Today's Draw: Ten of Chalices from the Tarot of the
New Vision. What are you lacking in life? What do you have better than
everyone else? When you add it all up, are you "winning"?
It's hump day in Zing Week and today's message is,
to put it succinctly, count your blessings. The Tarot of the New Vision is an
interesting deck, because it takes tarot's staple Rider Waite deck and
re-visions it from the opposite angle. So, in the original card, we see this
couple from the back, instead of the front.
In doing this, the deck comes up with some
interesting commentary on our traditional take on the cards. For example, in
the Rider Waite Ten of Cups, you see the couple looking at an idyllic farm home
sitting at the edge of a meandering river in the distance. It seems like a
magical moment when a rainbow of love floats over their heads as they look
toward their perfect life. A card of wishes achieved and dreams fulfilled. And
they will, most certainly, live happily ever after.
But in the New Vision, we see that perhaps their
reality is more mundane. They are in front of a modest home and the river is
more creek-like. The rainbow is gone, but the sky is a beautiful shade of pink
and blue. The pavement and landscape here are a bit rockier. And they have a
goofy shelter dog running toward them. But in this card they are every bit as
happy as we imagined them when we thought the other house might be theirs.
Often, our reality doesn't fit our visions of
perfection. Our home may not be a mini-mansion. Our living room may not look
like it inspired a Pottery Barn catalog. Our grounds may not be precisely
manicured, our dog may not be purebred and our husband and son may not wear
pants. But that doesn't mean we don't have "the best of
everything".
No matter how you look at this picture, there's
shelter and a fireplace for warmth. There's ready access to water. There's
fertile land. The only thing that could make this scene "less than"
is a lack of gratitude.
The other day I was behind a man and his three
children in line at the grocery store. The boy got some gum. The older girl got
a magazine with Justin Bieber on it. And the middle girl got nothing...haha.
She tried to throw something in the cart because, "everyone else got
something". But her dad said, "this isn't a contest. Next time you'll
get something and they won't."
If you're like me, you're thinking the girl should
have got something. Because clearly it IS a contest...one her brother and sister
won and she, alone, lost. In her eyes, there's only one reason dad didn't treat
her like the other two—because he doesn't love her as much. Remember feeling
that way? I could totally empathize with that little girl and almost offered to
buy her something, but I knew it wasn't my place.
Like it or not, we ARE socialized from an early age
to believe life is about winning, and winning is usually defined as ending up
with the highest score, whether that's measured in grades, athletic
achievement, the value of what you have, how much you earn or what your
status/rank/title is. That mindset stands between us and being truly happy with
what we have, no matter how much, little or average it is. And it also stands
between us and our zing. Because we spend so much of our time climbing that we
never take the time to enjoy the view.
While we all intellectually know it's not a
contest, we all get caught up in the contest mentality from time to time. I
believe we're all there more often than we're conscious of. But what if we
started measuring contests in terms of contentment, inner peace and kindness?
The world would be a different place. Just like the couple in today's card, we
might actually look toward the perfect house on the hill and feel utterly
triumphant about our simple cottage on the rocky knoll, our goofy junkyard dog
and our dress-wearing husband. Instead of continuing to strive for some ideal
destination, we might finally realize we've already arrived.
Facebook readers can see both cards at http://thedailytarotdraw.blogspot.com/
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