Tarot Reading for the Collective ~ November © 2010 Sarah Barry

Posted by sarahthepsychic on November 10, 2010 · Leave a Comment

It was all going fine until we started to get philosophical. We had a marvelous time with the Ace of Cups, realizing how wonderful it felt to be really honest with ourselves, and take full ownership of our emotional state. The resulting benefits in our surrounding relationships were proving to be inspirational. Yet then we decided to discard the Ace of Cups in favour of the 9 of Cups.

Hmmm.

Not that there is anything wrong with the 9 of Cups per se, its just… well, now’s not the best time okay people? We were making such progress with the good ol’ Ace, and then instead of choosing to live life experientially, we decided to just talk about our understandings of life instead. The 9 of Cups is great at allowing us the space to take note of how far we’ve come yet can sometimes get lost in words and hear only what it wants to hear and meanwhile our emotions are being ignored or suppressed by whatever means possible.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Does this seem all doom and gloom? I mean, we do have the Queen of Cups there right? She can help us sit down and remember all the goodies the Ace of Cups brought us, and the momentum we were starting to follow yet forgot about almost immediately.

The Queen is a winner when it comes to slowing down already, and reminding us to drink more water and eat a good breakfast and all that helpful stuff that seems obvious yet often we forget to do anyway (I have heard of this. People who have access to food who don’t eat breakfast!). So once we are feeling nourished once more (and not just physically), we can take a spin with the 9 of Wands, The Magician and The Wheel of Fortune.

This lively trio wants us to remember our circus skills. I’m not referring to acrobatics here (although please continue to be acrobatic if you can, its wonderful to watch). Rather, I’m referring to our ability to think laterally and ignore the conditioned structures that our well-meaning teachers laid out for us. Doesn’t 1 + 1 actually equal a window? And doesn’t it make more sense to imagine a world where we manifest beautiful things rather than how to harm our neighbours?

Yet there is this whiff of sulfur in the air. The kind of whiff that comes from a blast of some kind. Say if, for example we were to come across a large tower being blasted apart by lightning and fire. For those of you familiar with the tarot, yes, we have come across The Tower .

The Tower. A tarot card that rarely looks welcoming. The deck that I’m using (Tarot of the Cat People by Karen Kuykendall) features a huge stone cat being blasted apart by what appears to be a comet. That’s gotta hurt. Two figures and a cat are leaping/falling from the comet-besieged tower. We could take this lying down or we could jump back up and refuse to allow the crazy things that occur every day in this world to get us down.

Yes, people are racist/sexist/homophobic/xenophobic/ageist/ist ist ist!…And sometimes it is hard to navigate with a cool head when there is so much hatred being spewed around the planet.

And yes, I am sitting here in a comfortable room in a first world country, having just eaten nutritious food, contemplating a cup of tea, drinking filtered water, tap tapping away on my laptop, looking down at my white skin and acutely aware of how privileged I am in this constructed reality.

The Tower doesn’t really want us to suffer. It wants us to live! It wants us to really look around us and notice what is working and what died some time back and needs burying already. To work with The Tower means to have a powerful ally – a tempestuous friend that is good at pissing people off but only when those people are sticking their heads in the ground.

Let’s have a truly Towerful month! A month of putting out fires and starting new ones (I don’t mean that literally by the way. Just so you know. Well, put fires out by all means… just don’t put your life at risk). Starting a Tower fire means we are acknowledging our responsibilities in this life and heading forth into the night (and day) with the understanding that we are no longer bound by our own failings.