New Moon – Shadow Moon Begins

The nights come faster now. I’m reading Leah Lakshmi Piepszna-Samarasinha’s memoir, Dirty River, and the cadence of her writer’s voice is slipping into mine.
 
My We’Moon day-planner for 2016 arrived in the mail the other day, and I read my horoscope for the coming year.
Woman, you need to get your material/financial security under control, because what you’ve spent the last year doing is not going to be enough for the long haul. Figure out what resources you’ve got, restructure your finances, figure this stuff out because it’s time, and you’re not getting any younger.
 
At least, that’s what I took from it.
 
Did a tarot reading this morning, asking “Right, so… Financial and Material Security… How do I do that? How do I get there?”
And what came up was:
(A) You have let opportunities slip by in the past[1]
(B) Right now things are emotionally pretty good, but don’t burn yourself out
(C) There are new possibilities on the horizon, but you may need to squint, or change perspective, to actually see them. They involve Creating, and this could go in a few directions. What are you afraid of? (See: “F”).
(D) You need to stop believing that you have to do everything yourself, you need to stop isolating yourself and pretending that you have no back-up
(E) You’re feeling like you’re juggling All The Things and like you can’t focus in one area without letting all the other spinning plates drop, BUT what is actually going on is that you’re just totally getting in your own way. Those stories about what makes you valueable? Let them go. They’re not helping you and they’re not accurate anyway. (How do I do that?[2])
(F) What are you afraid of? Feeling? Trusting? Believing people have your back or that you can do The Thing? What’s up with that and where’s it coming from?
(G) Getting this stuff under control will lead to (or possbly require?) Letting Go of all that crap about how you’re afraid of what your mother will think, and all that stuff about how you think things are “supposed to” go or look or whatever. (Good luck with that).
(H) Take this reading in the context of partnerships, collaboration, and connection (I drew The Lovers as my advisor card). You have a lot of potential for growth and success here, but you need to wake up and make some decisions. That also means knowing your limits and not wearing yourself out on all of those “supposed to” things[3].
 
I still don’t know where things are pointing.
Isn’t that the way it goes? It’s either so painfully obvious – whether you want to hear it or not, whether you listen or not – or it’s just “Okay, yes, but I need HELP. Are you talking about writing, or something else??”
 
I do tarot readings when I don’t know what to do. Isn’t that why most of us do magic? To tip the odds, as much as we can, in our favour? To put a little more power – and knowledge is power – in our corners?
 
I’ve started looking for part-time reception/admin work (again). The kind of thing I can get without the dubious help of an agency. We’ll see what happens.
 
 
Meliad.
 
 
[1] I pulled a bunch of cards about this one asking “Yeah, but what opportunity? What is this about?” and what I got was “Transformation” (the death card), followed by a fire card that I don’t remember off the top of my head, followed by “Clinging to the Past” which… I figured was just the deck telling me to focus on the future with this one because I can’t change what’s already happened, so cut it out with the “what if, what if, what if”.
 
[2] The card I pulled to clarify this, to find out how to let that stuff go, was the Queen of Earth. Flowering. Lakshmi. I feel like I’m flatering myself, or possibly lying to myself, when I say this but… If I was doing this reading for someone else? I would look at that card and go: “Honey, you need to recognize that you’re capable here. You know how to manage money, you know how to forage and harvest and put things up for the winter. You can be practical, organized, and make things happen that benefit you. You can do this. You just have to recognize that and get to it.” Which, yeah, would mean getting out of my own way. Okay.
 
[3] I’ve arranged my life in a way that means I rarely have to leave the house if I don’t want to. I can take long baths. I work casual hours and, frequently, from home. I avoid walking down busy streets, I avoid crowds, I avoid having to deal with people (meaning plural, and meaning “possibly hostile” and “unfamiliar”) for more than 15 hours in a given week. I make a lot of food from scratch, food that takes time, because it’s cheaper to buy the slow-cooking stuff (roots, cabbage, shoulder-roasts), to buy the flour, yeast, salt, oil, than to buy something already made or fancier, and also because I have the time to spend on cooking food from scratch. I’m more than a little worried about what kind of a Fragile Flower I’d turn out to be if I was doing the kind of work that, yeah, paid me (not likely very much – see:baggage), but that didn’t let me protect myself like this.