I’ve been in the habit of drawing a tarot card every day for the past month or so. (Stick with me, fair readers, before you decide to judge.) I find it centers me in the morning while I’m sipping my coffee, and it guides me in setting my intention for the day. I don’t think there’s magic involved, other than the usual magical weirdness of how life works, but I’m always amused at correlations. Like the last Monday of school, I drew the wheel of fortune, then went downstairs and discovered my tire was flat.
I see it as being similar to setting an intention for the day during morning yoga, or having a daily bible verse or inspirational quote to guide you. Ever since reading Karen Cushman’s Katherine Called Birdie in fifth grade, I became interested in learning more about the saints’ feast days. (I first learned about my confirmation saint, Juliana, in Cushman’s book) I see a lot of really lovely parallels between the cult of the saints and the tarot, and I don’t think it’s blasphemous of me to say so. It feels a little bit like having an Advent calendar all year round, and who doesn’t love Advent calendars?
I mention this because sometimes, if I’m particularly busy or wanting to play a game with myself, I don’t look up the widely recognized meanings until later in the day to see how things wound up connecting. Yesterday, the first day of Westward Hough, I drew the 8 of cups. I looked up (one interpretation of) the meaning this morning. I seriously can’t make this ish up.
Pretty neat, right? Tarot cards, to me, provide archetypes on the hero’s journey, so I believe you can draw any card on any day and find relevance in whatever you get. (Which is why I’m never surprised or amazed or all hopped up on majick when a card seems to “match.”) But I do think it was a pretty lovely card to draw for the first day of our trip.
Today, as we head into Iowa, I have lots of thoughts about Hildegard Von Bingen’s PHYSICA, so we’ll see if I can make those coherent at all. And speaking of the Tarot, look at this AMAZING design the talented tattoo apprentice Lana Zellner (Eight Coins) created for meeee when we pass through Missoula next week:
(Three of cups symbolism here.)