Tuesday, June 14, 2011

6/14/11—Putting Luck in Its Place

Today's Draw: The Seven of Cups from The Fantastic Menagerie Tarot. How good are you at daydreaming? Do you see it as a valuable thing or an idle waste of time? And if there were no barriers standing in your way, what would you be doing differently today than what you have planned?

Day Two of our Baba Studio week brings the Seven of Cups, a card I usually equate to having a wealth of choices. That's interesting in light of yesterday's draw, which also touched on choice. But The Fantastic Menagerie puts a different slant on that. It talks about imagination and daydreaming. As the author of the companion book, Sophie Nusslé, so eloquently puts it, it's about "...inventing and populating new worlds of your own imagining...to be carried by the thrill of the moment towards living a life richer in texture and color."

There are those in my family who discount my worth based on my mystical leanings...my hippie-like idealism...my daydreamy nature. I have a nephew who denigrated me quite vocally and rudely a while back because he perceives me as having little of value to bring to this world. It struck me that this attitude would have never entered his mind if he grew up in a household where his parents respected me. It saddens me that I have achieved a good amount of success as a self-employed person, won awards for my work and am respected by my peers and still have to face that kind of energy from the people who are supposed to love and support me most. His mother once suggested to me that I didn't earn my success, rather achieved it through a series of lucky breaks. 

On one hand, I have to own some of that. I'm a fairly free spirit. I don't wear my serious face often. I don't talk about how hard I work or any altruistic things I do. I don't walk through life in an exhausted state demonstrating the distress of my mortal coil. I never complained about the years I spent in crappy jobs paying my dues. They've never seen me in a meeting or leading a presentation. They have no idea how much I know about my industry and all the dozens of industries I serve...no concept of the network of contacts I consciously acquired or the choices I made to forgo immediate desires in favor of the long-term plans I had for my career. To them, I'm just a lucky flake who somehow landed a job where you get to sit in playroom and think of silly ideas for ads all day.

The thing is, their attitudes mirror the attitudes of an outside world where is there is little appreciation for anyone who veers away from the analytical, practical mind. After all, if you're going to be a conceptual person, you should be inventing "important" things. Like rockets. Alternative fuels. And life-saving equipment or medicines. Creativity and "fun" is not for work, it's for whatever spare time you care to waste after work is done. And that model would make perfect sense if all we had was a left side of the brain. But we have a right side, too. And we not only have two sides of a brain that need nourishing, we have a heart and a soul, as well. And this is where the eyes of the overly practical people will roll...with me thinking that stuff like hearts and souls matter. But they do.

Fantasy and daydreams and play not only feed the heart and soul, they are the protoplasm that hosts the nucleus of invention. They are not at odds with the rational mind, rather they work in tandem with it to create new forms of reality for the individual and society at large. Before the rational mind can construct something new, it must be first be imagined. And this isn't just true for things, it's true for lives as well. Before you can create a new life and new reality for yourself, you must imagine it first. And if you want it to be a life that fulfills you, you have to see it first in the heart and soul before you can begin to strategize its attainment in the mind. Fabuliciousness is something you create. Not something you stumble upon because you're daft and lucky.

So yesterday I challenged you to change just one thing about your daily routine, as well as think of other things you could change. (Oh, yes I did...go back and read it if you don't believe me!) Before you can exit a rut, you have to remember you have choices, which is easy to forget when it comes to the things you do mindlessly and automatically every day. And today I challenge you to take that concept a little farther and apply wild imagination to the aspects of your everyday life. If there were no barriers to achieving your dreams, what would you do? Who would you be? And how would you live your life?

Without spending time in the Neverlands of your heart, mind and soul, you simply can't try on new ideas and thoughts and dreams to see if they fit. And until you know what fits, you can't effectively apply your will and faith to achieving those dreams. Because the fact is that stumbling upon a ready-made dream that fits you to a tee is for people who believe in waiting around for luck. And imagining a new reality and bringing it to fruition is for people who want to actually want to achieve their dreams in this lifetime.

4 comments:

  1. Spoken like the altruistic trooper you are with wit and poignant wisdom, Tierney! Your blog strikes mucho chords to resonate. . .and now I will take a step back to my yesterday archive and jostle those change-choices.

    Know that there is another out there where part of their family who are very close under all circumstances except. . .you can FEEL the ruffle and the ivory tower doors slam shut when the Tarot word comes up, as they encourage stick-to-it-iveness when that is never a problem. Your blog resonated with me deeply, as recently, tired of them not wanting to talk about it, but realizing that THEY were the ones bringing it up each time, I put my hand up and said, "Look, I can't help you understand if you won't even read the damn book." ruffle ruffle hmmphs. Hand up again to drop it and talk about something else, anything else.

    Your blog runs the gamut of that vein where the rational mind and creative mind work together in imagination. Keep running yout meetings and playing in the sandbox that gives you a paycheck doing the things you love. Thanks for you work, Tierney! I may not say it enough from my own cavern in the world, but thanks mucho for your work!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm posting a link to this entry on my FB wall. It resonated deeply with me, as well. My parents were always open-minded & encouraged me, but are now both gone. My in-laws, on the other hand, are born again Southern Baptists who fear for my soul believing me to be eternally damned. They also can't believe how successful my web site has become over the years since I first created it in 1997. They're upset that my 12 year old daughter now reads her own tarot cards (at her own insistence, not mine). It's very sad that people limit their view of our marvelous universe. They shortchange themselves of so much.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you, Jordan! What a lovely comment. I have more to say, but I'm going to do it over PM on FB. :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh, thanks, Nefer. The odd thing is that I'm not so sure tarot is the issue in my case...haha. I hadn't even considered it, but now that you and Jordan mention it, it's probably part of the problem. These people had this attitude long before I became a serious tarot person, though. But I can see how that probably creates wedges in families who don't understand what its about. I have five siblings and only one has ever shown a measurable interest in my tarot reading.

    ReplyDelete