Two of Pentacles reversed/Five of Cups. The Two of Pentacles (Jupiter, expansiveness and growth, justice, fortune, in Capricorn, “I build,” ambition, caution, cunning, competence, stability) in an upright position represents change, and it represents having the necessary balance to effectively cope with that change. Because the card is reversed, I may find that I am not dealing effectively with life’s challenges. Flexibility and a skill for changing directions when needed are necessary to achieve and maintain balance, and one or both of those may be lacking. The Five of Cups represents what happens if we allow ourselves to stay in the state of stagnation that is represented by the Four of Cups. The Five of Cups, which corresponds with Mars (action, spontaneity, aggression, drive) in Pisces (“I believe,” feeling, spirituality, soul growth, overly emotional), tells me that the balls I drop because of my inability to effectively juggle my responsibilities may fill my focus, but I need to force myself to turn away from the broken balls. This card reminds us that we need to stop crying about the spilled cups, so that we will see that right behind us, there is a solution.

My Thoth card is the Ten of Cups. “Satiety” is the word Crowley chose to represent this card. Interestingly enough, pleasure and happiness can sometimes take lots of effort to maintain. Yes, sometimes the “machine” is working well and the happiness flows, but at other times the lack of challenges that is happiness causes stagnation to begin. This card is seen by Crowley as Mars (action, spontaneity, aggression, drive) in Scorpio (“I desire,” intense, controlling, compulsive, deep, secretive). Uncle Al sees this card as presenting a warning: sometimes when we successfully strive to attain pleasure, we find that it is not what we want after all. Leave it to Uncle Al to see the bad side of this card, but in order to understand its energies, we need to think about the good parts and the bad parts of the completeness of experiencing the suit of Cups that is the Ten.

My Legacy card is the King of Cups reversed, flavored by the Eight of Wands reversed. The King of Cups corresponds with the cusp of Libra (“We are,” partnerships, balance, cooperation, grace, full of ideas) and Scorpio. In an upright position, his job is to create emotional fulfillment, well-being, and an environment that fosters creativity. Marchetti sees this King as remaining somewhat aloof from the flow of emotions around him so that he can better influence them for the betterment of all. He is good at helping others to understand their feelings and to release those that are not needed or harmful. Since he is reversed, I may not be able to easily separate myself from the flow of emotions around me, and recognizing those that need to be left behind might take an extra effort. Since this King is flavored by the Eight of Wands (Mercury, reason, intelligence, education, skill, communication, in Sagittarius, “I seek,” philosophic, fun-loving, adventurous, blundering) reversed, there is a heaviness and lack of action about his energies today. I may not have it in me to focus on anything, let alone comprehending what I see and feel.

My 6-digit date number is 11 (Archangel Uriel, **ducks incoming chaos*), which reduces to the number 2, the number of balance and polarity.

My horoscopes: “Your mind may be going a thousand miles an hour today. You might be inundated with new ideas and information that could cause mental overload. Write it all down if you can. You'll want to refer to it later. It might be advisable to then go out for a walk or other exercise. This intellectual overload could produce excess nervous energy that you'll need to work off.”

And: “After days of enjoying a delightfully keen companion, you're still not quite ready to quit. You may even be in the mood to have one of those verbal sparring matches for an audience, since your ego (yep, you've got one, too) is urging you to get out there and prove yourself. If your partner (i.e. opponent) doesn't quite see it that way initially, don't worry. If you can't convince them to see it your way after just a bit of persuasion, give it a rest. You wouldn't want to lose this, would you?”

And: “If you have been thinking about making a major change in your life, all signs indicate that this is the time to take the plunge! Radical change is scary, to be sure, but you are ready for the challenge. In truth, whether you realize it or not you have been preparing for this moment for a long time now. Trust us, you are ready. The time is ripe to begin.”

I have changed so much since just a week ago. Besides the one trauma that I hinted at in my blog posts that has to do with the efforts of another to perpetuate a grievance and impose it unjustly, I also dealt with something in my physical world, something that I discovered upon examination was in essence my own fault due to procrastination, and which could have had a negative impact on others, on people who I care about. I fixed the problem immediately, but I had a day or two where I was judging myself harshly.

Like the perpetuation of grievances from the past, harsh self-judgment is something that can totally consume our awareness. In some ways it is harder to deal with, because usually everything involved with the issue that brings harsh self-judgment is from within us, and the self-judgment does not end until we resolve those inner issues, which are usually not physical in nature. Our harsh judgment is not in reaction to the actions of others, but rather to our own words or actions, and this situation has the potential to turn into a downward spiral, just as easily as a downward spiral is created by the perpetuation of past grievances.

