I was writing something inspired by my last essay on the Slaughtered Ox.
I was going to talk about another artwork, but I don’t know. It felt so uninspired, I was going off on different tangents, and at the end it had good stuff in it but I don’t know…I wasn’t feeling it.
Maybe I lost it.
Maybe I got those writer’s blocks people talk about. I wanted to talk about the Painting Stanczyk by Jan Matejko. I still will. Look it up, it looks a lot like The Fool in the tarot only more somber. I’m into that juxtaposition a lot.
Though perhaps my mind may not be quite ready to develop that idea just yet. There were some historical facts in there, but maybe not enough emotion?
If you’ve been reading me you know I can’t get away from a philosophical emotion. I have 3 placements in Pieces after all. The well is deep, I just couldn’t get down a cohesive string of thoughts.
You ever get like that?
I got too much in my head.
I had a lot of fun by myself writing last week’s essay. I mixed art and tarot, and I thought it flowed really well. There are some good insights in there, and it’s a short read.
I’ve been trying to figure myself out. I feel like a 40 year-old teenager trying to figure out what they want to do when they grow up. So I thought, hey I can be an art/tarot/symbology writer.
But then I started to write with all that in mind, and I think the weight of the future got the best of me.
The expectation of perfection and success is something I’m working on. I keep thinking “this is the one thing that will finally get me in alignment with myself and my manifestations”, but that’s not exactly the way to go. I just end up being in anxious expectation, instead of grounding myself and developing an idea.
I was journaling and I pulled the Queen of Cups, and Aleister Crowley says: “To see the truth of her is hardly possible, for she reflects the nature of the observer in great perfection.”
In short, she’s the mirror.
Reflecting onto reality everything I think about myself inside.
Maybe what I wrote was actually good, but because I decided that it wasn’t then it wasn’t, and I decided it wasn’t because I have my insecurities and they get the best of me sometimes. And because they got the best of me I must have lost it. I didn’t write in June because I was taking care of some personal matters, and because of that the gift I felt in me is gone. WHOA! How about we hit the breaks here?
How quickly one can spiral into self-disbelief should be an Olympic sport, cause Usain Bolt’s got nothing.
Staring at the Queen of Cups, seeing that I am both the observer and the reflection, I understand that it’s not the reflection that needs to change, but my perspective.
Sure, not everything will be stellar, but isn’t that part of the fun?
And no, I haven’t lost it because it inspired me to write this.
So maybe, in a grand cosmic scheme, I needed to write something “bad” so that I could write about what it’s like to write something bad, and overcome it.
The Jester (The Fool) is about a leap of faith. He stares into the well of the Universe, takes a deep breath, and jumps in.
I will revisit the Jester (Stanczyk) painting with a fresh mind. And I encourage you to do as well. To revisit something that you put aside because you were uninspired or did it out of force.
Inspiration and discipline aren’t the same, but they’re friends. We can draw on facts, and pull on feelings.
So don’t be discouraged by some lack. You can turn it into inspiration.
With much love and tarot magick,
Icaro
The Queen of Cups is sitting on her throne above still water, reflecting everything around her without rejection or judgment.
The thing about the Queen of Cups is that too much love reflects the truth, and sometimes we don’t want pure unadulterated truth.
Because it forces us to look at the truth of our habits and how those habits create our reality.
But as Bruce Lee said “be like water”, and perhaps like water we can look at our reflection without judgment, but with clarity and compassion, and with stillness we can adjust our habits to create a better version of ourselves, therefore creating a better life.