The tarot cards I am using this month are The New Dawn Ritual Tarot. The deck is based on the traditional teachings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It touted itself as the tarot deck of the 1990s (it was published in 1991), and was geared toward people who wanted to get back to the basics of Ceremonial Magick.
I’ve waited this long to use this particular deck because the cards never appealed to me. The cards themselves seem to be cardboard without any sort of slick coating to make them easy to shuffle and deal, which is bad enough, but the designs are also off-putting. Still, I have the cards as well as an oversize 230-page book, so I figured I should at least try to learn something from this particular tarot. So far, the only thing I’ve learned is that my original assessment holds true: these cards don’t at all appeal to me.
As for the book, it gives the history of the tarot, an account of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an examination of the principles of the Qabalah (an ancient mystical system that more or less parallels the tarot), and explains a variety of rituals and divination procedures specifically “designed for magickal work with the Tarot.”
Mostly, the book describes in great detail each card, telling us what we are seeing (though why they need to point out the red and yellow and black parts of a card when the colors are obvious even to the most disinterested person, I don’t know). The book also describes what each part of the card signifies, how the card relates to the Qabalah, what the cards significance is to the earth and the solar system. Two pages to describe a card, but when it comes to discussing the meaning of the card itself, all they can come up with is a brief phrase. In other words, that huge book says nothing more what the booklet that came with the cards says.
I suppose for those who are deep into the mystique of the tarot, all the intricacies of the card are important, and perhaps someday I will be interested enough to delve further into the cards, but for now, all I need to know is what they mean.
Today’s cards are the six of pentacles, which means “success and gain in material undertakings,” and the ten of swords, which means “ruin, defeat, disruption.” An interesting combination, right? The cards seem to negate each other, though I suppose it could also mean that I will find some sort of success today followed immediately the ruination of that success. Or . . . something.
I’m still searching for a tarot deck that speaks to me, one that I might care to learn about its intricacies beyond the few divinatory words that usually pertain to the cards, but this is not such a deck.
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What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?
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Bertram's Blog 
Stitches of Togetherness
January 30, 2022 — Pat BertramSmall talk — conversation about unimportant or uncontroversial matters — is a staple of my life now. When I visit with friends, we talk about small town life, ourselves, their pets and children and grandchildren, people we know. The only time I have a conversation about something more vital is if I know they more or less feel the same as I do because I simply have no energy to discuss anything anyone feels passionate about. Their passion for their beliefs about the “issues” of the day exhausts me.
For many years, I didn’t engage in small talk. At least not that sort of small talk. Jeff and I talked about everything that was important, both in our lives, in history, in health, in myth, in the world. We generally agreed, and if we didn’t, we’d discuss things, listening to each other without interruption, until we came to a middle ground. Mostly, though, through the decades, we formed our ideas in tandem. These ideas weren’t based on feelings but on in-depth reading (thousands upon thousands of books) on a multitude of subjects, including many things we didn’t necessarily agree with but wanted to know more about.
Then there was the other sort of talking we did. Small talk so small it wasn’t really small talk, more like the stitching that holds two lives together. You know the sort of thing I mean. Things said more or less in passing: “We didn’t get any mail today.” Or “I saw so-and-so today.” Or “They were out of something at the store today.” Or “I’m home!” Nothing of importance beyond the moment.
Several years ago, I wrote that one of the collateral aspects of losing a life mate was having no one to do nothing with. Although Jeff and I worked and played and talked for more than three decades, we often did nothing together. We were just there, a presence in each other’s lives. I’ve found other people to fulfill some of the roles he played in my life, such as someone to do something with, but I have no one to do nothing with.
I’m now realizing it’s the same with talking, and why I so often talk to his photo. I have people to talk with, both small talk and sometimes larger talk, but there’s no one around for the smaller than small talk. If I am sad or lonely, I can call someone, or I can go to the library and chat with the librarians while they check out my books, or I can do any number of things. But there’s no one around for the sub-small talk. I can’t call someone to say, “I didn’t get any mail today.” Just the effort to call would turn the idle comment into something it wasn’t meant to be and would give my not getting mail an importance it didn’t deserve. And yet, a shared life is made up of these passing comments, these “stitches” of togetherness.
Those stitches are another of the many things no one really notices until they are gone. In my case, other things were so much more overwhelming — not just the pain and angst of his being dead, but the silence of my life, the yearning for one more word or smile from him, the lack of someone to do nothing with, the stark aloneness of being alone (it’s completely different having alone times in a shared life than being alone in an unshared life).
When grief started leaving me, I became engrossed in other activities, such as dancing and traveling, moving from place to place and trying to figure out what to do with my life. So many of those activities are no longer a factor. I’ve bought a house and moved to my perhaps final home, so now the subtler and more permanent aspects of living alone after the death of a life mate are making themselves felt.
And apparently, this lack of “stitching” is one of those aspects.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.