Hello Roses!

I’m sure you’ve heard, but… winter is coming!

After I put together that last post on Runes for Winter Solstice and the New Year, I thought it would be great to give you something similar with Tarot Cards! Whatever this time of year is like for you socially and emotionally, I believe the cards of the Tarot have many things to teach us and much help to offer us. As part of my offering to you this holiday season, I’ve selected three of what I think are the most seasonally-appropriate Tarot cards for focus, spellwork, and meditation around the time of Winter Solstice (Yule) and the transition into the New Year: the Eight of Cups, the Five of Pentacles, and The Star.

Eight of Cups

At a time when many of us are contemplating New Year’s Resolutions, few tarot cards could be more appropriate than the Eight of Cups. The Eight of Cups is about walking away from what no longer serves us. I shared on this concept in relation to Dagaz in my last post, but the Eight of Cups tarot card shows us this farewell from another angle. Personally, I often see the chalices depicted throughout the suit of cups as symbolically representing the place in our hearts we try to fill with love, meaning, and fulfillment. The primary lesson of the suit of cups as I see it is that, try as we might to fill our cups and our hearts from outside of ourselves, truly we can only find fulfillment from within. (If you’d like to read more in depth about this way of understanding the suit of cups, you can find that blog post here.)

The Eight of Cups also depicts a mountain range, towards which the figure makes their way, staff in hand. The top of the mountain is the figure’s destination, and represents their highest goals. What is your mountain? What path must you take to climb it? Take some time to reflect on your goals for the coming year and into the future, and what it will realistically take to achieve them. What is required of you now, at this moment in time, to move in that direction?

You cannot carry every part of your current life into that envisioned future. Something old must go in order to make space for something new. Your load is heavy. What can you leave behind? What no longer serves you on this journey?

In the last year (or in your past in general), how have you sought fulfillment from outside yourself? What distractions from your true purpose have you allowed to take up residence in your life, and how have you justified those distractions that do not serve you? Take some time to reflect and journal on the habits and behaviors that no longer serve you, and envision yourself physically leaving them behind. You may want to combine this work with the Dagaz rune meditation described in this post.

In your journal or on a sheet of paper, you may want to create a drawing or a collage of yourself as the figure on the Eight of Cups. Represent the thought patterns, habits, and behaviors you are choosing to leave behind at this time as words, symbols, or images of physical objects behind you. Draw the mountain in front of you, and at the top of the mountain, draw or paste words or images that represent your most important goals moving forward, the higher purpose, vision, or dream that means enough to you to sacrifice the distractions you are leaving behind. Keep it in your journal to look back upon, or put it up somewhere you will see it often and be reminded of the importance of your goal and the necessity of your sacrifice.

Five of Pentacles

When you look upon the Five of Pentacles, what do you see? Where do you place yourself within the picture? Are you one of the figures passing through the snow, somehow excluded from the sanctuary? Are you on the inside, surrounded by the light and warmth of community and high spirits? In your life, who is on the outside and who is on the inside?

The message of the Five of Pentacles seems to me to be that, regardless of the true nature of wealth and abundance, humans continue to live in fear, and in so doing we exclude both ourselves and others from some of the richest aspects of experience. When we do the simple math, there are more than enough resources for everyone, but when power is poorly distributed, some people get more than they could ever take advantage of, and many people barely scrape by.

The somewhat Christmas-y nature of this piece may throw some of you witches off, but I hold that if Jesus and Arthur Waite both thought that it was important to turn our attention to the poorest and most wretched among us with love, care, and respect, there must be something to it. And isn’t any church or temple (as depicted) meant to be a place where people of all stations can come together to honor some higher power or virtue? A place where it’s not supposed to matter that we live on opposite sides of the tracks, because we follow the same star? But the thing is, as much as we want to believe we would never stand on the inside and let someone walk by barefoot through the snow, most of the time we don’t notice the people walking barefoot in the snow outside when we are celebrating inside. And no, it’s not your responsibility to spend every waking moment tending to other people’s needs—you have needs, too, and if you are not well-taken-care-of, you cannot care well for others. But it is our responsibility as individuals to be the kind of community members we want to be in community with.

At this time of year when the gap is widest between those who have a strong support system and those who do not, broaden your perception. If you have a family to celebrate with and a fire to gather around, how can you spread the blessings? How can you share the bounty? Whom can you reach out to and include, even in the smallest way, to let them know you appreciate them? If you are on the inside, how can you make those outside feel more welcome, seen, and cared for? Count your blessings and share from the overflow.

