#spreadaday2, Day 3 – The Mario One.



I think this is a fun spread and can even be extremely insightful in one’s own meditations. I can understand why a lot of people freaked out about it’s “complexity” and I see that many who did the spread sort of improvised it to their own style of reading.

Looking at the spread in a linear fashion, I got:

9 of Pentacles

2 of Wands

Judgement

6 of Wands

Temperance

the Emperor

Death

3 of Swords

and the 8 of Cups.

I stared at these cards, trying to read them as a story.

From 2009 – 2012, I held my own for awhile. I had a good job, was getting frequent raises, boss was super happy with me. But I wasn’t happy with me. I’ve always hated how the routine 9-5 kind of job just sucks the life out of people. I’m not one who empties easily of “life”— and I started to get overly wrapped up in it. I went off the deep end a little. A lot. I was bored with life so I decided to take this retail job by the balls and totally be a star employee, etc. It worked. But the responsibilities piled sky high. I didn’t agree with some of the things my boss asked me to do. He put me in charge of patrolling “security”, catching shoplifters and sending reports to the police station. Suddenly I felt like all that misplaced passion was on overload (2 of Wands); my ownJudgement was being compromised and questioned. I was being put in the seat of a “judger”, so to speak, and I was springing to the top of my bosses list for assistant manager material. I started noticing how often people around me were stealing from the store. I found myself having to rat out homeless people and start huge scenes often leading to very frightening arrests inside the store. I felt like I wasn’t safe when I would walk home every night.

I remember my boss printed out this stupid certificate one day, towards the end. It was in Latin. Some award for catching so many shoplifters. I found it disgusting and was ashamed of it. I shoved it into my employee file and never saw it again. (6 of Wands)

What happened next could be described by lots of cards. 10 of Swords? The Tower? For sure. But I Temperance where I would expect to see a card of great pain coming from external events over which I was completely a helpless victim.

True… but…

How would I describe what happened next using the Temperance card?

Well, 2 parts of my life— this false me I had established at work and my true identity collided. Temperance talks about two things that are very different coming together. I used all upright cards here, so I read this bearing in mind that any card could be read as reversed. So maybe I hit a breaking point when the two parts (remember about that 2 of Wands up there!) were FORCED against their will to merge. Let’s call if a bad “chemical reaction”. Oh, so fitting in more ways than one.

Next, I stood before the Emperor. In a court of law. Suddenly, I had fallen right off of that 6 of Wands horse and I stood before a reckoner. So many people could be represented by this Emperor. The Judge. My lawyer? The consequences of hanging around with the guy I fell in love with (unfortunately)? Perhaps my own father, as we prepared to undergo a true test of our father-daughter relationship…

And then: Death. Again, perhaps cognitive reframing has worked in my therapy for PTSD after all that happened during this time. Because I would expect to see, again, a more ominous and painful card here. But perhaps Death is putting what happened nicely: the situation ended as I knew it and there was no longer any choice but to start COMPLETELY new in my life. Or, perhaps the Death card speaks from it’s shadow position: the idiotic mistakes I made when trying to AVOID leaving behind certain parts of my past.

I remember what I wrote on Facebook that day. “Why do I always wait until fists fly?”

Two weeks after that, I sorrowfully entered the court room once again, this time to get a no-contact order that would keep me safe from the guy who did it to me.

Three of Swords, hell yeah. This was gut-wrenching pain— not even fear anymore, as he twisted my arm slowly around in its socket and told me what he planned to do to us both. We’d go up in flames in that tiny camper together. This person I loved had lapsed into opiates again and was withdrawing. He became a psychotic, terrifying demon version of what I thought I knew him to be. Three months- three swords. I watched as this person I was SO SURE was my soul mate— my cosmic connection— deteriorated into a life of drug addled insanity. Pieces of my heart chipped away every day. This was not supposed to happen.





My STOP card is the 8 of Cups, and what the HELL else would it be?

The card that stalked me almost all year.

And I pull these cards today, after I return from my third year in a row of RENEWING that no-contact order.

He’s out of my life, and so is ALL of that shit I’ve been afraid to say goodbye to. All of those memories… I’m beginning to finally get it now. Memories are just… memories. Write them down if you’re afraid you’ll forget them. Create something with your artistic talent, your Fire energy— create one last shrine to all the things that are over, done with and will never ever return.

You are now realizing that carrying these little scraps of “cherished” reminder of the past are HURTING you. Look how much time has been wasted staring at these damned spilled cups. All of that emotion and feeling and all of those bitter tears and self-indulgent moments of recalling, of “maintaining a clear memory” of it all… it’s a goddamn waste! You’ve told your story, you’ve written your story, you are STILL experiencing the same severity (worse, really) of flashbacks and nightmares you were when it originally happened. Now though you’ve deeply ingrained these scars in your heart that come from the shards of the past you insist on carrying.

Only now I understand why the 8 of Cups has been stalking me. I wasn’t understanding the place between realizing that I must say goodbye to that which no longer serves me… and actually letting go.

I wasn’t thinking about how scary it actually is to LET GO.

To not think about those events as The Tower or the 10 of Swords. To not be stuck in that that victim holding pattern in the 8 of Swords. To let the stage that the 9 of Swords inevitably led me through GO once the lessons have been learned.

To let go, you don’t have to literally burn everything down that reminds you. You don’t have to get rid of anything— no, you just need to put it out of sight, and put something new in it’s place. Take the newspaper articles, the boxes of paperwork, the LETTERS FROM JAIL (ahem, self, are you listening?), put them in the attic or storage bins and get them out of your sight. That’s step one.

Step two is to endure the pain. It’s gonna hurt like a bitch and seem like there is no light at the end— like there’s no end at all.

But it will come to you one day like a lightning bolt of realization.

Just the same way as I just looked at my “Tower” event as a “Temperance” event, you’ve got to start trying on some new lenses.

Look at it differently. I realize that I am suddenly more at ease with a lot of my oldest and most intense triggers. I realize that when I am lonely and scared, these days I don’t reach out to a shard of painful memory to try to somehow be comforted by it.

The past really is gone. Sometimes there really is NOTHING you can do to get back what you’ve lost.

I’m starting to understand the concept of letting go, though.

And that’s freaking huge.