“After the Flood(1957) … with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain … A small boy in a yellow slicker and red galoshes ran cheerfully along beside the newspaper boat … the boy in the yellow slicker was George Denbrough … After the Flood (1985) A kid in a red rain slicker and green rubber boots was sailing a paper boat along the brisk run of water in the gutter.”
― Stephen King, It
They say that to move forward we go straight ahead but I don’t think that is entirely true.
Moving forward is rarely in a straight line, it is I think more of a circle. We begin at a certain point only to arrive there when a cycle has been completed. Perhaps life is constructed from a whole bunch of perpetually ambient circling cycles. Several things jump out at me here such as groundhog day, wheel of rebirth, hungry sharks, orbiting planets, point nought recurring and of course The Fool and The World. The list is endless and that is the rub, movement in the circle is endless, an eternal flow of cyclical activity. The interesting thing is that the format doesn’t change but just its experiential nature.
If The Fool is the beginning of the process of the developing consciousness then The World is its conclusion, but only for it to begin all over again.
The Fool unencumbered by being any particular state of being, is in fact all of them. That is the paradox of our Fool. He is all things to all beings and yet not at all. As a result of this apparent fluidity he weaves and wafts through all the cards, threading his way among the soulful personifications adopting each archetype like a mantle.
With The Fool standing on the parameters we can then construct the remaining 21 cards into streams of three.
The first stream, Magician to Chariot is Interdependence, each card interdependent on the other, their dynamic is in the becoming/physical.
The second, Strength to Temperance is Independence and the dynamic of emergence/psychic.The third from Devil to The World is Autonomy and the dynamic of manifestation/spiritual, the integration of the three realms.
It is a picture of the journey of the soul as he comes from spirit into the physical world and undertakes the experience of awakening.
By the time we have reached The World it is supposed that we have a true knowledge of self and can withstand a healthy relationship with our psyche. We have completed a cycle on the journey into maturity and one can hope that we have learned to love and made the necessary shifts and adjustments in order to do so.
As long as we have spurned the challenge of living out our lives in a constant state of resistance which deter the influences of beauty and magical wonder, we can trust that our cravings and desires will become positive realisations resulting in subsequent enlightenment.
Everything has its cycle.
Relationships, work, our home life, everything seems to be in a permanent state of transition. It can be difficult to know when to let go of something or whether to nurture things into a new paradigm.
This spread is aimed at you understanding your personal life cycles and reaching an insightful awareness.
- Do I need to be aware of a closing of a cycle? (If you feel that there is no closure as yet here, wait until another time).
- How is that expressed in me?
- What do I need to be aware of?
- Old patterns that will hinder.
- Transitional process that will help.
- Message from old patterns.
- New life patterns.
