A reading in the park

Chloe and I were sitting under a tree today in a local park. She'd just done a reading for herself and she suggested I do a draw she'd read about from Lisa Eddy:

'What truth will set me free?
How will it first piss me off?'

You can see I have drawn Moon and 10 of Cups.

So... what truth will set me free -- confusion, murkiness, something hidden. I was perplexed.

'Life is murky that is just the way it is. Learn from the murkiness, like the crayfish emerging from the depths,' Chloe suggested. 'Out of the mud, the lotus,' I put in, 'and all that malarkey,' I added, waving my hands around. She laughed.

We turned our attention to that 10 of Cups -- the same card I drew yesterday morning. 'It will piss me off because life isn't "Leave it to Beaver"', I said. We stared at the card. 'And I'm not June Cleaver in her string of pearls. This card shows how things are supposed to be -- perfectly clear, a nuclear family, a rainbow, a little house, and everyone happy. It pisses me off that life isn't like that? But I'm one of the most cynical people I know -- I thought I'd dealt with all this already.'

'Maybe it pisses you off that sometimes life IS like that,' Chloe suggested. Brief silence.

'Or maybe there are still things that I expect to be perfect and clear, and it pisses me off that they aren't. I will revisit this later,' I said.

And now it's later, and now a more literal interpretation seems plain.

We went to the Staffordshire Pagan Conference today, and obviously I had expected a certain level of competence from the event -- I had, after all, drawn the 10 of Cups yesterday and sung 'Good Day Sunshine' in anticipation of the event. Yesterday WAS  a fun day in Lichfield. It's a pretty city, and we had a nice meal out.

Then today, we arrived at the venue for conference and there was no signage, no greeter, nothing! But we asked around and found it upstairs.

The venue was set out with chairs facing a stage in the middle, flanked on either side by rows of vendor stalls. Behind the audience was a bar, and behind one row of vendor stalls, a food stall. Everything in one room! This did not bode well, but as Chloe pointed out, we've been to tarot conferences with stalls in the room. It can be done. (Though the addition of a food stall and bar is questionable!)

The organiser did nothing to establish order at start time, he did not call the room to attention, he did not ask participants to find a seat in the audience, and he did not say anything about refraining from shopping the stalls until breaks and lunches. So no one listened to him introduce the first speaker, they just carried on jostling each other at the stalls and talking and laughing loudly. No one listened to the first speaker, who rambled on without once trying to get the attention of the room. We couldn't hear a thing.

I went and complained to the organiser who apologised, but suggested that people would be quieter for other speakers. I suggested it was very rude of them to carry on ignoring the speaker like that. He said he would try to get them to be quieter. When the next speaker was up, the girl who introduced her asked for quiet 'as the speech progresses', but the noise had not died down to indicate anyone was listening to her introduction, and it didn't die down for the second speaker's presentation, either. Couldn't hear a thing. Members of the audience were getting up and wandering away, and by this time they'd opened the bar! Raucous laughter, people getting sandwiches, people milling around the stalls, an echo-y microphone and presenters showing no skills in controlling an audience -- it was nerve wracking. We couldn't take it so we left at 11.45!

That's how we ended up in the park, on a beautiful day, doing tarot readings, a much more edifying experience by far.

So yeah -- murkiness and confusion is a truth about life. I wanted to learn something today, I wanted to hear something I'd never heard before, I wanted some nugget of truth or bit of information that could lead to something new for me. And it didn't happen,  and that did piss me off. But you know, the truth about life is, sometimes sh*t like that just happens. In fact, it happens an awful lot. Things that ought to be good turn out to be disappointing. It pisses you off because you can see how easily it could have been made better, but it wasn't. But you know -- them's the breaks as they say. And if nothing else, today was a lesson in patience, and rolling with it. That includes unnecessarily long wait times between train connections and disappointing porridge. LOL