new orleans

Little late again, but here’s this week’s tarot card: the Six of Swords!

This card’s another melancholy one, like the Three. There are a few sad cards in the Swords! I’m not really sure why it’s that way - from a cursory glance at each suit’s attributes you’d think that the Cups, being the suit of emotion, would be the suit most predisposed to melancholy, but it ain’t so. 

I think maybe it’s something to do with the notion that a lot of human suffering seems to be borne out of dissonance between the rational mind (symbolised in the Swords) and the world surrounding it? Which I can sort of relate to, although as a universal rule it’s a bit specious as it puts the onus on the sufferer to end their own suffering? I might be overthinking this.

I think I see the Six of Swords as representing something that, on one level is undeniably quite beautiful & elegant, but if you stop to think about it for too long it gets a bit sad. I know that’s a bit of an amorphous description but I do feel like it’s a Thing. 

The fact that the image usually depicts a cloaked traveller in a boat makes me associate it with journeys, and the idea of time passing.

Eastern Ratsnake, Oatland Island Wildlife Center.

By Samuel Lee.

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“a study in flowers”

Painted on PS [2018.08]

No. 237