Card Cartography: Day 5
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 5 (the final day) starting below the line.
Knight of Swords
decisive, swift action on an idea that has taken over your thoughts; intellectual ambition, strength, and action that can be exciting and also blindly fruitless
This last card of the week feels very much like I’m leaving this experiment on a cautionary note.
My first thought when pulling this card was “Don’t be the knight of swords right now!”
I have big knight of swords energy baked into my eldest child, striving, accomplishment-minded proactive approach to life.
The knight of swords is a good personification of Atalanta, the name I’ve given to my inner striver voice. (Any other Free to Be You and Me kids reading this? No, then you can go listen to Marlo Thomas and Alan Alda reading the story that gave me this nickname.)
Atalanta—and I invite you to picture her as this card’s knight illustration—is a total badass who I love and appreciate. She’s the part of me that sends me seeking and exploring and stubbornly doing things her own way.
Naming my inner striving voice after Atalanta from the story (tl;dr version: she’s a multi-hyphenate princess who wants to choose her own fate and takes control of her own destiny by finding an equal and following her own path) is a way to make peace with this side of me that I am sometimes prone to dismissing.
My inner Atalanta is awesome, and she gets shit done. She is also very much the part of me that jumps into things without collaborating or listening or taking my time.
I’m trying to listen to my inner Atalanta aka my inner knight of swords, but to balance her out with space for consideration and compassion.
When I catch myself listening to Atalanta, knight of swords, I’ve now got this cues wheel that I made last night (the one I referred to in yesterday’s post) to help me take a breath and consider my actions before whirling off on the adventure.
Atalanta is welcome to contribute her—often exciting—ideas. I also need to balance them against the rest of what this week of cards has reminded me of:
that I need to be open to emotions on the journey of what comes next
that I want to lean into abundance
that I need to accept letting things go
that I don’t want to be stuck ruminating in between two choices
Ending this week of card-based experimentation with yesterday’s 2 of swords, followed by today’s knight of swords really does feel like ending it with the binary choices I often fall into: endless rumination between options (stuck in the 2’s clash of ideas) or decisive action that may not consider its consequences (plunging along with the knight’s horse).
When I find myself headed in either of those directions, here’s what I’m going to do:
Closing out this week of tarot and blogging, I’m appreciating my accomplishment and experimentation. I've played with my work this week, and reflected on what I want. That's what I wanted. Good job, me!
Favorite word of this post: badass
