There are many kinds of idleness, many of them useful and necessary for making your way through life. There can also be actions that are blocked, currents that dammed or choked, and projects or engines that have stalled. There is a message in this card to examine the reasons why things aren’t moving or slowed to a crawl.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek:
To be consoled as to console;
To be understand as to understand;
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.
–Prayer of St. Frances of Assisi
Nostalgia and sentimentality can lead to a belief that the past can be remade creating a wall against the next step to resolving problems, especially when the future is unknown and includes possible hardships, we want to put on the brakes and stall the process. But often this leaves us ill prepared for what comes along and we wallow in denial and avoidance while real issues go unaddressed.
There may be a need to seek a situation that allows you to be more freely who you are and express love and create relationships that are more fulfilling.
Sometimes it is wise to pause and inspect our motives for rushing forward with actions that will have potentially huge effects on our lives. Sitting idle in contemplation is not a waste of time if it prevents future waste and confusion, though it may appear indecisive, lazy or apathetic.
Idleness can be caused by illness which can include depression or anxiety which can grind any action to a halt or freeze people with fear and prevent life from flowing in a beneficial way. There may be a way to get assistance to deal with these obstacles in order to resume the flow of an active life.
Sometimes it feels like you are moving up a steep slope or against the current and are exhausted by your daily grind, and need to relax and recoup your spirit in order to make progress, instead of giving up entirely.
You may have intended to return to your path, but have idled long and have lost your desire to move. You may need to find a way to force yourself on to your feet again. Motivation is needed to rebuild the will.
You may think that all has been lost through your idleness, that you have let too much time pass, but with the breath of life is hope even though you may not recover all the lost ground, you may not need to if you can find a path that suits you better.
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”
― Lord Byron
“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
Although all is temporary, there is a grounded state that brings a feeling of well being and security without fear that makes it possible to open to the world and life around you with all you have to offer. It is the place of power and has nothing to do with politics or armies or violence of any kind. It is the kind of power that heals and replenishes the world and the possibility of joy among the storm and chaos of life.
Look for an opportunity to create a space in the jumble of life that is centered from which to approach the your life from a position of confidence and support. Now is a good time to settle down for awhile or make a firm choice of where you will center your life around the values you hold closest to your core and know who and what you cherish.
Develop faith like a mountain in your soul and you can not be moved from your place in the world by a passing a breeze. Even the mightiest wind will only scatter leaves and leave you to stand steadfast.
There is active, overt power which seeks to control as many people as it can trap to do its bidding. But, there is also the collective power of people working together or the power of a person who is completed grounded in integrity. With that power miracles can be brought to life in the world.
Let passion be your path and run full tilt into the world diving head first into the living water, immersed, devoured and devouring.
You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.
You have a chance to put your dreams in play through energy and enthusiasm you will lead others into your visions of passionate living.
There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.
— Federico Fellini
“From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.”
― Hokusai
Fortitude is the guard and support of the other virtues.
–John Locke
“The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on. When you consider something like death, after which we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably won’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly.”
― Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
Follow desire and let your dreams and visions be maps to the unknown destination.
Burdens are the foundations of ease and bitter things are the forerunners of pleasure.
–Rumi
Sometimes oppression comes from without when some people seek abusive power over others on any scale from a 2 person relationship to a dictatorial regime using fear and violence to achieve their ends.
Sometimes we oppress ourselves by having expectations that are beyond our power to reach or by giving into fear or desperate need for security.
The first defense and initial step to throwing off oppression is to recognize it and name it so that it becomes possible to see its limits and weaknesses.
The second step is to counteract oppression wherever you can. Stand up to it and move out of the cage it has put you in giving you a view of the world outside the absurdity of life in a trap.
Question the authority which has you under its thumb and make plans for safe routes of escape so you can take with you what you will need beyond the walls.
Hope has feathers to help you fly, but you must grab the opportunities when they show themselves. Grab and hold on with all your spirit and courage never let go of that bright bird.
knowledge and enlightenment assist courage and hope. You must teach yourself, with the help of those who have escaped and those who are learning to do so, to unlearn fear and doubt and relearn action and conviction.
There are many forms of oppression and domination which become invisible–the new normal
— Michel Foucault
As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything seems unchanged, and it is in this twilight that we must be most aware of the change in the air– however slight– lest we become unwitting victims of darkness.
— William O. Douglas
Wheel of Change Interpretation: Living in Together in Community
Find out what bonds you to where you live and where you come from and make use of it to build relationships with people in your community. Enlist the help of others to make everyone feel more at home by developing a bond of shared work and values. By choosing what values to promote rather than blindly following the values of others out of fear or laziness, we may be able to avoid oppressing others or being oppressed by the politics of fear and hatred.
Myriad Ways 