January 30, 2010 - Four of Wands

Looks like a celebration ahead! Hurray. Maybe it's my upcoming trip to the Santa Barbara Film Festival. Maybe it's the friends I'm planning to meet there. Maybe it's a surprise, something wonderful I can't even conceive of now. The best events in my life came just like this, out of the blue, completely unthought of, inconceivable until they happened then inexorable once they occurred. They felt like the hand of fate, the touch of God, miracles, plain and simple.

When the Four of Wands comes up in a reading, it speaks of celebration, of freedom, of excitement. And, as opposed to trying to figure it out, plan it, worry it, I think I'm just going to see what comes and relish all of it, in every form.

In the Jane Austen Tarot, the Four of Wands (Candlesticks) depicts the weddings of Pride and Prejudice - Jane and Charles, Darcy and Elizabeth. Not that this card promises weddings. Rather, it is the end of one cycle, a foundation complete, and moving on to something new. A relationship can move to the next level, is moving to the next level, but nothing is certain, nothing is guaranteed. I get that now in a way I never did. You can want, I did, but all that wanting, as powerful as it is, doesn't make it so. Relationships are living things with their own fates. We think we drive them but when two come together, lover, friends, parent-child, etc., something is born and the third, the child, has its own destiny. I never realized this so completely until I loved and lost and kept on loving. And it didn't die, but lived as something different and keeps evolving, surprising me.

What Would Jane do?

"Rash decisions do not often result in prudent results, and success and achievement are rarely achieved without effort. Yet people continue to insist that prosperity and happiness are worth the expenditure -- especially in retrospect. With humans being the malleable creatures that they are, present happiness always trumps past pain." p. 62 May it be so.