Does he look like he's going to stay there for long? Not likely!

Cat's Eye Tarot, US Games 2011

The Knight of Wands comes up for me today, and it is another card that has stalked me in 2013. (By 'stalker card', we mean cards that keep turning up over and over in separate readings.) In Cat's Eye Tarot, the court cards seem based more on relative age of the cat than distinctions of personality. Pages are kittens, Knights are adolescents, Queens are sleek adult females and Kings are burly adult males. The Wands suit features orange tabby cats, and the Knight of Wands here is an adolescent/young adult tabby up a tree. He's not charging off into battle like the traditional Knight of Wands, but I guess it did take a bit of power surge to get up that tree. Presumably he's doing that weird cat thing where for no discernible reason he went charging up the tree, will then sit and stare for a few minutes, startle, and for no apparent reason go charging back down the tree again. I had a cat like this once. (I have owned cats in the past...my ex-husband liked cats). This cat was kinda psycho. He did things like sneak up on a box or upright brown paper grocery bag, and suddenly spring straight up into the air to land inside it. If I was in the loo, he would stick his arm under the door (we lived in an old house and the doors didn't fit that well--the bathroom door had a big gap at the bottom) and feel around on the floor and all around the door. It was strange to be sitting in the bathtub and suddenly see a cat arm poke through there. I don't know what he thought he was going to find. If I left the bathroom door ajar so he could get in, he would come in, hop on the toilet and step over onto the edge of the tub and then walk all the way around the edges of the bathtub a few times, sometimes using my knees or shoulders as a bridge to get across. He would suddenly appear thundering from the hallway sounding like a Shetland pony to leap upon the sofa, run across the back of it, race around the living room and then streak back into the hallway again. This particular cat caused us to have to wire the Christmas tree to the wall because he would run up the tree and ride it down to the floor. He liked to crawl under the sofa and attack my feet from underneath. But the most annoying thing he did was attack my backside when I was washing dishes. I guess when I was scrubbing pots I would get my whole body into it, which must have caused some jiggling to the backside. Well, he would launch himself halfway across the kitchen and latch onto my backside for a second before falling back off again and running away. Sometimes he really latched on and I would have to shake him off. After a couple of episodes of this I would close the kitchen door to wash the dishes. That cat was a menace. He was also mad. He liked to eat wasps. Seriously, how could I make something like this up? This cat was pretty dang insane.

Anyway, now that I look at the cat in the card, I can see he does look like he could at any minute get some wild hair up his butt to go charging like an insane thing either up or down the tree, leaving observers to wonder what the heck -- and that is a pretty Knight of Wandsy thing to do.

After yesterday's weights workout, I won't be sprinting anywhere, but I think this card today is telling me to continue to approach things (in this case, my workout regime) with gusto.

Change of plan?

Cat's Eye Tarot, US Games 2011

Here's a pip card with no pips on it. I have to admit, that does annoy me. I have a few decks in which the illustration does not include the right number of pips; I just wonder WHY? Why not put the pips in? And with this Seven of Pentacles from the Cat's Eye Tarot, I have to think, what does a cat sitting in an open doorway have to do with Seven of Pentacles? One of my little litmus tests for a tarot is, if there were no titles on this card, could I tell what card it is? This particular card gets a resounding no from me. If that bit at the bottom were chopped off, this would be a painting of a cat. A very attractive painting, very charming, but still -- nothing here to lead to me think, 'Oh yes. What an apt representation of the Seven of Pentacles.'

RWS 

The traditional RWS 7 of Pents shows a farmer leaning on his hoe in the middle of his field, admiring his crop and awaiting the bounty of the harvest. The Druidcraft shows a druid harvesting mistletoe, beside a rock carved with seven pentacles. Even the Gaian Tarot, even though there are no pentacles in the card, has seven trees standing in the background. I just like my pip cards to have the right number of something on them.

Anyway, leaving that aside, today's card is the Seven of Pentacles, a card which usually is interpreted to mean patience while something comes to fruition, amongst many other possible alternatives. I can't see that in this cat. So I looked at the LWB and had to laugh, because it describes exactly what I've already done this morning:

Druidcraft

'Take the time to assess your progress as you reach for a goal [so far so good, very traditional and expected]. If you do not see the expected results, you may need to make an adjustment. Do you find yourself standing at a crossroads needing to make a choice? Stop, assess and then prepare to move on and enjoy the good things life has to offer.'

Well, today I assessed my yoga programme and decided I should add in some weights work to support my practice. And I did a weights workout this morning instead of yoga. So after I'd assessed and made a change, I drew a card confirming what I'd just done. I assume more assessment and change is on the horizon. (I know I could use it where food choices are concerned!)

I really have no idea what this cat is assessing. Maybe he thought he wanted to go outside until he saw it was dark out there and now he wants to go back in? He is looking up (presumably at the person who opened the door) with a 'You've got to be kidding me' sort of expression on his face. I suppose whether to go out or stay in is one of the biggest decisions a cat may make in a day.

Clearly I will need to draw more cards in order to warm a bit toward both cats and this deck. It's cute, you know, but I'm just not feelin' it yet. Still, I'm trying to 'be more cat'!!

Be more cat

I am not a cat person. I've just never had much use for them. They don't seem to do much, they can clearly live without us, and they make my nose itch. I left Facebook because to me it was 'the place where people endlessly post snapshots of their cats' (among other reasons). Lately there's been an ad campaign for O2 with the slogan, 'Be more dog!' that features CG cats enjoying the freedom releasing their inner dog. It delights me:

Cats sense my antipathy, I think, because they invariably make a beeline for me and wind themselves around my feet or climb onto the sofa with me to shove their butts in my face.

So, you wouldn't think I'd end up with Cat's Eye Tarot (Debra M Givin, US Games 2011), but I did! On a whim, I selected it as trade for one of the decks I had on offer for free here recently. It arrived in the post the other day, and so I thought I'd try a draw with it. Doesn't seem to matter the deck, tarot is tarot, and the cards that have been stalking me lately turned up (I shuffled them nine times before drawing. Seemed fitting):

Queen of Wands has been stalking me most of 2013, and Temperance has just now turned up (possibly to remind me to look at the ways Queen of Wands is manifesting and make sure they are not out of balance, like doing too much yoga or maintaining too many blogs!) For the last card, I took a peek at the book, and this sentence struck me: 'Do you face challenges with confidence, or do you take a defensive stance?' Well the answer to that is pretty much 'defensive stance' across the board. So I guess the question for me now is, once I've identified the out-of-balance aspects of my recent approach to life, to determine how the imbalance is a result of taking a defensive stance. 

So yeah, for the next week, this blog will be a little more cat.