Circles of Compassionate Influence (Messages of Divine Love)
December 12, 2023/Dreams of Gaia Tarot
INTRO NOTES TO THE DECK & READING
Welcome to my birthday week! On Saturday I turn a proud 46 years old. It feels like yesterday I was crusading in my teens, livin' it wild in my twenties, growing up in my thirties. Time tends to be linear for most people, but since I turned thirty-five, time has been more circular than ever. Embodied in this deck, the Dreams of Gaia tarot (last used on June 5th) follows the pattern of nature, adhering to the cyclical nature of the elements and our bodily attunement to them.
It is no secret that I spent much of my life rejecting my birthday. Not out of ingratitude, but out of a displaced doubt about my deservingness. My heart bursts with the blessings that I've encountered since 2012 - on a path of beauty and healing, at a time it was needed most. It's been eleven years of reducing the shame and trauma and bolstering the bombastic glow of my life. The healing I've experienced in those years culminates again this week with three days of rituals to purify and open my heart, so I can welcome the love that has been waiting for me.
Be aware that this deck wonders that it doesn't quite follow the expected rules and roles of tarot. So read each of the descriptions carefully, but you can see the guidebook here for more details that I might be omitting for the sake of the collective: https://www.carti-tarot.ro/Dreams-of-Gaia-Tarot.pdf This week, I invite you to join me in throwing off the bindings of unworthiness that held us back and breaking forth into the world as the embodiment of love in our overlapping circles of influence.
These Messages of Divine Love are weekly intuitive card readings offered to share strength & hope for those building a heart-centered world. Each week you'll find messages from our collective guides, Mother Earth, the ancients watching over us. We'll get a peek into what our future selves want to share and how my protectress, Mother Mary, can share her wisdom and love to get us through the week. Each message includes chakra themes that help center our energy. Subscription is FREE.
Where We Are This Week
Love
Heart Chakra
To fully immerse in the meaning of this card, let me share a bit of a visualization based on how I see my own heart: it is a multifaceted pink diamond, glittering and throwing prismed rainbows over every person who witnesses it. For some it's too bright - they have to approach carefully, glare at only the reflections against the wall - for if they peer too close they'll see themselves as they are, as I see them, and that is just too much to bear. But others see that reflection and get drawn in, purely entranced by the goodness I find in the monsters hidden in the corners of their soul. They could gaze there forever, in a self-congratulatory, yet challenging stance, unaware that there is more of me (and thus more of them) to see. That's cool - we can stay there forever, locked in that singular level of awareness. But the people for me, the true beloveds in my life are those who see that first facet and take it upon themselves to continue exploring more, to get deeper, to see to the true core of me, who spin and glow with me, each of us glittering our light upon those in our presence. And just like a kaleidoscope turns, each moment is a fresh chance to see a new facet of ourselves reflected in the world around us and vice versa, each moment creating a new "we" because we are a new "me" now carrying the shine of those moments that came before us. So let this be your rallying call this week: There are as many forms of love as there are moments of me.
Messages from our Guides
Ten of Fire (Wands) (R)
Root Chakra
Love means taking responsibility for ourselves, not claiming mastery over anyone else's fate. Especially right now we need to be very aware of when we're acting out of an ego need to be right, to be followed, to be dominant over another. The temptation to control others is born out of our anxieties from the times we couldn't exert control over our own lives. But also it is born from the experiences of those who came before us that live on in our genetic and cultural memories. We might fear the consequences that someone else will face if they don't take our path or don't adhere to our beliefs. Yet, is that lesson ours to take from them? To control the outcomes for someone else's life betrays a self-centered belief that our experience, our lesson, and our lives should be the standard for everyone else's. Be sure especially that we aren't appointing ourselves the hall monitor as an excuse for not living a full life ourselves.
Messages from Lady Gaia/Mother Earth
Nine of Water (Cups) (R)
Sacral Chakra
Last week I wrote "It's easy to get stuck in old memories, especially during this time of year. " This week's card urges us to break down the walls that have been locked us in, holding back the flow of our timeline as we ruminate, deliberate, doubt, and regret. These emotions have been holding us back for so long that it's hard to remember what life was like without them. But right now, we have to be willing to stop controlling so much of our emotional lives that we forget to truly live and flow. Once that breaks open, the river of time will choose a new path...all we need to do is be willing to trust ourselves (and Mother Earth) enough to flow in the direction of our greatest reward. This will be a priority with the New Moon.
Messages from the Ancients
Queen of Earth (Pentacles) (R)
Solar Plexus Chakra
The reason this one is a throat chakra card instead of a more intuitive third eye card is that we’re already having trouble discerning our internal voice from the cacophony of opinions swirling around us. To do this, we have to know what is truly ours. We need to do some radical listening through the act of mediation to better organize and understand not only what is being said, but who is saying it. Recognizing when to let go of overly critical voices that overwhelm our ability to cope is a necessary practice to discern our true guidance from the dissonant voices introducing new doubt and old traumas.
Messages from Our Future Selves
Five of Water (Cups) (R)
Throat Chakra
The future selves, the enlightened visionaries that we become later in life, always look back with a clear eye. They've had time to ponder our mistakes and reclaim their sense of self. Trust in the ability that we've always had to grow and learn. We are being offered a powerful medicine in our lives - one that might make us gag with tears and burn with regret, but once it's out of our system it is gone forever. Each of us knows what this means - it could be facing a hard truth, or confessing our sins to a neutral universe. This purging will happen with the new moon but will be done by the time the moon is full once again. Letting it wash through us, we will be carried to a place of extraordinary opportunity in the months to come.
