Deep solitude March 27, 2008
Posted by Liz Mead in : Matters Blue , add a comment
I did a reading this morning. A tarot reading.
I’ve read the cards for over 30 years and use them to focus and believe. Not because they have any power, but because I believe in the combined wisdom and history they represent.
I used the Grimaud version of the Tarot of Marseilles. A modern issue of the deck that evolved in the south of France in the 18th Century. The oldest deck is from Italy and dates back to 1450, drawn from a number of fragmented decks and commissioned by the powerful Visconti-Sforza family of Milan. I’m very excited to be visiting Milan soon, and hope also to visit the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo to see the oldest deck on display.
My reading this morning though was done with the simple blue yellow and red deck of the Marseilles variant. I like their simplicity. I think it makes it easier to focus on the associated and traditional meanings rather than battling some obscure symbology stuck on by a well-meaning occultist who had a penchant for wolves, blood, Indian headpieces or fairy wings.
The Tarot of Marseilles requires an unguarded approach. I started the reading with the Emperor and finished with the Empress. No prizes there for the question I asked was related to the work I need to be doing in the world. The Empress is my card of choice, the self-sufficient artist at home creating from the earth what she needs. Gaia, Mother, delighting in her own creations – giving birth to her future.
The next card, the 4 of Pentacles was matched on the other side of the reading by the Moon. On the conscious side, if you like, are my preoccupations with security and stability. A sense of place in the world. Finding my place. Owning my place. On the unconscious side is the dreamer, the psychic, the madness of loss and grief, the lonely path ahead, but also the creation at night from the deep well-spring. Of course I want to feel safe, but I also want the psychic freedom to create my own way forward. In fact I dreamt last weekend of a new job (but that’s a topic for another blog).
Then I laid out my favourite Queen. She of the Cups. The manifester, the lover of the unseen magic and other realms. I think she’s a mini-version of the Empress, though she has more of the moon-mood-altering madness than her older sister. She’s the reason I get depressed, but she’s also my muse. She sees things as she wants them to be and intuits the next step. It seems magical from outside but its because in sync with her own process. Matching her in the reading is the adventurous energy of the Knight of Wands.
You’ve got to love this guy. He’s the journey expert. Off on another trip, this time to Greece, Italy and Croatia. This is the optimist, the expansive energy of hope and self-belief. This energy of adventure will play a part in the quest for my work. I will journey to the work. I’m on a journey for the work. I work right now and that work is my journey. This card always comes up when a journey is imminent. So no surprises there. 
My final card – the answer card – was the last one I pulled out this morning. It was the Hermit. The hermit - me now in the middle of my life. The hermit needing to focus on what has meaning and what matters to me. The hermit, alone, and forced back on my own resources, free of demands, save those I set for myself.
The Hermit and the Moon are friends. It used to be my late husband, Bloke’s card. He pulled both several months before he died. It is also the card my twin sister invariably pulls out of the deck when I read for her. Father of prayer, meditation, deep solitude and reflection. The Hermit, representing a new way to think. Uncluttered, crystalised this sort of thinking will light the way I need to go.
Normally I’d lay out another card over the top of this one to find out more. But I think I’ll just sit with it and meditate on it. I won’t rush in to fill it up with the wrong, empty, clanging thoughts that sound like; Move now, Leave the job now they don’t deserve you, choose another job out of the paper, Seek is a website not a way of life, that one will do – it’s close enough.
Instead, I’ll sit with it. Being still, being alone, being focused, getting clear about my way of working in the world. It will be partly magical, partly dreamy, part adventurous, part secure, part creative and part controlled. With perfect stillness and peace of mind.
Doesn’t sound half bad.
Working with sparkle March 19, 2008
Posted by Liz Mead in : Matters Blue , add a commentThe quickest way to make a connection is definitely not by using an ADSL broadband connection courtesy of one of the countless internet providers, but rather by using the right hand side of the brain
, and a bit of sparkle.
