Tarot Blog Hop: The Joy Of Gifting

Welcome to the Tarot Blog Hop!

An international group of tarotists (check out the master list) are all writing on the same topic and then linking to each other so that the reader can hop from one blog to the next, seeing all the permutations and facets that the topic inspired in different writers.

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The Joy Of Gifting

Our topic for this blog hop is proposed by wrangler Arwen Lynch of Tarot by Arwen. Very simply, she gave us a five position spread to explore the idea of sharing gifts with family and friends.

I decided to use the Sacred Isle Tarot. I like working with card pairs, so I’m going to pull two cards for each question.

What gift would I give the world if I could?

5 of Cups and Ace of Pentacles

To see the gift of new opportunities in our losses.

In my meditation practice, I have been working with waka, Japanese poetry, and my recent meditations have been on this poem:

Watch and learn from the stone that has been hollowed by raindrops.
Discard the idea that achieving a task is too difficult.
Nothing is impossible.

My personal mantra lately is “drip drip drip” as I try to chip away slowly at the not-entirely impossible tasks before me.

I think my gift to the world would be to see those spilled cups –the things that go wrong in our life–as the first tiny drips that carve out the foundation in stone of what eventually becomes a vast castle, a legacy of achievement.

What gift would I want from the world?

The Star and the Knight of Wands

Spiritually inspired action.

This is not a fantasy deck, and all the artwork is pretty realistic, but this Star card has weird tree-sized mushrooms in the background and the lovely lady in the pool has pointed elf ears. To me, that says to find the fantastic in everyday life, the unreal in the mundane, the creative in the created, and allow that guiding principle to spur me in the actions I take. The guiding star becomes the flaming torch, idealism leads the charge.

When I was making jewelry, I called my business Silmarill: Inspiring Art. I meant that my art was inspiring, but more importantly that it inspired art in others. That each creation inspires creativity. Perhaps I want to take this gift back, to reclaim my ability to create. Or not to reclaim it; I’ve never lost it. Maybe I’m not sewing or making jewelry now, but I am knitting a lot, and designing some tarot bag patterns (basically, no one who knows me would let me get away with saying I’m not creative!); but to go deeper than that and find the unreal, that fantasy world, my very unique and slightly distorted take on life, and allow my work to emanate from that most personal part of me. I have signed up for a writing class on the lyric essay that starts in January–I wonder if this will be my gift from the world.

What gift have I gotten that has brought me joy?

The Queen of Cups and the Fool

Ok, I have a confession. I started to do this assignment twice in the past week, even grabbed a deck, but then didn’t do it. Then Thursday a miracle happened–I got a call from a nearby animal shelter telling me that someone had turned in my cat who ran away back in July. He’d been gone for over five months, and I felt pure joy when he was back with me. After bringing him home, I had lunch with a tarot friend and said, I wish I had done that spread when I first thought to do it–I wonder if it would have shown me my cat coming home as my greatest gift.

Pulling these cards together–the Queen of Cups, the sign of Cancer, the mother, the nurturer, the home; and the Fool, reckless adventure, does indeed seem to address me and my cat. (He’s the reckless one! What stories he must keep!)

But as I look at it, I am reminded of perhaps a deeper lesson and its resulting gift. When I finally began following my intuition–when I let those nonsensical, irrational thoughts lead me off those cliffs, I received my greatest joy: finding ever deepening layers of creativity and daring to share my unique visions with others in a way that they can be inspired into their uniqueness. (In some ways, that seems to be surfacing as the theme of this spread.)
Learning to follow my intuition is an on-going process. I didn’t follow it early in the week when I had the notion to do this spread. But I do follow it much more than I used to. And that is a gift.

What gift have I given that has brought me joy?

The Page of Swords and the King of Wands

The Page of Swords in relevé, yellow bodice, skirt flared like a tutu, head tilted, holding her glinting sword above her, a scroll in the other hand, graceful arm that gently crosses her body. She dances on a tuft of flowers at the tip-top of a mountain, a vast panorama of mountain peaks and glacial lakes curving out behind her. A man, direct, secure, swathed in a green cloak, seated on his throne, leaning ever so slightly forward, staff held in front of him across his body. He is inside, raised on a dais, an arched window behind him opening onto nearby trees and in the distance a castle.

The images resolve, dissolve into me as a child, performing in the annual ballet recital presented at Young Auditorium by the Madeleine Murphy School of Ballet, my father, seated in the audience, watching intently to see his daughter on stage.

Now, thirty-odd years later, I dance a different dance high in the mountains, my father back in the land of deciduous trees, in his new home, removed from the old castles, and still he admires me and the work that I do.
I never would have guessed this.

What is one last thing I would like to share about this season?

9 of Cups and 7 of Wands.

Smirk. I was thinking, I have nothing else to say. No other particular thoughts about the season, at least none that I’d care to share. And so after such a series of beautiful cards, I get two smug ones, two go-away-and-leave-me-alone ones. But the thing is, I almost didn’t sign up for this BlogHop. I’m not much of a gift giver (although I very much enjoy making things for people) and I really have to work hard to be gracious when receiving gifts; I always feel like I don’t ring true in my expression of appreciation. I didn’t think I’d enjoy this hop. Kind of like how I toss presents in the back of a closet thinking I’ll probably just regift them.

Like the 9 of Cups, I’m happy enough where I am, little dreams rise like glittery stars from my scheming brain, but I stay on this plateau instead of rising to the perfection of the 10. The man fighting off the other six wands stands in front of a great hollow tree, entrance to the lower world. I used to write short stories when I was 9 or 10, always discovering doors in trees that led me into fantasy worlds of adventure.

As much as I pursue my gifts, as we have seen in the previous cards, I ask myself now, in what way do I guard against them; stay smug and stuck; spend too much time defending my private passageway rather than turning my back on my attackers, my detractors, climbing into that tree and seeing what adventures I and the Fuzzy Kitten can go on. I can’t just rest on my laurels and be happy with last year’s gifts this year; it is my gift not to have reached my potential.

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Joy Vernon has been studying and teaching energetic and esoteric modalities for more than twenty years. She is the organizer of the Denver Tarot Geeks, Denver Tarot Meetup and Denver Traditional Reiki Meetup, and she served on the faculty of Avalon Center for Druidic Studies. She is one of the psychics at Isis Books and has been featured at SpiritWays, the Mercury Café and psychic fairs throughout the Denver Metro and Northern Colorado. She is a Certified Professional Tarot Reader and a member of the American Tarot Association and Tarosophy Tarot Association. Joy also teaches Traditional Japanese Reiki. For information on upcoming classes or to schedule an appointment, please visit JoyVernon.com.

© 2014 by Joy Vernon. All rights reserved.