had a lovely lunch of broccoli, garlicky butternut squash and sweet potato mash, and a Quorn chicken-style filet. Then we watched an old made-for-TV horror film I remember from my childhood. We found it on Youtube and watched in 7 parts. ('Devil's Triangle, 1975. Sh*t me up when I was 8!) In other words, it was a grounded day, in which I was firmly paying attention to my body and earthly life. Even my meditation this morning was earthly focused; I meditated on the progression of the day and night, visualising myself suffused all around by sunrise, noon, sunset, night, moonrise, full moon, waning moon, all in turn, over and over. Always an energising and peace-inducing practice).
Observations: I have 24 hours in a day. I can spend them wondering what they mean, or I can spend them in enjoyment of them. It's up to me.