LET’S START WITH “CERTIFIABLE.”
Not certified, just certifiable. 😉 The coursework is done and my paperwork has been submitted to Biddy Tarot, and now I’m just waiting for (hopefully) my official Biddy Tarot certification. Will I feel special? 🙂 Well, I do like to get a good grade from the teacher. haha. But seriously, I do think the coursework was very educational and inspiring. Whatever level of competence I have achieved thus far is not completely due to this course of study (as I’ve been voraciously consuming Tarot info from a variety of sources ever since I dropped down this rabbit hole), but it sure has helped! And it’s clear that a lot of time, effort, money, love, and wisdom went into creating those courses. So I will happily accept my Tarot Scout badge for this endeavor! (Oh my gosh, you guys! Tarot Scouts! Slap a TM on that and I think I’ve just come up with an amazing idea for packaging and marketing Tarot classes! Different learning modules earn you different badges, and maybe we could organize a summer camp to go along with it! You heard it here first.)
Whew. Well, in the meantime I’m going to share some more recent happenings rather than delving into my back story. But I do want to fill some of that in soon. Anyway…
BUSY.
I am a moderator for the “Tarot Learning Group” on Facebook, and besides all the routine, metaphorical herding of cats that goes along with moderating an online community, we have some occasional special events, and there’s one coming right up! Tomorrow evening we have Brigit Esselmont (founder of Biddy Tarot) herself presenting a live training session called, “Reading Tarot Intuitively.” Pretty sure I’m already reading intuitively, especially since Brigit’s support of this approach was a big reason I took her courses. But I’ll be there to see what she and the other group members have to say, and to help “moderate” anything that seems to need it.
I also help moderate a local “Buy Nothing” group on Facebook, though honestly I don’t do much for them at the moment, and am considering putting in my notice. It’s a fairly guilt-free thing to do when one isn’t contributing much anyway.
Other than that, I’m also a freelance/unpaid editor and proofreader for various indie comics and other self-published writers. And that work is piling up while I wrangle one low-level household repair task after another: a leaky kitchen faucet, the dishwasher’s motherboard intermittently mounting a one-machine uprising against the humans, an unpleasant smell in the shower stall that I’m hoping some enzymes down the drain will fix, etc. And I’m a mom of two school aged kids (and one of those schools is middle school, which is a whole new ballgame!) and my husband’s job is super busy and stressful. And we have pets. And I have chronic health conditions that make my personal resources more variable than I’d like. SO…like everyone else, I’m busy. And like many creative folks, organization and long-term project management are not my biggest strengths. Which should probably bring me to my 7 of Cups story…
7 OF CUPS.
This saga noticeably began when I decided to participate in a “Blog Hop” for International Tarot Day (July 8! Google it!) — a fun little game in which 78+ bloggers will each create something related to an assigned Tarot card. The day before I received my assignment, I pulled the 7 of Cups as my daily draw and gave a mental “UGH” because (a) I’ve never really properly understood this card, and (b) I’d just gotten this card a few days prior in a reading by my friend Sunshine ShGa (angelpractitioners.com/sunshine) but hadn’t really explored it further, so I felt a little pestered. haha. I said to myself sarcastically, “Watch them give me THIS card for the Blog Hop.” And sure enough, the next day I got the email that I’d been assigned THIS card. Pretty hilarious, and unlikely (1/78 chance, right?), but then…
I came up with the idea that I would, for this dreaded 7 of Cups project, make a collage version of the card, since I used to enjoy some old school “cut and paste” collage making when I was much younger and made more time for art, and I have a giant stack of magazines already that I collected months ago for the purpose of restarting this hobby. I then happened to run across a post in the “Tarot Nerds” Facebook group in which they were calling for members to submit original Tarot cards for a collaborative deck they are making. (I think this might already be an annual tradition, but I’m not sure about that.) I figured if I was going to make a card anyway, I could use it for two purposes, so I offered to submit it to my fellow Tarot Nerds for their deck, assuming of course that they didn’t have that particular card assigned already. The response I got? Basically, “Would you believe it? This is the ONLY card we haven’t already assigned.” *insert goosebumps here* In fact, it turned out that there was ONE other card that also hadn’t been assigned, but after the last coincidence, this was still starting to feel like an important synchronicity. THEN, last night…
I was looking for something totally unrelated in the stacks of things under my desk, and ran across my first ever Tarot deck, which I haven’t used for a while. (Probably because it’s under my desk with a bunch of other things.) But anyway, I felt guilty and decided to get it out and shuffle it to wake it up, and draw a card because that’s what you do when you’re making up, and…well…I’m giving you ONE GUESS which card I pulled!!! YES. It was the 7 of Cups. Okay, now I took statistics once, but it’s been awhile. I vaguely recall that the probability of a series of events would be calculated by multiplying the probabilities of each event in the series. So that would be…if I start with just the time I said “watch them give me this card” and call that 1/78 when it was “this” card, then the next assignment being the same card (let’s ignore the fact that the 7 of Cups was one of the only two remaining cards for the collaborative deck and call it 1/2 chance that I got the 7 instead of the other card), then the 1/78 chance that the very next card I would draw for myself was the 7 of Cups again:
1/78 * 1/2 * 1/78 = 0.00008218277499
Now it doesn’t take a math major to realize that the probability that you are still reading this is undoubtedly even lower than that number. hahahahahahaha. (Did I mention I was NOT a math major? I could be totally wrong about this calculation. I am not going to check my work right now, but you’re welcome to.) But seriously, it doesn’t take a math major to see that this probability is extreeeeeeeeemely low. I am not totally freaking out, because improbable card appearances happen quite regularly to me and my other Tarot-loving friends, but this one really stands out.
Anyway, I think you get my points: (1) I’m meant to finally get to know this card, and (2) I tend to go off on tangents, and (3) these two ideas might be related.
So obviously I need to do a Tarot reading (a custom spread) about what the 7 of Cups should mean to me at this juncture in my life. And I need to do it soon, because I have a lot of cutting and pasting to do right afterwards. And eventually I’ll get back to writing about the other things I said I would share, and still want to share.
Meanwhile, the electrician is here (don’t ask!) and I’m open for any and all insights you have about the 7 of Cups. ❤
Ace of Tarot 