I have been wondering why these issues have been presented to me at this time, and I think I am beginning to tease an understanding out of my own consciousness.

Each of us has the ability to ground and center our awareness. This grounding and centering is a necessary part of a healthy and serene existence, and the strength of your ability to ground and center needs to be equal to the strength of your ability to rise up out of yourself and evolve. We are, after all, traveling through life in a physical vehicle, and thus, we are subject to the effects of the physical realms. We are each challenged by our Deities, the providers of our life essence, whether we realize it or not, to be as aware of Them and of the higher pursuits of living and growing, and to be equally aware of the weight (meaning response to gravity, not pounds on the frame), health and physiology of our own vehicle, the effects of the thoughts, words and actions of others upon us and of our own upon others, and of the effects of the elements around us. Talk about a balance of polar opposites!!

If we focus strictly upon the physical world and its myriad of pleasures and pains, bounties and lacks, efforts and relaxations, and if we focus strictly upon “feathering our nests” with physical objects and with those things that bring us pleasure of the physical senses, we miss out on a huge portion of what life is all about. After all, when this life is over, all of those physical things need to be left behind, and most likely, the memories of the times when we enjoyed our possessions will have faded away to dust. Think about it; can you remember having your favorite ice cream cone when you were 5? How about when you were 7? Or 10? Or 15? Having too many pleasures tends to bring a numbing of the senses and a numbing of the ability to remember. Focusing too much on buying more “stuff” can be an obsession, particularly when we are comparing the caliber of our own “stuff” to the “stuff” of others. We become the negative aspects of the Four of Pentacles, grasping and protecting our own possessions and not even enjoying them because we are too busy examining the possessions of others and calculating the worth of their possessions so we can compare them to our own.

If we focus on the other realms, the vastness of the universes that are not physically anchored or supported, we can easily become lost. Yes, striving for growth and for understanding is such a good thing, and we all should continue to learn and evolve, for it is our Purpose. The Path of Evolution is an experiential one, and unless we can do as Kali Ma instructs, and separate ourselves to a large extent from our attachments to the “stuff” of the physical world, we will be too heavy to rise, our energies will be anchored to the physical things we value and are responsible (due to our ownership of them) for maintaining. But those non-physical experiences and interactions are mind blowing, and enticing (and necessary for our evolution), and they can take up a lot of our waking time, and distract us from our awareness of those responsibilities I mentioned for the things we own.

The problem arises when we are not able to balance these two states. I need to remind myself of the energies of The Tower, and the source of the chaos illustrated on that card: a lack of balance, and an attempt to proceed without allowing balance to happen. Those kinds of efforts are usually doomed to failure.

Sometimes we need to experience this kind of collapse of the system in order to train ourselves to strive for more balance of these two states of being, and for a stronger connection to that part of ourselves that is part physical and part Will; connection to that part of ourselves is what allows us to ground and center our awareness. The Law of Opposites tells us that we can only understand one concept if we also understand it’s opposite. We cannot hope to prevent a state of mind which we have never experienced. We cannot hope to understand how to access the strength of Will to turn away from the perpetuating of such state of mind until we have built up the strength of our Will by testing it against an intense version of that state of mind. I see now, that these two incidences have one purpose, at least as far as how they relate to me. After all, “[Y]our joy can fill you only as deeply as your sorrow has carved you” and “[i]f you’ve never tasted bitterness, sweet is just another pleasant flavor on your tongue.” (From Blood Fever, by Karen Marie Moning.)

I have found that in many respects, the interactions and experiences I am having are largely composed of feelings, and thus, are increasingly difficult to describe. The sense of rightness regarding this entry, the sound of the puzzle piece popping into place as I realized the validity of my thoughts (and the purpose of my experiences) is not something that I can truly describe, and all that is written here seems to be lacking something. But the “monster in the night” that is fear of chaos, fear of being subjected to influences beyond my control, fear of harming another through my own choices, has become less frightening to me because this time, I have bested that monster. I found the courage to face it, eye to eye, despite my fear, and guess what? The monster blinked first.

PBT tonight; my task now is to choose an appropriate dessert for our dinner tonight. Hmmmm . . . chocolate cake? Or ice cream? Decisions, decisions.

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