Card Cartography: Day 3
This week (the week of June 23, the first full week of summer, with all the ripeness and flourishing promise that summer brings), I’m conducting an experiment (here’s how it came to be). Each weekday, I will:
pull a tarot card, focusing on the question How shall I work today?
see how that card guides me throughout the day
write a short blog post (30 minutes only, exactly 500 words) about how it felt
single out my favorite word from that blog post at the end
OK, 500 words for Day 3 starting below the line.
Death
accepting the ending of a cycle and the start of something new; uncertainty amidst transition
Death feels like a card ripe with significance today.
It was the final day of Reimagining Leadership, a group I’ve deeply appreciated being with for the past several months. We’ve been exploring how we want to lead differently in the world (see my reflections from yesterday, as well), and one thing I’ve come to see is the importance of discernment and clarity.
To be a leader is to know which things to hold onto and which things to let go. Not always to have those answers alone, but to have the wisdom to see when a given move is wholesome above others and to make that move.
In a Death-card kind of way, that’s where I feel I’m at with my business as a whole. I need to compost some of the energy I’ve been putting into trying all the things in order to sustainably channel energy into some of the things.
Endings are coming, no matter what we do. In the Buddhist tradition, impermanence is arguably the most central tenet. The Upajjhatthana Sutta (the Five Remembrances) teach us that:
I am of the nature to grow old, I cannot escape old age.
I am of the nature to get sick, I cannot escape sickness.
I am of the nature to die, I cannot escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
I inherit the results of my actions of body, speech, and mind. My actions are my continuation.
Far from finding these to be unbearable downers, they remind me that my time is finite and not to spend it all on things that are meaningless to myself and others.
In this caterpillar goo phase of transforming my business, I’m taking the Death card to be a reminder that I will need to let go of some things I may love doing. I love leading retreats, for example. But offering them on my own is a source of a lot of unpleasant stress with an uncertain financial return.
Perhaps future retreats need to come in collaboration with others or in specific situations.
Or perhaps not at all.
Perhaps I can compost offering my own retreats in order to allow for germination somewhere else.
The Death card is my reminder today to accept—and even seek out—endings and transitions.
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
This is one part of a reading from Thomas Banyacya, Sr. (1910-1999; Speaker of the Wolf, Fox and Coyote Clan, Elder of the Hopi Nation) that Rebecca shared aloud today to close our final Reimagining Leadership gathering.
The Death card reminds me to tend to my own garden of what I can be and how I can lead in the world and not to spread the water of my energy too widely.
Here’s to finding my garden and knowing it’s enough.
Favorite word of this post: germination
