Amazing Emperor

It’s pretty incredible to me (and stick with me here – this is all metaphorical and I’m aware that it’s all about using symbolic language to describe emotive states, which not everyone is comfortable doing) that the Emperor is the next card in the Tarot to follow the Empress, about whom I wrote yesterday. I’ve never studied the order of the Tarot, just generally understand that it’s similar to a regular deck of cards with the face cards (Major Arcana) and the suit cards (Minor Arcana), so each day of this writing challenge is a surprise to me. Why is it so incredible though? Because I was writing yesterday about boundaries being a struggle for me and what does the Emperor bring? Yep, boundaries. And more: Structure.

So, boundaries and structure might not sound as sexy as the creativity and intuition represented by the Empress and the High Priestess. And, yes, sometimes creativity and intuition need to be unbound, loosened, set free. The stronger the compassion of the structure and boundaries, the more solid yet fluid they are and the better they can protect us while we exercise our creativity and intuition. Wait, what? How can they be solid AND fluid? Think of tall buildings – they are made to sway in the strong winds that assault them. They are made to bend but not break. That’s how I see the structures and boundaries represented by the Emperor – the foundation and supports that allow me to bend into whatever shapes I find appealing but not to the point that stress fractures threaten the whole caboodle.

Most structures that are designed like this have some sort of energetic release available to them and monitored to understand the amount of energy being released and the changes in that over time. That sounds super technical and crap, but what I’m working around to is that people need to be like that, too, if they are going to keep themselves in some kind of balance. What I do NOT mean is the kind of balance that is perceived as perfect center, not too much this way, not too much that. That is actually a kind of stasis that can be as limiting as being too far one direction or another. Having structure plus an energetic release allows life to flow one way along a vast and broad continuum then tip back the other direction before it gets too far out of whack. There’s a lot of play in a well-developed system, plenty of room to adjust when unexpected anomalies pop up.

If I’m being totally honest with myself, there are energy leaks in my sway-and-bend system that are causing it to approach that breaking point. Because, put simply, nothing is absolutely unbreakable. My most severe energy leak is social media. Even if I were making a very conservative estimate, I would say I spend two hours a day reading posts on various social media sites, the vast majority of that on Facebook. A rough exchange of that time for another activity, like writing, would net me somewhere on the order of 364,000 words (approximately three decent length books) per year. Like other activities that are challenging to quantify, though, the scattered little bits of time I spend on social media bleed out the day so slowly that it’s hard to see their impact as a whole. Eventually, though, you feel their impact and you face the decision to change your habits or stay on the same path to nowhere (or destruction, depending on how dramatic you’re feeling).

I just hope I can use this compassionate Emperor energy to rein it all in and reign over it without stifling my creativity. With the enhanced focus, though, my hope is that the creativity has room to intensify, burning out all the little cobwebs hanging in the corners with its brilliant heat.