Dear reader of signs,
Welcome to the Friday, the 16th of June’s observation from my daily ‘Reading the Signs’ June challenge, an exercise of paying attention with a focus in mind as the day unfolds.
I’m continuing to work through my decks of cards, and during the afternoon dug into my book collection to uncover my older Tarot books. I’ve purchased a couple of extra texts on the subject recently, and have been researching it again. It’s been a reconnection with an earlier era when I devoured the subject.
For this session I chose the Botantica Tarot by Kevin Jay Stanton and drew Dandelion - i.e. The Fool, in a traditional Tarot deck.
This deck was part of a Kickstarter campaign which took years of work by Stanton. I remember him as being very dependable and updating his backers with regular progress as he hand-painted all the cards. It’s a gorgeous deck, with top notch packaging — you’ll get a better sense from his web site.
The Fool, is card zero in a tarot deck: pure potential, the naive and optimistic quester/jester. Here, represented by a dandelion, considered a weed by many, but the leaves and roots are edible, and they have many traditional uses (the sap is supposed to be a treatment for warts, for instance). It’s a plant that’s everywhere in the world but often considered a nuisance. I adore that phase in the early spring when the fresh green fields are dotted with their cheerful yellow heads. For me it’s an optimistic sign of the end of winter.
This dandelion has progressed through its bright flowering stage and is now a delicate halo of seeds, bursting to disperse. The tiniest breeze flings them into the environment, carried on the currents of fate.
Like the Tarot Fool, poised to walk off the cliff, this card of tumbling seeds is all about foward motion. It is the next stage in your life.
It is the card of deep instinct and acceptance. Movement happens because it is the correct time and it occurs without second-guessing or cynicism. As we get older we can forget the ability to start spontaneously. Experience makes us wary as we know all that can go wrong.
During the day an old friend asked a question about when a certain project began, and I dug into a cache of very old emails from the late 1990s. I started scanning emails between Martin and myself. I was so charmed by them — long-ish personal emails are no longer a thing — that I read out a bunch of them to him. We were smiling and amused by the lightness of our relationship, and by our ease in the world. Before we learned harder lessons.
Then I recalled the card for today. Leap, play, laugh is the Fool’s mantra.
Shake your seed head. Spin on quixotic winds.
Fall; grow; germinate; fly away again.
Bare your teeth at the rushing air.