I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
Yesterday, I drew the Judgment card in a Tarot reading, in the position Where Courage Is Needed. The Judgement card can be read as a call to adventure and, or alternatively, as a resurrection.
In Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Tarot interpreter Rachel Pollack writes of this card, and its “call to rise to a more meaningful existence”:
Sometimes in life a person can come to a crossroads (notice the cross in the banner) where a decision is required on whether to make some great change. And sometimes it can seem as if something within the person has already decided and the only choice left to the conscious self is to follow with the appropriate action. The old ways of believing and thinking, the old situations, have died without ourselves even noticing.
In the same reading, in the position of What to Release, I drew the Eight of Cups, a card of departure. By the light of the moon1, a person walks away from eight upright cups towards a foreboding mountain, following a river to their left.
Of this card, Pollack writes:
In this card we see someone turning his back on a double row of standing Cups which symbolize a situation that not only has provided happiness, but actually continues to do so. In contrast to the Five, all the Cups remain upright; nothing has been knocked over. And yet the person knows that the time has come to leave….
We see the figure climbing a hill, going to higher ground, with the implication of moving from a less to a more meaningful situation.
These cards together urge me to move towards what is more meaningful. Or, perhaps, they reflect the journey I’ve already taken in that direction.
Last weekend’s artist talks
I attended the artist talks for the WCACO No Rules exhibition which closed last weekend. I connected with two artists I have admired for their work in the past, women I had never met, except by coming across their art. One woman had won a grand prize at a show I participated in. The other had her art written up in a WCACO newsletter from when I had just joined the group.
Looking up both of them online at the time I was introduced to their art, I found that they were just like me, older women who felt a call to make art, and who stuck with it long enough to develop skills and to evolve a particular style.
I am realizing that influence and inspiration doesn’t always depend upon building an audience of thousands or millions of followers online. Instead, it can happen one-on-one.
In my own life, I’m experiencing how one person’s activities can influence and inspire another’s. As I wrote before, my creative activities have inspired my older daughter to answer the call to work on her own. In another example of that, my younger daughter is working on an art piece to submit to WCACO’s (Un)Altered Books show, because she was inspired by my own work for it.
Pollack writes, of the Judgment card, that one person’s liberation is everyone’s:
By showing a whole group rising the trump reminds us that there is no personal liberation. Each human being is part of the human race and therefore responsible for the development of the race as a whole. No one can be truly free while someone else is enslaved. [We] might recall the Talmudic saying (quoted at the end of the film Schindler’s List) ‘He who saves one life, it is as if he has saved the entire world.
I think of my maternal grandmother, who inspired me to make art. She didn’t try to sell her work or show it. She didn’t do it for any other reason than that she couldn’t stop herself from creating, and also because it was a way to share with other people.
Leaving behind the things of early and middle adulthood
I read the Eight of Cups card in my reading as describing the journey I’m taking right now away from what was demanded of me in early and middle adulthood: that I create a partnership and raise children, that I form a household, that I build a career and financial security, that I orient myself towards what society wanted of me. I had that success, and I don’t need it anymore. But it’s hard to walk away from it nevertheless.
Walking instead towards meaningfulness and creative expression feels lonely sometimes, like the figure on the card. It feels like I’m walking only by the light of the moon. There’s a river burbling beside me, which makes me feel a sense of progress. There is a scary mountain ahead. It looks stark and uniniviting. Can I really live like that?
Pollack notes that the figure in the Eight of Cups resembles the Hermit, a Tarot card who follows the vita contemplativa, withdrawing from normal society to pursue wisdom and enlightenment. She writes:
To reach the height of the Hermit’s wisdom, we must first put the ordinary things of life behind us.
The Hermit reminds us that the image of land does not necessarily mean action or involvement in the ordinary sense, but an suggest almost the opposite: that is, withdrawing from outer activity to seek at greater self-awareness.
I’m not sure that following the way of the hermit is exactly what I should be doing — another card in yesterday’s reading was the Six of Wands, a card of external visibility and validation. I interpret that to mean that my current urge to apply to art shows is something to indulge, not resist.
However, the Eight of Cups says to me that my current trajectory of leaving what used to matter to me behind is as well a valid and valuable direction.
Putting these cards together, I read a message of courage, contemplation, and creativity.
I will bring courage to my willingness to live a life of contemplation, one which is more solitary than my life before. But I will also bring the courage to create, in that it might allow me to find a kind of salvation for myself while showing the way to other people around me.
- Actually, Pollack says its an eclipse. ↩︎