Love bubbles - have you sent any lately?

A rather studious-looking winged love bunny appears today from the Joie de Vivre Tarot (Cassidy, US Games 2011). I am quite charmed by his headdress, which sports a letter rack at the top. He's a harbinger of messages, hopefully love notes! And his bowl isn't hoisted onto his shoulder, but instead floats beside him, anchored lightly by curling ribbons. The liquid in the bowl effervesces with sparkling heart-shaped bubbles. Beneath his feet, the hill is cut away to reveal the roots of love in the earth, layer upon layer.

This card is telling me today to be the messenger of love. I should express loving, kind thoughts today, and if I feel positively disposed toward anything or anyone, I should give voice to it. Today is not a day to hold back on positive messages. Today is a day for giving genuine compliments and in general bringing some love-bubbles into someone's life. That's a nice mission for a Friday.

Let it flow, let it flow, let it flow

Joie de Vivre Tarot, US Games 2011

Yesterday I drew the Death card, wondering about endings. To be honest I never noticed anything ending, though I was disheartened to see my BMI has risen to 24.5 (teetering on the edge of 'overweight', or as my friend at work says, 'officially fat') which didn't make me happy, but didn't kill my eating of 3 or 4 jaffa cakes. Maybe yesterday was a turning point of some kind, though. I've been working on a particular project, something about the way I live my daily life, or the way I experience my life, and yesterday I had 3 or 4 unexpected positive experiences, which might suggest I'm turning the corner on it.  The Ace of Cups coming after the Death card has meaning for me, in relation to this project. It suggests that I'm heading in the direction I want with it.

Enough with the vague, let's look more closely at this sweet card. A lovely mouse-eared faerie girl in a dress decorated with big red hearts holds a giant clam shell full of water up at shoulder height, allowing it to flow in streams to the pool below. Above her a tiny angel figure holds a big key, and all around her on spirally vines sprouting more red hearts, lovely peacock-like birds perch and nibble from the heart blossoms of the vines. I love the way the mouse-eared girl has headdress of a crescent moon, with wind chimes dangling from it. Listen to the secrets of your heart, it seems to whisper, and love will flow through you.

Grateful dead

A red-eyed skeleton with blue hair perches on a fat-bodied bat. Shes holding up a flower, its petals coming off in the wind, her hair and cape flying, as the bat wings its way toward the unknown. This is the Death card from Joie de Vivre Tarot (Cassidy, US Games 2011).

There is a feeling of decay in the card, with the ribless spine of the skeleton and the sickly splashes of green. The bat is like a bug-bat combo, it's odd, fat body like that of certain moths or bees. It doesn't seem unpleasant, though, and its destination is a glowing 7-pointed star at the end of a tunnel.

There's something about this card that reminds me of the Grateful Dead. Death is encountered full on in this card, considering that the deck itself is rather fey and sweet in many ways (with some pointy edges!) This card confronts the decay of the physical body, an aspect of Death that many tarot cards skip right over in their leap to the 'transformative' effects of Death. But Death itself, as Rachel Pollack points out in 'Tarot Wisdom', is not transformation. Death is the ending that must occur before transformation can happen. This card seems to me to take a frank look at the end of physical life (as frank as you can get in a deck that also features mer-bunnies).

That said, in a reading, I would always hesitate to interpret this card as literal death, though that is always a possibility, and I think it's important that readers should not be squeamish about it. I would usually interpret this card to mean an ending of some sort.

I wonder what is coming to an end for me today. It's a daily draw, and so as I often say, anything that happens will be very mundane. I wonder...

Mer-bugs and bunny fish

Joie de Vivre Tarot, US Games 2011

I notice a lot of cards in the Joie de Vivre Tarot (Paulina Cassidy, US Games 2011) feature underwater scenes, mer-fae, crab-creatures, fishy-folk, and in general an under-the-boardwalk-down-by-the-sea kinda groove. This is okay with me. I need more of the Water element in my mix. Far too Airy, me. Those critters that don't look fishy generally look like they're at least half bug, but in this card, the figure has a girl's upper torso, then the pinched-in waist and bulbous nethers of a bug, suddenly ending in a very skinny fishtail! It's after you notice this that you look again and see her hair's floating, not flying in a breeze, and she's underwater, and those cute bunnies are actually fish creatures, too. (Or at least that's how I noticed it).

Her name is Bliss, and her bunny fish companions are called Innocence and Charity. They flow along in the warm currents of emotional contentment, according to the LWB. Very precious.

Emotional contentment is a good thing, because today's Tuesday, which means my work shift is again 8.30 - 18.15. Pffft.