If you are on the outside looking in, you are not alone, either. Even in the Five of Pentacles Tarot card there are two figures outside the church, and though they appear to barely notice each other, they have much in common. They could be friends. Though they are outside in the snow, a church of all places would surely offer them shelter from the cold. Instead of focusing on the type of community you wish you had, take some time this season to reach out to and connect with the community you maybe didn’t even realize you had but that is nevertheless available to you. And of course, remember that the view from the outside looking in is not always an accurate representation of what is going on inside. If you want to connect with more people this holiday season, attend social events related to your interests. If you are feeling disconnected, isolation is not the cure. It is not my intention here to invalidate the reality of exclusionary networks and the very real difficulties of being “on the outside,” but rather it is my goal to empower those of you who feel like outsiders to make changes in the only place you have the power to control: within yourself. Exclusion is real, and you may or may not be the victim of it, but you can only make changes in yourself, and how people respond to that is their responsibility (response-ability). However, the changes you make in yourself are the most efficient way to affect change on the outside world and on your experience of it. I can’t make other people include you (although I have implored them to, see above), but I can encourage and empower you to stop self-sabotaging your chances of being included in social situations (such self-sabotaging actions include self-isolation, antisocial attitudes, choosing not to go out and meet people, not initiating conversations and interactions, failing to take responsibility for your social presentation).

I share these suggestions with the deepest love and compassion, from the perspective of someone who grew up an outsider and often still feels like an outsider in certain communities, but has taken responsibility for my antisocial attitudes and assumptions, blunt delivery, and chronic bitch face, and has made great efforts to become more approachable and compassionate. I used to feel that people who were turned off by direct speech and a flat expression didn’t deserve to get to know me anyway (wow, what an arrogant asshole I was!—although, to be fair, I am high-functioning autistic and I didn’t know until much later why the typical model of social interaction didn’t feel natural to me), but now I realize that it’s no one else’s responsibility to get to know me if I do not take measures to be approachable and sociable, and that realization has changed my life for the infinitely better. After so many years of feeling excluded, I finally realized that most of the walls between me and my peers had been erected by none other than myself.

So, on that note, what illusions of separation have you created or agreed to believe in between yourself and others? It’s time to take those walls down. Examine your own belief system. In your conscious or unconscious belief, what separates you from other people? Are there people you don’t associate with? If so, who and why not? Is it possible you could learn something from them? Are there people who think so differently from you that you just can’t understand? What might you have in common? What values do you both hold? Do you feel welcomed in community? If not, is it because you showed up graciously shining your light and people really didn’t like the heart of you? Or is it because you expect to be excluded and carry the attitude that you expect not to be welcomed? Both of these things happen in the real world. If a few people don’t like you, that’s probably on them. If most people don’t like you, you might need an attitude adjustment—in which case, maybe look into the Eight of Cups exercise described above. My challenge to you for working with the Five of Pentacles this Winter is to seek to understand (through journaling or another form of reflection) how you exclude others or yourself, and to make strides towards being more open, inclusive, compassionate, and welcoming. Together, we can build a bigger table.

The Star

The Star Tarot card is especially relevant during the long dark nights of Autumn and Winter. When daylight hours are short and nights grow ever longer, stars shine as beacons in the darkness, a hopeful reminder of the light that will soon return.

Furthermore, thanks to centuries of humanity navigating land and sea by the stars above, stars in general (and especially the North Star, Polaris) have come to symbolize guidance. Just as ancient sailors steered their vessels by the stars above and ancient kings followed one bright star to Bethlehem, The Star Tarot card calls us to examine our highest and most transcendent values and to chart our course forward accordingly.

Take some time to think (and perhaps journal, as I always recommend) about what is most important to you in this life. See if you can distill your highest values beyond the material—for example, if your family is most important to you, is the heart of that love, service, or something else? What is the highest transcendent value that everything you do and dream of has in common? Once you distill your highest values, consider how you can embody them in your every word and action. Are the words that you speak in alignment with your highest good and most sacred values? Are your thoughts about yourself and others aligned with the virtues you hold most high? Are your actions and attitudes aligned with what you believe you believe?

If not, don’t beat yourself up about it—just notice where you are living out of alignment, reflect on what underlying subconscious beliefs are causing it, and make adjustments as necessary. Over time it will become easier and easier to live out your values consistently and to act, think, and speak in integrity with your deepest truths. If you desire to dedicate more attention to this thought & transformation exercise, I highly recommend Don Miguel Ruiz’ The Four Agreements. To read it once is quick and easy; to implement the concepts found within it will take the rest of your life and reward you every day.

I hope that these exercises and reflections will prove helpful and inspiring for you this season, and aid you on your journey to becoming more and more yourself every day.

May an evening star shine down upon you,