Liminal states

Overall, it was a good year for me.  I got more into tarot than I had ever imagined: three tarot conferences, going to the Seattle Tarot Meetup fairly regularly, several online workshops, a half-dozen professional readings, winding up the year by working with James Wanless on Fortune Circles, and so much more.  And it’s been very good for me.  Especially over the last few months (when I’ve been focusing a lot on the Temperance card), I feel like my life’s much more in balance than it has been since I can’t remember when.  Even though I still feel like I’m in transition to what’s next, I have a much clearer picture of what I want.

And TapestryMaker’s certainly making good progress!  True, there’s plenty of room for improvement in a lot of ways; but there’s some stuff it’s really good at.  Like doing tarot, for example, especially at psytrance parties :)So I started by meditating on a few cards representing different aspects of the life I want: the World from Obscurity,  the Eight of Cups and Four of Wands from Barbara Moore’s Steampunk Tarot, the Ace of Wands (Ecstasy) from James’ Voyager deck, and the Three of Cups from the Waite-Smith deck.

Next I focused on a handful of cards from the Rider-Waite deck that reflect what I’m trying to do with TapestryMaker: the Eight of Pentacles for the craftsmanship, the Hierophant Reversed (for the underlying original and unorthodox theories) and Seven of Cups (for magic and illusion — in the positive sense) from a reading by tarot advisor Gina Thies last August, and the Magician for the magical.

And of course the Magician brought me to “Magic Manifestation” meditation from the November Fortune Circle: the four aces, for “see it, feel it, believe it, do it”.  James talks about doing the meditation feeling yourself surrounded by gold light; at least for me, it turns out that black light works pretty well too 🙂

So I put TapestryMaker in “autoplay” mode, cycling through the aces, and danced for a while.  Then I asked “How to make my visions come to life in 2016?” and picked a card.

It would have been a bummer if I had gotten a negative card — or even a positive-but-challenging card.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s a lot to learn from those cards as well; but when I’m dancing and having a great time it would certainly harsh my vibe to have Death come up and have to spend all night reminding myself “it’s really about transformation!”  So I picked the card from my special “party” version of the Voyager deck, with 20 negative and challenging cards temporarily removed.  And why not?  Tarot’s a tool; for me on New Year’s Eve, this was the right way to use it.

And geez, what a fine card I picked 🙂

I’ll be talking a lot more about Harvest — and the Harvest Tree reading I had done just a few days earlier — in future posts.  For now, let’s just say it was exactly the right card for my mood.

After which, it was time for the countdown to 2016, and then hours more of dancing and socializing.  Doctor Spook and Random from Geomagnetic were spinning at midnight … how cool is that?  I did a couple more readings using the Obscurity deck — one for my friend Andrea on “what would open-source consciousness be like?” and one for Spook on “what does 2016 have in store?”  The Wheel of Fortune came up in both.  Seems like a good sign 🙂

But mostly I just danced, enjoyed the vibe, and caught up with friends.  So many familiar faces, people we’ve celebrated New Year’s with for a decade or more (“remember that night at Somarts back in 2005?”) … I really do think of these folks as my tribe, and we definitely converged on New Year’s Eve 🙂

I <3 psytrance.