I may check back in again later with a report on what exactly the emotional contentment turned out to be today -- but remember that with daily draws, everything is really smaaaall scale. So it might be nothing more than a good laugh. And that's good enough!

ETA: I totally forgot about the 'nostalgia' aspect of 6 of Cups, but just remembered that today I was chatting to a 17-year-old member of staff about what we wore when I was 17...yeah, that was in 1984. Wow. Bit of nostalgia, I guess. And we did laugh a lot today...but we always do.

Stay the course

Joie de Vivre Tarot, US Games 2011

What a hopeful card for a Monday morning! The work environment will still be plagued by network problems today, if what we were told on Friday is anything to go by, so I'm not sure why she's so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning. The LWB of the Joie de Vivre Tarot (Paula Cassidy, US Games 2011) calls this figure 'Moxie'. All the characters in this deck are given nicknames that reflect the card meaning in some way. I like that, it's kinda cute. This card, the LWB says, that a 'perfect balance of willpower and action will carry you forward with spiritual and intellectual harmony' and to 'remain confident with your ideas, and stay focused on your intentions.'

Okay, then. I will take this as encourage to stay the path of the project I am now working on. Today is the eighth day in a row to contribute to it, and my intention is to work on it daily until July. The way to do that, as this card seems to be reminding me, is to do one day at time. It's an old saying but it's remembered for a reason -- it's true!

So today's motto is:

Stay the course, light a star,
Change the world where'er you are.
                                         ~Richard le Gallienne

Moon magic

Joie de Vivre Tarot, US Games 2011

As soon as I turned this card over today I heard Jiminy Cricket singing 'Wish Upon a Star':

When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires
Will come to you

If your heart is in your dreams
No request is too extreme
When you wish upon a star
As dreamers do

Fate is kind
She brings to those who love
The sweet fulfillment of their secret longing

Like a bolt out of the blue
Fate steps in and sees you through
When you wish upon a star
Your dreams come true

Maybe it's the shadow of a star seen in the water under the feet of the figure playing violin. I imagine those three owls are harmonizing on the background vocals. There are no monsters of the subconscious emerging from the mirky depths here. Just a cute little crab, marked himself with a star, clinging onto the tree. There's an eye carving just above him. The owls have little halos containing star, moon and sun motifs. A dragonfly perches on the neck of the violin, as if receiving a message from the music which it will carry off into the night, like an intention (or indeed, a wish) released into the universe.

Well, the full moon is considered a powerful time for magic and wish-making...

I had a little check of the LWB to see what the artist, Paulina Cassidy, might have to say, and she confirms that this card is about release and fulfillment: 'Illuminating hidden truths, the moon's energy brings clarity to the surface...trust your intuition, and create a life of your imagination and design. Magic is within.' So what I see rising to the surface in this card is not the Big Bad of the depths (though Cassidy does say we must face our hidden truths)--it's the star, rising up. It's the wish from deep inside that we can bring to fulfillment. Not the hidden monster, but the hidden truth, the hidden wish.

Wish upon a star, indeed. Moon magic.

Just hangin' around

Joie de Vivre Tarot, US Games 2011

I have a new tarot deck and it's all the fault of Siddaleah and Prince Lenormand!  They have used it on their blogs lately and I was forced to buy myself a copy as a result.;) Today I drew a Card of the Day with it, my first draw from it, and got this guy: The Hanged Man.

I've looked through this deck a few times since I received it and I believe these characters may be just as cheeky as the faeries in Brian Froud's Faeries' Oracle! Because today's card is more or less exactly what is going to be happening at work today. With the entire computer network down, there's not a lot we can do but 'hang around' and put in our time. That and apologize to customers and send them to the only other place in town with public access PCs, the Community Cafe. :)

So yeah, I'll be hanging around.

There's another aspect to this card that I will need to exercise as well. How can I put this diplomatically? One of my work colleagues, the kindest soul you could ever want to meet, doesn't deal very well with disruption of ANY kind. She gets herself into a right flap about things, particularly things that are beyond our control. So the other aspect of the Hanged Man, one of patient endurance, will most likely be called into play as well.

I notice, though, that this Hanged Man's hands aren't bound, and neither are his feet. He's got his own stripey tail wound around one leg and the branch. He can let go at any time! He's in way more control of this situation than he at first appears! And that is a reminder that I don't 'have' to go to the job, it's a situation I put myself in, and it's a situation that could as easily be changed. Well, that thought came out of the clear blue this morning! But it does help to remember that I am not a victim in my life, even when I must exercise patience and endurance. Our hands are never truly tied.