An Important Distinction On The Topic Of Making Progress On The Path

In addition to simply being a gorgeous piece of artwork, the 6 of Swords in the Gilded Tarot differs in a very important way from the 6 of Swords of the Robin Wood tarot.






The Robin Wood card shows a person as a passenger in a boat being moved forward by a spiritual guide of some kind. The Gilded Tarot shows a person poling her own boat. The large moon in the background suggests openness to intuition and spirit, but she is still making an effort and taking responsibility for getting where she needs to be.

Both cards speak of journeys and progress under the influence of spirit. Only one shows the person doing something to advance the journey.

I've always loved the RW 6 of Swords. It spoke to me of my own Journeys -- but it's also a vivid image of how I've let myself be moved by outside forces (not always Spirit!) more often than by my own will.

In Which I Explain "Rules of Engagement" to Wolfling

Wolfling has a small pack of friends she runs with here at our apartment complex -- and she has a very firm sense of identity as the pack's alpha.

Last week she came home and told me about a mini drama that had just occurred. Her friend Annie had confesssed to Wolfling and to Craig, a boy slightly younger than themselves, that she had a crush on someone at school. Craig, not the nicest kid at the best of times, immediately started mocking Annie and told her that everyone in that family hated her. Annie burst into tears and ran away.

"So I slapped Craig," Wolfling finished -- sounding both satisfied and defensive.

( Bear Mother Musings )

In Which I Declare Partial Success

Today was supposed to be dedicated to three tasks:

1. Getting my spiritual direction business website into something resembling a functional state

2. Creating an altar for Inanna in my bedroom - across the room from my Ereshkigal altar

3. Engaging in a private ritual this evening


Things -- as usual -- have not gone quite as planned. After a week of feeling engaged and excited about the website work, including scribbling notes during the day, I ran into all kinds of resistance once the actual work was at hand. However, I have succeeded in creating an almost-ready-for-publication home page, and have the rest of the site mapped out. Now I can start filling in the blanks. I'd hoped to have more actual content by this time, but at least I have a strong start and some momentum. I still have most of tomorrow to work on it as well.

The Inanna altar has been waiting on getting a shelf installed on my wall, and my dad helped me with that this morning. I don't have a blue-and-silver cloth, which is something that's been part of the design idea from the beginning, but I do have some other nice things, including a blue candle, a new statue, and a wall hanging that says "Only those who risk going too far find out how far they can go." Which is a very Inanna-like statement. She's the poster child for "going too far." Now all I have to do is go upstairs and arrange the elements.

As for the private ritual. . . I had kind of expected to be engaged in that prior to the current time of 7:45pm, but everything else has taken longer than expected. I need to have a light snack and head upstairs so I can meet that commitment.

There will be dancing.
I'm trying to not let that worry me.

Conversion Experiences

One of my very spiritually-engaged friends posted last night about her strong feelings about two friends who had become atheists. Her story got me thinking about my own experience of suddenly finding myself an atheist after/during my existential crisis in college. What at that time I called a "loss of faith" I later came to consider an initiatory doorway into a much deeper spiritual life.

Another person's comment got me thinking about the question of what consistutes a "successful" belief and what prompts people to change their beliefs. Under what conditions do we decide -- consciously or unconsciously -- that our beliefs are not resulting in whatever we think they should be delivering as a result of our having them? And how hard is it to change, even when we start to feel some degree of discomfort from holding onto old beliefs? While I'm primarily focusing on spiritual beliefs, this could be a much wider question, taking into account beliefs about political systems, the economy, parenting, etc. . .

Anyone interested in sharing your conversion stories?

Anyone want to throw out some definitions of what makes a belief system successful or not? What makes it "work" for a person or not? Are there any universals that one could expect to see in the life of a person who holds beliefs that "work"? (This is a very subjective question. I'm not looking for a one-size-fits-all authoritative answer.)


I'll post some of my own reflections a bit later. . . Now that the snack mentioned in the previous entry has settled, I need to get to work on applied spirituality rather than theory.