Messages from Mother Mary
Three of Earth (Pentacles)(R)
Crown Chakra
When I tuned into this card it went through various iterations. From "Silly goose, stop thinking you know everything." to "Even Sherlock needed help, cutie." But the message was clear - we need to know when to ask for help. The first step is to swallow our pride, our savior/martyr complex where we single-handedly save the world all by our lonesome. That's part of the delusion of colonization and systems of trauma - they keep us separated from each other, sold on a "one true savior" narrative that promotes extremes of self-sacrifice for what was always meant to be a group project. Seek out those who know more than we do - listen, absorb, integrate, learn, and begin to trust in how others can contribute to the whole we envision.
Undercurrent
Journey (R)
Third Eye Chakra
One of the biggest patterns all of us are facing right now is resistance to letting go of the past. Whether it's the "trad wives" clansmen or the futile fantasies of white supremacy, society is having a really hard time letting go of its cruel ambitions of the past. While this is impacting all of us internally, we wouldn't all be in each other's spheres of orbit without there being a purpose to our learning. It's going to take each of us releasing ourselves from the tendrils of the past to be the helpers, healers, and leaders we need to be when others finally break free of theirs. We snip away the sinew that adheres to our present, tethering us to a version of ourselves that doesn't exist. Use this opportunity to show others how you got free of your tethers so they find the courage and inspiration to pass through the transformation offered to them.
Final Advice
Nine of Air (Swords)
Crown Chakra
Each of us emits this beautiful, divine glow when we are finally in alignment with ourselves. I always imagine mine is the soft glow of rough-hewn rose quartz that I found in my mountain meadow summers. A shimmering light of infinite color all our own - like glitter, but more beneficial and harder to get rid of. Yours might look like the mesmerizing shades of cobalt blue, the keeper of secrets in the ink-stained journals of childhood. I know someone else who is the brilliant yellow of a desert sunrise, full of promise and unafraid of success. Still, someone else out there is the dewy green of a jungle leaf, dripping with nourishment. Imagine the brilliance of that glow - each of us representing a different hue of life, one suspended moment of infinite variety. In choosing to be truly ourselves, our flicker of beauty enhances all we find. When we show and glow, we influence everyone within our orbit to be brave enough to dance with us in our authenticity. Now imagine if, no matter where that person went, or what they did, they carried that essence of our truth with them wherever they went. It touched the next person they knew who carried it further than we could have ever imagined. These seeds of love help us connect in an infinite pattern of diversity…
So let's make that influence a good one, shall we?
PARTING WORDS FROM A GEEK EMPRESS
I share a birthday with Jane Austen (Dec. 16) so I think it’s only appropriate that I invoke her spirit in this week’s reading as well. While hands down my favorite Jane Austen book (and adaptation) is Pride & Prejudice, I have a soft spot for Mansfield Park. Even though we know that film adaptations usually sacrifice something of the original, the 1999 adaptation of Mansfield Park improved the book experience for me with one line. Even though it’s said in the film to encourage the affections of a rival to the heroine’s love, it’s something that as a polyamorous woman I relate to rather deeply. That line doesn’t appear in the original book; rather it’s from Jane’s personal correspondence:
“There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time.”
The truth is, even with the people who we choose to spend a lifetime with, we are constantly falling in love with newer versions of them, through newer versions of ourselves. The love that existed for me in my 20s still lives within me, but it is but a drop of the love I choose every day with my partners in my 40’s. Likewise, the love I have for one child co-exists harmoniously with the love I have for my other, - each one special, each one fiercely loyal, but a different flavor of dynamic depending on each kid and who they are. The love I have for one partner, what they bring out in me and I in them, is fundamentally different, yet not superior to, the love I create with the other partner(s) I have. The energy I bring back to the family is a unique harmonization of our lives. We always have multiple forms of love that exist within us at any given time, none of it truly in conflict with the others unless we overthink it too much and let the restrictions of patriarchy taint it for us.
This renewal of love is everlasting as we encounter new versions of ourselves over time. We are constantly playing on the heartstrings to bring out new harmonies, and new resonances. Just like a duet between two singers will likely sound different each time they perform, a reflection of who they are in that moment, our growth as people carries the impact across time - no one version of ourselves is the same as they were before we met this person. We carry the influence of their resonance with us, like the soul glitter of a lifetime, each of us coloring the world with the vibrancy of our love. That compassion shines long after the relationship is done.
As I celebrate my 46th year on this earth, I hope you will carry forth this love to others, sharing your heart, and your vulnerability, building a sacred circle of influence that can love (and live) well beyond us.
No matter what happens this week, remember I am with you always in love 💖
Classes for the New Year!
💓 Messages of Divine Love Year End Review.
Thursday 12/28, 5:30 pm Mtn
For the first hour, I’ll delve into the data from this year’s worth of readings including patterns and trends. In the second hour, I’ll be giving short audience readings and pulling cards for the final reading of the year/beginning of 2024.
($25)
❤️🩹 Surviving your Tower Moment.
Thursday, January 4 (Rescheduled!) 5:30 pm Mtn.
Using the imagery of the Tower from tarot we’ll use this as a lens for navigating substantial personal & societal change. Empower your journey with this class which is aimed to help you not just survive but thrive in the rebuilding process. ($44.44)
💖 Intuitive Tarot for Heart-Centered Leadership.
Saturday, January 13, 1 pm Mtn.
Using the tarot as a tool of intuition, we’ll use this to tap into our subconscious awareness to better understand and evaluate our perceptions. You’ll walk away with not just a basic understanding of tarot, but tools to use to develop a better relationship with your intuition. Includes an option for a closed practice session to check in and practice what you’ve learned.
$85