Ramblings, rants, musings, explorations, ideas, fears, loves and... Perspectives.
If I hear the word “poop” once a day, I guarantee you that I hear it a hundred or more times. My boys seem to grow more fascinated with the word the more anathema I deem it. At ten and five, I wonder when they will outgrow their preoccupation, when it will cease to be so seemingly endlessly obsession-worthy. I wonder, too, whether my calling attention to it, demanding the constant references end posthaste, serves to prolong the behavior.
Lately, I’ve been trying to walk more. Moving my body has been on my to-do list for the past several months as the effects of a sedentary desk job have been catching up with me and thrown in particularly stark relief as something I need to be particularly aware of now that I’m 40 years old. Honestly, I have to laugh when I say that number out loud – there’s no way I’m forty. It’s just ridiculous to believe I’ve been wandering around the planet that long. Inconceivable. And absolutely true.
Hairdryers are not my favorite things. I might relent and use the noisy things two or maybe three times per year. On the whole, though, I prefer letting my hair air dry naturally. The look that results doesn’t necessarily fit society’s idea of what a 40-year-old woman’s hair should look like, but then I tend to eschew any kind of make-up or dressy clothing norms anyway, so there are plenty of things that the fashion magnates and their minions could choose to pick on me about.
The writing prompts for yesterday and today seemed like a good fit for one another; besides which, I almost missed both of them completely because this week has been one train wreck after another. (Did you know it costs over $100 to get a bug removed from your child’s eye? Yeah, THAT kind of week.)
*If I can beg of you to stick with me through some dry bits at the beginning, I have a fun little breakdown about two-thirds of the way down this post.
Ah, the beautiful and handsome energy of the Hierophant calls to me with lessons aplenty… Since he is the teacher, I have a few questions for today’s Tarot card from Lyn Thurman’s “Writing the Wisdom of Your Soul” October 2014 writing challenge. The questions he poses to me are, “How will YOU teach your legacy? What knowledge can you pass along? What of your experience can you share?”
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.
This post treads down the same path as the previous three – they are part of a writing challenge by Lyn Thurman this month: Writing the Wisdom of Your Soul. It explores the archetypes represented by the traditional Tarot and offers a way to communicate with your psyche, subconscious, higher self – label it however it makes sense to you. All of those words appeal to me in different circumstances – what follows is my interpretation of Lyn’s prompts. Today's card is The Empress.
For the past 24 or so hours, I’ve been contemplating the conversation I blogged about yesterday (please take a quick moment to backtrack, otherwise this post might not make as much sense as it could – I don’t feel like repeating myself). In particular, I’ve been focused on that “don’t change – be who you are” part and I finally understood why it vexed me so much: I had been making it into a binary matter.