New year, new prompt (to let down after 2 entries? hahaha)! Although I think this will be more of a series than a prompt. I can't promise to have a regular schedule for this series, but I'll make sure to post from genuine aha moments—I just hope that happens more often.
I decided to bring in here my musings with the different cards in the tarot deck. In case you don't know it yet, it's not just the spread that makes up the messages in tarot. Every card rings in some moral truth and substance that is profoundly meaningful in itself. A tarot deck has two categories: the major arcana, and the minor arcana. While typically, the journey through the deck starts with the major arcana's The Fool, I decided to run through this randomly, like a random feature from a collection of books. Today's pick is Wheel of Fortune.
The cyclical nature of life has been a theme that I've been fixating on for a while, especially with everything that happened last year (wow I can't believe that I can finally refer to 2020 in past tense like the nightmare that it was). One of the meaningful concepts that that year has imbedded in my consciousness is that life truly is a wheel that keeps turning. Or a roller coaster that never stops—up and down, fast and slow—Life is a heck of a ride. And almost always, none of it is personal.
The Wheel of Fortune tells about life's genius way around its laws of cause and effect. It's a good reminder that the wheel of life never stops turning and that we exist in a realm that goes around in a circle. If you think about it, many phrases revolve around the idea of repetition and coming full circle. Sayings like "what goes around comes around", or "history repeats itself", or "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree", or how about the Disney classic "it's the circle of life". All these phrases typically used in different settings and situations, yet all bear the same theory that what we put out, we eventually receive back in.
In the end, the Wheel of Fortune card is just a reminder of the bittersweet truth of how life works.
If you've read my previous blog, you'd know this is one concept that the past year has highlighted to my consciousness. Most of the events from last year showed me that we owe as much as we take from life. We can't really expect to go on our merry way without having some sort of consequence from our choices. And whether those are bad or good choices, it sticks with us like unpaid debt that strings us to those very moments, forever keeping us accountable for our past. Take the current state of the earth's climate crisis. For years, science has not once failed from warning humankind of the consequences of our unconscious materialistic hoarding. How many more famines, pandemics, typhoon devastations, and unbearably hot summers have to happen before we even listen to Mother Nature's pleas and be more conscious of the trail of the carbon footprint we leave behind? What's truly sad about this is that the longer we ignore these blaring distress signals from nature, the more we suffer. We end up passing the troubles and problems to the generation after us; A generation that won't have any other choice but to live through the consequences of the mess their predecessor has irresponsibly made. They're left to clean up and solve a problem that they never even chose in the first place—environmentally, politically, and even down to more personal aspects in life. And this might be karma in its grandest, most obvious form: the debts we don't end up paying in our lifetime become the debts our sons and daughters end up paying for instead, as the wheel of fortune keeps turning and reflecting us the same energy we choose to give out to the world. It's our choices that pave the journey of humankind and determine whether we're moving forward or going around in circles.
This card reminds us to be conscious; to be more aware of our actions and intentions that we put out. Because even in moments when we think that the universe isn't paying attention, it is. And the universe is a swift and masterful debt collector—it's nothing personal, it's just life.
In the end, the Wheel of Fortune card is just a reminder of the bittersweet truth of how life works. It's often hard to accept that the things happening in our lives is somehow, in one way or another, a consequence of our choices—especially when it's not as good as we had hoped. And it's even harder to accept all the type of debts we've recklessly dealt ourselves with. But the point of The Wheel of Fortune is not that we're forever doomed by our choices in the past, but it's the choices we make now in the present that determine the nature of our future. This card reminds us to be conscious; to be more aware of our actions and intentions that we put out. Because even in moments when we think that the universe isn't paying attention, it is. And the universe is a swift and masterful debt collector—it's nothing personal, it's just life.