My fabulous friend James has patiently spent three separate sessions sorting out my ADSL broadband connection. Taking that long, because he had to systematically diagnose which bits of which puzzle didn’t work with which bits of which other puzzle.
The process was exhausting but rewarding. Whilst I kept him plied with gin, all I could do was marvel at his resilience and systematic discipline.
And the best part is that I am now on the net! Or as my friend Sparkles would call it, the interweb.
James and I have another blog called Working with Sparkle. The postings are about communication processes, systems, tricks of the trade, provocative ideas and war stories. We do it by blogging, simply because it’s the way we both think well. We think with a tale. Not a fairy tale. Nor a dog-wagging tail. Just a tale.
The idea of running a concurrent blog came about whilst James was conducting his diagnostic process to connect me to the net. As I listened to him tell the annoyingly calm trouble shooter from Internode, that yes he had tried all the things he was now being asked to do again, I had an epiphany. A blinding moment of insight. A bright blue moment of connecting thoughts, slap dang in the middle of our removing one ethernet cable to replace it with another wired router cable in some other portal of blah blah blah.
At that stage, Sparkles just wanted a hammer.
Who is Sparkles? And what’s he got to do with connections?
Sparkles made an appearance on the flight from Armidale to Sydney. James and I work together and we were returning from an excruciatingly long working weekend. The weekend had been full of repeatable – how many times do I have to tell you -messaging; impossible sales pitches and endless doubt on the part of what was starting to resemble an entire army of website users. Mind you this is typical for the sort of marketing we’ve been forced to do.
So there we were, on the plane. Exhausted. We watched a perfectly lovely steward demonstrate the bells and whistles attached to his yellow life-saving vest. You’ll recall that mind-numbing moment (for them) when they put on that yellow vest for the 50,000th time, and pull on one tag, whilst blowing on one other whistle, whilst juggling one further rope.
And in a flash of creativity, James envisioned a congo line of 30 such stewards, given bells, whistles, perhaps a feather or two, a sparkle and tiny touch of bling, to ensure they had no trouble getting attention. He quietly whispered just one word to me – Sparkle. Where the vision came from, we’re not sure, but it was an insane moment which made us both explode with laughter – and gave us a fabulous metaphor for our communication work. If you want to get attention – work with sparkle.
My own communication tenet has always been about engaging others to make the outcomes stick and last. Often my work is a bit left of field, shaking them up, making grownups paint with colour to make the unlikely connection between their company’s goals and the encroaching environments of change. I’m a firm believer that it is no good me being a hero or a legend, if it all falls apart the moment I’ve gone.
My partner in crime, James follows an equally empassioned truth – the art of diagnosis. His is a more incisive, more challenging art, because it pares back the situation in order to make the correct and systematic reading of a problem. When done correctly, this makes the solution all the easier to find and match and the subsquent roll-out more factual and enduring.
So working with sparkle is just that: a bit of dash to get us started, a few bells and whistles to get attention, but in the end an adjustment to systems, metaphoric routers and cables, and above all blissful sustainable connection to the whole wide world of possibilities.
Thank you James – this blog is for you.
Changing habits March 13, 2008
Posted by Liz Mead in : Coming Back , 2comments
Right at this very moment two of my girlfriends are changing.
One is head over heels in love and planning to get married in her garden. And the other has just resigned, rented out her home, and has booked a flight to Kathmandu to work on a community project.
It’s not the first time either of them has done such a thing.
What is it about our lives? We repeat things until we get it right, or hope to get it right, or get it almost right. In any event, who says what’s right except our own in-built moral compass. What interests me is that we keep repeating things.
Just this morning I was talking with friends about this process. How do we stay true to our path? How do we change the direction of that path if it reaches a dead end? And will we know the dead end when it appears? And what about those forks that lead you in circles back on the same path. The forks I call habit.
I’m aware that when we change one part of a puzzle other parts of the puzzle adjust, sometimes with resistance and other times to strengthen the new configuration.
