Winter 1999 - News in Psychic Counseling

 

Death to the Year!  Death to the Century!  Death to the Millennium! -
THIS IS A CHRISTMAS CARD?
  OY VEY!

Yes, this actually is the Christmas card in the Tarot deck but perhaps I need to explain a bit.  It's not my intention to give a Tarot lecture here, much as I'd like to, but as we all face the end of the year, century, and millennium perhaps this card's message will hold meaning for us.

Remember that the cards are usually ironic in some way, none more so than Death.  This is really all about birthing.  First the sun is a sunrise, not sunset.  The skeleton is walking from the cold dark north to the sunny warm south.  Even a skeleton can be thought of as the beginning not the end...  in skeleton form needing to be fleshed out.  There is a seed in the top corner in the position of the East.  A star in the East?  Sound familiar?  The star and seed are much the same symbol...  potential, potency, birthing.  There are many twigs and sprouts suggesting new growth, and even those odd body parts are planted in the ground and look like they are sprouting new bodies.  Boy those ancients knew how to have a good time!  The troubling symbol is a blade which looks pretty wicked and it can be.  It is all about cutting, pruning, ending.

The message of the card is that in birthing there is always ending, and in death or ending there is always birthing.  In fact it is often necessary for us to do some cutting and ending in order for us to allow new growth and new beginnings.  Often it is even painful, as in any birth process.

As we reach this important milestone of the millennium end perhaps it would be useful for us to take a look at what needs to end in our lives.  What did we pick up in this past year or century or even past millennium that we don't want to carry over into the new?  What would we like to have die in us?  I remember when I turned 50 and went to the beach and drew a line in the sand quite literally.  I thought of the things I had picked up intentionally and my accident in the first half of my life that I did not want to carry across the line.  Then I stepped across the line and thought of all the things I did not yet have but wanted to bring to me in the second half of my life.  Perhaps some similar process would be appropriate now that I face the new year and millennium.  I want to take some time to reflect on attitudes, behaviors, opinions that I may have carried with me from the past thousand years which are no longer appropriate to me and my culture.  I might even do something ceremonial, such as writing them on a list and burning them, to remind me of what I want to let go of.

I will think of the past century and what I may have picked up from my parents and grandparents and the culture in general that I now want to let go of.  Can I get past that nasty little alcoholic gene the family carries with it?  Will I finally get past the moral duplicity of the 50's generation?

And what about just last year?  What needs to be let go of in order to move on to new and better things?  What didn't work and what do I need to do to acknowledge it and gently move away so it doesn't continue to affect or infect me.

After letting go or killing off the bad stuff of the Death card, the next card which is a result of the Death card is the judgment card, or the Resurrection.  And that is the real message of the Death card...  it leads to rebirth, rejuvenation, healing.  The good stuff!  You cannot have the good stuff if you hang on to the old bad stuff.  It's a simple law.  Two things cannot occupy the same place.  So once you have decided what is going to die, then you must decide what will takes its place, and it's this process that helps cement the dying of the old.  If you simple try to kill off an old idea it tends to regrow and occupy the same space.  But if you quickly fill the empty space with a seed of a new thought, it tends to grow and take over the space, forcing out the old bad weed.  No wonder the card is filled with images of growth and seeds and twigs!  So before you begin to decide what you want to rid yourself of, perhaps you need to decide with what you want to replace it.  And that's where most of your thinking should be...  on the good, new stuff.

And that's what Christmas can be about...  the birth of new potentials.

Happy planting!

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