When I was drawing today's card, the news was playing in the background, naturally saturated in 9-11 remembrance.


I have mixed emotion about the whole topic of 9-11. On one hand, I feel for those specific bereaved families, and would not want to inflict any further upset onto them. I believe the love they shared with the family and friends they lost transcends time. Any act of remembrance is an act of love, from one person to another.


It is appropriate that we all show support for them.


On the other hand, as a total population, the vast majority of us did not lose someone close to us that day. As a percentage of the population, the injuries and casualties of Iraq and Afghanistan has caused more total impact then the events of 9-11.  With all due respect, sympathy and compassion to individual tragedy, as a nation, as a whole, we are at a crossroads. We need to get over ourselves. For those of us not directly involved, there is a point where we turn their personal tragedy into a national wallowing in hyper-emotionality and self-pity. That, to my mind, is an insult to their losses and an insult to the memory of those lost. It is time for us, as a whole, to take a new direction or risk stagnation and darkness. It is time for us to honor those people and those events through courage instead of fear, peace instead of war, compassion instead of intolerance.


For some unknown reason, the last post about the Sun card has been popular. Given the historic context of this weekend, I'm not surprised that the Sun came up again today (all pun intended).


The sun is a symbol of LIFE, of LIGHT, of stability...
When 9-11 happened we could have chosen to react differently. Instead we collectively chose to be afraid, to be angry, to go to war, to villify those who protested the wars as 'unpatriotic', to spy on ourselves, to torture. We chose a world of pat downs and misnomered 'patriot' acts. Some even chose to use innocent military funerals as a means of expressing hate. Sure many, many individuals have acted with courage, vision,even selflessness...like the military, first-responders, NYFD, NYPD....heck, New Yorkers in general. But the national sway, in hindsight, was the opposite.


George Lucas was absolutely right when he wrote that fear and anger leads to the dark side.
Now, at the tenth anniversary, we arrive at a new crossroads. Yes, we should remember those lost...but maybe a kind thought for those lost to hatred world-wide might be order too.  In my opinion, the best way to honor those lost is to live with compassion and courage.
Not live stupidly...reasonable safegaurds are, well, reasonable. Not live with war, fear and bigotry. Live with a compassion and courage that would make lost loved ones proud and make war-mongers quake. Down that path we might find the stability so craved since that day ten years ago.


Deep in the human brain, there is a cell cluster of special cells called the amygdala. If I'm understanding correctly, it has to do with dealing with emotions, conditioned fear responses...the pavlov's dogs kind of thing.


Perhaps it is time to reach deep within ourselves and reawaken our national amygdala, to learn to get over our fears, get over ourselves, to stop wallowing in self-pity over what happened. It is a time to choose a path of light instead of a path of darkness. It is time to shake of the dust of "ground zero", put aside fear and anger. If we remember and commemorate by way of compassion and courage, then the sun rises again over the world trade center.

Time in a Cup

Tarot card: Five of Cups

The painful losses that are sometimes associated with the 5 of cups is closely related to the perceptions we saw yesterday with the knight of coins.

Change is enevitable. It is the one thing in life we can true count on. It is normal, natural, and expected to regret losing the things that give us pleasure. No one wants to lose someone or something they truly love.

This card does not, in any way, chide or contradict us for mourning our losses. If anything it acknowledges and validates that normal sense of grief and mourning. There is nothing wrong with reminiscence and honoring past experiences, past feelings. There is nothing wrong with the normal mourning process. If anything, problems come when we rush or suppress that process. Some people are hardwired to work through it in an eyeblink. Others take more time to recover. Another way things can go wrong is if the process is stalled...when we become interminably inconsolable.

When the 5 of cups comes along, it also asks us to look at our mental outlook and mind-set. The knight of coins reminds us of the power we have to co-create our world through our perception of our world. The 5 of cups is a bit more specific. It looks at the unavoidable, it is a hand on the shoulder recognizing the pain being felt, and offers a bit of human sympathy and commisuration.

If the 5 of cups resonates with you today, what is it you miss, mourn or have lost? Are you allowing yourself to feel the loss, and grieve as you need? Are you wallowing in the loss, so much so that this card has come to remind you that loss is normal, natural, but can not stop us from living?

When change comes, I like to think of time - in a quantum physics sort of way. Time is a whole thing...all time exists all at once. We just experience one thread of it one moment at a time. The rest of it is still out there.

I like to think of it as spinning yarn or thread. And collapsing probability waves.

The past still exists, our consciousness has just moved beyond it, like yarn we've already spun and is in the center of a ball of yarn behind us...we don't see it, it is wrapped up and obscured by more recent events - we can't touch see or experience it, but it is there. We can touch it and experience it only through love and memory, but it is still there.

The future has infinite possibilities...many, many fibers and filaments for us to choose...the future is a whole entire field of cotton. It too exists, right now, all at once. Through our choices, we select from all the possible fibers, and spin them into our NOW. We choose, we collapse the future possibilities into the tangible present. In the next second that bit of spinning becomes part of the past, part of the yarn we have created.

The life we spin is ever changing. It is hard to move down the thread and let the past threads go, especially those we most cherish.

It is exciting to know we can spin the most beautiful yarn we can from the cotton we are given.

If we cling to old yarn, the thread becomes tangled as the new is spun...the spinning wheel never stops...so long as there is life, there is movement and change.

Loss hurts...but what is ever really lost? Material things are impermanant anyway. The memories they contain are ours forever, with our without them. The past still exists just outside our grasp, but love that is felt never fades. The golden time still exists where it was, no matter how things are now. Golden times may yet come, may yet be spun from shining new fibers.

Circumstances change. People leave. Feelings change and fade. Love may spin farther away in time and space, but it is never lost. We sense it in a different way, as it touches our heart in a different way. Different isn't lost. Different isn't gone.

How you spin, and the life you weave is up to you. The memories, the love is always yours.