scrubjayspeaks

I've started doing daily one-card draws from my tarot deck when I first get up in the morning. I have a little bit of time on workdays when I'm getting ready, and if I can make it a habit then, I can keep it a habit the rest of the week.

(This isn't a New Year's resolution, because I refuse to wait on anything once I decide I want to do it. This particular habit was a Yule resolution that I then missed for a couple of days, so. *hands*)

While I've had my deck for many years and am roughly familiar with at least one school of thought on reading them, I've never been fully confident. I have wanted to move toward a more meditative approach, rather than the fortune-telling focus I grew up with. So I've been studying more from a few sources, and I'm getting back into it.

And pleasingly, I have already had An Experience.

This morning, I pulled Three of Swords. Traditionally ominous. But like I said, I'm trying to move away from a predictive model. So I really didn't know what the wisdom offered by this card might be. So I thought, well, it's my day off, I've got time--let's pull another card for clarification. So I set the Three of Swords aside and started shuffling my deck. And immediately dropped a small stack of cards that stuck perfectly together.

And there, face-up, was the wildcard.

To explain, my deck (Hanson-Roberts, the background of which I know nothing of, but I adore the art style and I've been using it since I was in my early teens) has an extra card, a wildcard, a mystery card, not part of the normal 78. I don't know if any other decks come with this optional card. In my deck, it portrays a woman drawing aside a curtain in a stone-walled window, with the words "To All Believers." I LOVE this card, so I always keep it in the deck. Non-standard, but to hell with that.

So I've asked for clarification about the Three of Swords and been given the emphatic answer of "just wait and see." Okay, sure. I guess. I will...keep a weather eye on the horizon?

Half an hour later, I'm checking my podcast app for new episodes. And what might be the newly-posted episode of Tarot for the Wild Soul, the show that has been slowly building up my interest in reading again for the past few years?

Three of Swords, which is Lindsay's card for January.

Well. Okay then. "To all believers," indeed.

I've just had such a nice day??? And in the most mundane ways possible:

From the moment I woke up, I knew what I wanted to get done today and the order in which I would do it. I had plenty of flexibility, so that sudden plans by my family could involve me without derailing what I was doing; I knew there was time to spare. I got writing done, including on long-term projects that always get shuffled to the bottom of the list because they aren't emergencies.

I read books! I played video games! I spent time with the ducks, the dog, and the cat! Things I genuinely enjoyed, which left me feeling happy and restored. I spent time with Mum that didn't revolve around crisis management. My pain didn't suck any worse than usual, and my fatigue was manageable.

I felt like a real human being who does things in the world. After a week or so of depression issues that involved a lot of anhedonia, actually feeling pleasure in anything was a shock and marvel. It was the most basic of functional adult days, and it was just

so nice.

So nice to feel like life isn't just something unpleasant that happens to me.