Monday, November 26, 2007

Reading for Self

Since I haven't had this blog long there aren't many takers yet. So I figure I can use readings for myself to illustrate how the readings look. I generally don't read for myself. There's too much chance for misinterpretation based on emotion. The situation that inspired me to do this reading was a dream I had about an old crush from high school whom I literally hadn't thought about in probably 20 years, and drawing the Fear card from the Wisdom of Avalon oracle.
I knew the dream about "Dirk" (Dork) did not presage his return to my life, for which I'm actually quite thankful, because he turned out to be a Dick. In fact the most telling part of the dream seemed to be when Dirk kissed me and said he was going to leave his wife and my inner voice said "a leopard doesn't change it's spots." But this dream was trying to impart something to me. Let's see if I can figure out what.
I used the Secrets of the Necronomicon deck to do this reading. It is available from Llewellyn.

In the present position the card is the four of cups. Is Lily disappointed? Frustrated? You bet yer fur she is! She's 42 years old, living in a trailer, and as soon as her puny $700 paycheck comes in, it's spent. I started too late focusing on what I really wanted to do because I didn't know before. Bipolar has a way of scattering a person's energies and thoughts to the four winds.

Crossing me is the Great Ziggurat, which is akin to the Tower. There is a great deal of upheaval in my life. Most of it concerns my son's impending graduation next spring. He will be leaving home. He is my only child and I am divorced. This "frees" me in certain ways. But it also leaves me lonely. I do not have many social contacts and I am very shy by nature. And I am a born worrier. How do I stop worrying about his safety? He isn't prone to behaving recklessly and he doesn't do drugs or drink. Letting your child grow up is hard. What if he doesn't want me in his life anymore?
The Great Ziggurat also indicates climbing to new heights. Perhaps this energy is there for both myself and my son.

Crowning me is Great Cthulhu. In this deck, Cthulhu is akin to the Devil. He echoes the sentiments of the Fear card in the Avalon deck. It is a warning not to fall prey to lusts or to let fears destroy, or any plans that I may have had will be demolished by short term folly. Honestly, I think the greatest danger for me in my solitude is becoming an alcoholic. This is something I really need to be wary of.
The dream I had was full of the feeling of being drunk, though on lust rather than booze. Back in the day, what tied me and people like Dirk together was boozing and doing drugs. In the dream I was concerned only with my own feeling of entitlement, where in reality I would be thinking "what a creep, trying to get a piece of someone else behind his wife's back!" I'd come to the conclusion that Dirk was a creep before he ever graduated. (He was a year older than me.) Looking back on it, he was confused about things and I forgive him. Last I heard about him he was married and I hope he still is. I don't think he was a bad guy at heart.
There is something from those times that I've never dealt with and am still trying to heal. Perhaps my son's being around the same age as I was when this drama went down triggered something.

The seven of wands indicates what was going on in those times. Backstabbing bullshit. I made my first suicide attempt when I was sixteen. I didn't think I was strong but maybe I was stronger than I gave myself credit for. I survived.

The king of Pentacles is in the recent past events position. My ex husband embodies the traits of the king of Pentacles. Methodical and generally practical, somewhat dull in aspect. Except for a few relatively minor incidents, my ex and I have been civil with each other since the divorce. I have had to deal with the guilt over the fact that I never loved him romantically. I married him for practical reasons. I reasoned that it was better to marry someone for whom I didn't feel any sort of deep desire, whom it made a sort of logical sense to marry. This really goes against my nature and it sounds horribly cut-throat when I state it outright. I did not intend to use my ex, I didn't want to have boys on the side or anything so awful as that. I intended to stay married to him. But after my son was born things deteriorated between us and my ex's dark side emerged. Both of us had too much baggage.
We have been civil for all these years. We are family. That too is a triumph of sorts.

The future events card is the ten of Pentacles. It represents family and monetary gain. I would be pleased with monetary relief, from a positive source. I have trouble wishing for money. My family always taught me that such wishes would be greeted with misfortune because money is the root of all evil. It's hard to get that out of my subconscious.

The Ace of Swords represents my desire to cut away the dead flesh, the unnecessary parts of my past that keep me bound to fear and hurt. It represents a desire for control, but this is a benign control, such as a control over one's base instincts. While certain addictive behaviors may have actually helped me survive in the past, it is time to be rid of them. With the desire for control of self comes a desire to help others--in my way, not in a way prescribed by society. I am in a "helper" job and I do not enjoy it. But I do wish to be a force for positive change.

The Knave of Cups or Scribe falls in the Environment position. After some fifteen years, I finally published a book. But the book I published was not the one I initially conceived. I wanted for my book to mean something, to be a means for helping others. In some ways it has. There are other ways that maybe it can, and I hope that it will.
The book is a good thing.

The Knight of cups represents traits of mine that are both positive and negative in nature, and are indeed somewhat contradictory. While possessing a desire for honesty, I also have a tendency to be secretive and paranoid. I will not directly lie, but I don't always tell the entire truth. I tend to have tunnel vision. My devotion to my goals is at times perceived as selfishness. I have always given people the impression that I'm standoffish when actually I'm shy. On one hand I could give a shit less what other people think of me. On the other hand I don't care to be despised. I can appear to be very cool, even cold, but inside I'm in turmoil most of the time. I need to be sure my fears don't get the better of me.

The Queen of Cups reveals my tendency to form superficial relationships in order to protect myself. While one cannot immediately trust everyone there may be a need to open a door in the wall that I've built around myself in order to avoid complete isolation and devastating loneliness. In all honesty, I'm not certain how to do this. I have had walls around myself for years, even against those that I care about the most. This seems to be a warning to stop allowing fear to keep me separate from others. Protecting oneself without appearing superficial is a real balancing act. This seems to be the most important thing for me to work on at this time.

I hope this reading will help illustrate the style and depth in which my readings are performed. I charge $25 for a private reading, or you can receive a free reading by purchasing an autographed copy of the book for $20, or by agreeing to have your reading displayed on this blog. I won't use your real name!

Blessings,
Lily



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