I deal the cards until I come to the a Major card.
In answer to the questions:
What drives me? - The Chariot was the first and only card.
What blocks me? - there were six cards before Le Pape appears.
Advice? - Temperance was the next card.
I’m driven by the will to achieve, but I’m failing to take the reins and have been left stranded by prevarication. I lack confidence in my abilities - not so much technical, more conceptual.
Its time to make something for, and about myself…. something that in years to come my great grandchild might come across and treasure.
To make this ’thing’ I need to break out of constrained thinking, and stop worrying about making a mess and wasting materials. I need to trust the process and allow this thing to evolve.
There’s more of course. I could spend hours exploring the cards, but already an idea is starting to form.
I first read Clarissa Pinkola Estes _Women Who Run With the Wolves_ in the early 1990s, and it remains close to hand. There’s a section entitled The Scapecoat…
… is a coat that details in painting, writing, and with all manner of things pinned and stitched to it all the name-calling a woman has endured in her life, all the insults, all the slurs, all the traumas, all the wounds, all the scars.
A few years ago I worked through an unhappy period by making ‘painful’ fragments - torn, burned, manipulated fragments of fabric, fibre and thread. I called them ‘A hundred tiny hurts and a few bloody big ones’. But as I worked them, I found myself adding more and more tiny areas of sparkle - the silver linings, the glimmers of hope, the pearls in the oyster.
I don’t want to make a Scapecoat. But I would like to make a Lifecoat…. something that charts the triumphs and tribulations, the achievements and the losses, the hopes and the dreams I have had and continue to have. I feel the cold more these days, and with the central heating set to the minimum to do my bit to save this amazing planet, I need a robe to keep me warm and comforted at home.
So today the plan is that I shall make myself a robe, using the softest fabrics and embroidered with metaphors of my life. Tomorrow I may regret stating this decision, but at least it’s a foothold out of the quagmire of indecision.
