Preparing for the New Year: Strength

 

 Strength

from Mystic Faerie Tarot

by Barbara Moore with art by Linda Ravenscroft

For today and the next several days leading up to the New Year, I want to offer you this card from Barbara Moore and Linda Ravenscroft's charming Mystic Faerie Tarot. This is not a Card of the Day, but a guide to steadily walk you through the process of preparation for 2022.

Considering all that the 2020s have already put us through--and, child, you know they ain't finished yet--the very idea of Strength, as in Lord, give me..., should not be a surprise.

Strength? Gather yours.

We are not only not out of the woods, we've got a lot of people out there still trying their damnedest to send us off in the wrong direction, deeper into danger.

Strength is one of my favorite Major Arcana cards. For those of you new to these parts, Major Arcana (major secrets) means the big overarching archetypes that represent the driving forces and energies and themes in our lives and issues. Strength generally shows up in Tarot as a figure (usually gendered as female but possibly an angelic or, in Ravencroft's vision, a faerie being) depicted with a big lion or other jungle cat (or, in this case, a dragon). We're meant to see the "lady" as a calm, wise tamer of the beast--heavenly mind over earthly matter. The beast is all body and physical force; she is spirit and intellect. In some images, she grabs and wrests control of the lion's jaws; in others, as here with Ravencroft's dragon, she sits peaceably with her formidable partner, an interpretation I much prefer, as you might expect!

There is no fight, no wrestling here. Ravencroft's image can call us to make peace with the totality of who we are, to find strength there in friendship and collaboration within, and to face the external world from that place of self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and power.

So, begin to prepare yourself this way: 

Whatever you encounter in 2022, you will show up as your full self with all your forces--spirit, mind, body, emotions--in loving alignment and on point. You will nourish and nurture you full self. You will express your full self.

Let this be your plan, and start to build towards it now. Dream on it. Journal on it. Sing it. Dance it.

It might turn out that I will have a few more things to share with you before January 1 but, for now, this is your practice for the week. Enjoy!