Welcome to the Samhain Tarot Blog Hop;
Hello, welcome, don't stand there on ceremony or give me that critical eye thing; you should be familiar with my ways by now. Ah so your new to this that's okay; honesty just put your deck down over there for a few, hang up your broom over there by the door and grab some left overs from last months Blog hop, they're fresh out the time portal. Tonight is about honouring the ancestors after all its Samhain, All Hallows or Día de Muertos, if you happen to speak Spanish or come from Mexico.
This is my time of the year (except maybe for driving in the dark), there is a chill to the air, you know the snow or at the very least the frost and ice is about to start forming and let's face it, the spooks and ghouls (oh and freaky fools) start to wake up. This time around I don't have any plans that can go awry but I know that it's important to follow this one through, because not only will it be relevant to the Blog Hop but I also sense that its going to be honest, revealing and mildly sentimental. So if its not you thing or you feel that you may end up doing a disservice to your ancestors and mine with you comments, then maybe best to just skip ahead.
Meet my family, this is dad, mum and me; hubby is the one taking the photo. Dad's been with the ancestors now for going on five years. He was terminally ill with a progressively degenerative condition known as MSA (Multiple System Atrophy) and it was just all to do with when he was ready to let go and return home. My family was and still is awesome, a bit crazed at times, disjointed and touched or tainted (really depends on how you look at it). Dad in his own way was empathic and the other side (meaning mum's), well I am convinced that my grandma coming from fishing folk (so I'm told) was a seer, she would do the tea leaf readings and the palms for folks but stopped when she witnessed/foresaw my aunt in an accident.
Thing is all that had to end up somewhere, so it chose me or rather I believe I chose it. All through my life cycle this time around it's been in the background and then one day it decided to get acquainted with me and well since then it's been nonstop. I will get to that, there is something that I need to deal with first...
I think what brought home this year to me was getting married, it changed and yet expanded my life in ways I really didn't think was possible. Two words within a sentence and suddenly I have a whole new set of ancestors that I didn't even know in my life, which is massively wyrd when you have a great uncle and a ancestral king from a family you've known a little bit about and now suddenly they want to tell you their story in dream-o-vision, complete with bloody murder and up close and personal madness.
However I have learnt to deal with death; both the card and the moment of death. You see I have felt the passing and witnessed the passing of more than one member of the family line, it's odd because the sense of peace and beauty that comes from it, the understanding and complete knowledge that you obtain from being the witness is, well it has no words.
The picture here is of my father-in-law, husband, myself and my mum; I felt my father-in-law pass to the higher side of life, it began the day he made peace with his son, it is a personally held belief of mine that some moments are sacred and only meant to be witnessed by the family themselves. Without needing to be in that room, I knew that everything they needed to say, all the moments that needed to be, happened in that room and then when it was done, my father-in-law had decided there was no more needing done and chose to meet his wife, my dad and all the others that wait beyond the veil for us. I do think there is a beauty in that; we may not get to decide how we are going to exit, but at least once its happened, there is some solace in the knowledge we'll be made welcome...
This weekend I went on an ancestral healing workshop, a lot happened on the workshop and I was able to witness a great deal, work with the tools that we learnt but I also connected with all four of the family lines; my dad's, mum's, hubby's and also my past lives; the part I am glad about is none of the lines needed to have it out with me or me with them.
I seem to have a healthy respect for all of them and know I can call on them when I need to as well. This started me thinking in terms of Tarot, maybe it is possible to help clear the past using the representations presented in the cards, we have plenty of archetypes to work with from Hierophant as the grandfather to the Emperor as the father, but is there a Grandmother figure within the traditional deck?
The mother is represented as the Empress, the daughter as the High Priestess, with the Star as the virginal sister. The fool the son and the Magician the brother, but where do you find the Grandmother? Originally I thought it may have been The World, but thinking about it this can have too many representations. I know that a lot of it depends on the deck but I am just thinking of the general rule for the major deck as it was in the like of rider-waite or the IJJ Swiss.
I have a varied family tree and my past lives are certainly very interesting and there is a wealth of understanding and knowledge within them that they allow me to access when it's needed. Having learnt from my Grandma on Mums side how to read not only cards but also tea as well as the Crystal Ball, mainly from the spirit side than here on the physical, plus learning to come into alignment with the empathy and sense of things as I have, I have come to realise that being a seer or oracle is not to be taken lightly. The more I write (and yes edit) this I am not sure that I would use a Tarot deck to help heal wounds of the past, mainly because one set of grumpy ancestors is enough but an entire spirit world of them, no thanks!
A huge thanks and shout to our Cat Herder and Blog Wrangler Louise for this idea, do leave me a thought, a comment or a WTF if you feel like it and enjoy the rest of the tour, don't forget your deck, your broom and great uncle bulgaria's map of the internet in binary for the blind on your way out...
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