Right now I am changing the way I live and work. I change the way I live in my house by decorating and moving things around. I change the way I work by linking to new media that enables me to operate from home in a far more global way than ever before. All fine because it’s just about me. Where it gets tricky is when other people come into the equation.
This darling soon-to-be-wed friend has had to change arrangements for the overseas trip we were going to take together. The sudden change raised a question of paying more money or losing money to adjust for that change.
My first reaction to the travel change was a default reaction to rescue the situation, to ensure someone else was made happy. To pick up the extra cost so she could be happy. But it didn’t sit right. Something tweaked in this newly-renovated-self. Something made me put my needs out there.
And here’s where the stress arose. If I told her what I wanted and needed, would this friend be angry? Would my needs outweigh hers? Would I lose her as a friend? Whose fault was it anyway? Why rock the boat!?
No need to worry, of course. Once all the information was laid on the table and because she’s a friend, her reaction was of course perfect acquiescence and love. I needn’t have worried.
But I did. Not that I worried for nothing. Rather I worried just enough for the lesson to be remembered well, and the dead-end behaviour to stop.
So I dare say we will keep doing the same things again and again. We’ll repeat the same lesson many times before we’re through. It’s how we do it, each time it comes up, that make the difference, not getting it right.
Dreaming the Blue Lynx March 7, 2008
Posted by Liz Mead in : Matters Blue , 1 comment so far
The best time of the day for me is early in the morning. At the still point of time between waking and sleeping. And a time I spend in quiet thought – usually on a dream I’ve just woken from.
This week I dreamt of a blue lynx, nudging me as I walked alone along a path in a forest – archetypal and totemic for sure. It was a lynx with its characteristic flat face, tufted ears and big paws. A lynx just like the one I thought I saw in Canada last year.
On the Icefield Parkway in Banff National Park, Canada last year I saw a wolf. It walked past the car I was in. It was so close I could have easily touched it. It eye-balled me so calmly I stopped scrambling for my camera and just looked. My first thought was that it was a lynx even though I’ve never seen a lynx or live wolf before. When the French first settled Canada, though, they too thought a lynx was a cross between a domestic cat and wolf. So no surprises there.
But here I was dreaming of it. Why? I’ve been confronted and comforted many times by my dreamscapes. Some portend events, like swirling rivers in New Orleans or crashing planes into towers. Others simply process information and food! The difference seems to be that the ‘big’ dreams occur in times of personal change or crisis.
I did a Google search which revealed that a multi-lingual recruitment agency, called Blue Lynx operates in Europe. This was strangely comforting given my desire to change work. I wonder if dream language qualifies?
The Lynx symbology, my second Google search revealed, was probably more useful. The Lynx is honoured in a number of mythologies in Finland, Africa, Greece and the Americas. It is a totem of clairvoyance, vigilance and personal power. Because of her beauty, the African Lynx was beloved by the Northern Star who assumed human form to marry her. In 17th Century Italy the Academy of the Lynxes, of which Galileo was a member, was dedicated to the search for truth and the fight against superstition.
This totem Lynx teaches when to speak and when to hold silence – a great lesson for me who is figuring out the right level of engagement in my current workplace.
Mythology tells us Lynx got her flat face when she tried to jump through a wall chasing one of her forest buddies, another pertinent lesson for one who keeps hitting her head against a brick wall at work.
Wolf or lynx, dream or waking doesn’t really matter. My blue moment lynx reminds me to trust my intuition and inner eye more than surface information. Although vigilance and suspicion are valuable tools, the secret for me, right now is to just slow things down so as to really eye-ball the events and people that cross my path.
Once you really look at a situation you can see everything as it is, not as you wish it to be. I am where I am because I’m meant to be here.There’s no hidden meaning or reason for things that I can’t figure out for myself. This lynx dream also reminds me thatI have all the personal power I need to do just that.
And for the record, I do believe it was a Lynx in Canada just pretending to be a wolf.
Sweet dreams
