Tarot card for the day: 10 of Wands Reversed
He carries all ten wands in his arms. He trudges beneath the weight of it all. Was it that he couldn’t say no? Or that he wanted too much, more than he could realistically bear? It’s not that they’re all bad things, for many of the wands are sprouting with new life. But the sheer immensity of them is great.
I also think the context of the number ten and its location in the deck is vital in contemplating this man’s story: he is nearing completion of something and though he is weary he can soon put them down. This is an end-of-harvest narrative where we’ve labored for months to finish something and maybe before celebrating, we simply need to rest.
This season of Midwinter before first new light, before the end of the year and the beginning of the next, is a time to let go of the things we’re carrying around with us, whether they’re internal things (guilt, regret, blame…) or external ones (attachment to material objects, relationships…) and let ourselves be present with ourselves.
In Stephen Sexton’s poem “The Burdens” he describes how he might imagine different scenarios than the one he’s in, carrying the burden of facing someone’s illness: “let’s say a ship arrived one day,” he says, and that ship is beautiful and steered by “happy impossible wind” and on the ship the captain finds them. What do we do with our burdens? What should we do with them? Can we imagine hope even when buried beneath the weight of them?
Bibliography:
Sexton, Stephen. “The Burdens.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/149257/the-burdens.
(My Tarot deck is Llewellyn’s Classic Tarot by Barbara Moore and illustrated by Eugene Smith.)