Balancing Acts
The world frequently seems hellbent on making us choose sides. Imagine the field day Carl Schmitt would have if he were still alive. And while it’s certainly important to draw boundaries to let in and encourage what we want while refusing what we do not, too often the divisions we draw are sloppy and overly broad, where we choose a lenience that permits everything from those with whom we identify and grant nothing to those we do not.
When I want to think in more nuanced ways about how to draw boundaries, I find it useful to look to other sources than the Rider-Waite tarot. Western thought is notoriously bad at seeing the big picture holistically and in terms of mutual dependence. It’s a little too obsessed with drawing clumsy dichotomies and putting fences around things, as if one could simply cut out undesirable things from life as easily as slicing a visible piece of mold off bread. More interesting and realistic approaches imagine the world as a web of mutually dependent interactions that come together to create a whole that goes beyond the sum of its individual parts.
When I want to think in this way, I prefer to look to Oracle decks rather than tarot decks. Tarot decks can be read like this, and this is how I try to use them, but it requires a deftness that is made much more straightforward by some other decks. For holistic thinking, one of my favorite decks is the Medicine Card deck. It uses animal cards with a pan-indigenous set of interpretations to offer guidance on how to navigate the complex situations of every day life.
Today’s draw:
Dog, Buffalo, Ant
Deck:
Medicine Cards, by Jamie Sams and David Carson
Dog is marked most by his loyalty. In the reverse position, he calls on you to examine where your loyalties lie and ask whether or not they’re serving you. You may have chosen company who bonds with one another by creating enemies elsewhere, leading you to behave unjustly towards others. Or you may be failing to stand up for yourself when confronted by people who would take your power (in which case you are failing to be loyal to yourself).
The need to balance loyalty to both the self and others is complemented here by Buffalo, whose lesson is abundance. Specifically, by honoring all the world has to offer and paying respects to all parts of creation equally, Buffalo opens up to the benefits that all things have to offer and is able to manifest abundance easily. Like Dog, Buffalo remembers to recognize this in both self and others, and so the ability to receive endlessly also translates into having the resources available to give endlessly. Together, they tell us to not be stingy with respect and honor — recognize the good that others have to offer while staying true to our own gifts and we all reap the rewards of both.
Like Buffalo, Ant has faith in the ability of the world to provide and honors that. But Ant adds that we must sow to reap the rewards, and that good things come to those who wait. Some things take time, and so it is important to be persistent and patient as we work to create the world we want around us. Together, Dog, Buffalo, and Ant tell us that, while the road may be long, the divine is around us always, in ourselves and everything else. If we remain unwavering in our commitment to that, we learn to cultivate and draw it out of the world around us for the betterment of all.
