Pendulum

 

The pulses of a seismic body,
A body that beats in extracted sugars and bitter sweetness.
It writhes in the rhythms of its own natural orders.
Where chemicals and synapses squeeze against each other like worms in a bucket.
Inside this cathedral of wet proteins and fatty acids lies my perceptions, my feelings, my very being.

The body is a vessel drawn towards equilibrium.
A beast ravenous to return to the centre balance of being.
You see it in our wants and our cravings.
It's the impulse to overeat after being underfed,
The desire to swim in iced water under summer’s sun,
The thirst to socialise following solitude.
Maybe monks of meditation may always find their presence in the equalised centre.
But this isn’t the trajectory for most of us.
For most of us we swing up and down through rhythms of pleasure and pain,
Like a needle on a seismograph.
Up and down,
We weave through the centre balance only for a brief moment,
only to immediately escape for fields of thorns or meadows of grass.
Life is about feeling it all, for that is what the body demands.
Comfort and distress, hot and cold, hungry and full,
Balance comes with how smoothly we sweep up and down between states of bliss and states of unease.
It’s not about the position of the moment but the grace in which the overarching curves of life flow.
For in these grooves where our paths weave we feel the shifting tectonics within.
We feel a body eternally in friction to the movements of the universe.
A body always attempting to return to centre.






Inspired by paper 

Leknes, S,Tracey I, 2010,  "Pain and pleasure: masters of mankind." Pleasures of the brain: 320-335, oxford university press, New York City, USA

Readings

Exposing myself to the buzzing static of the universe and seeing what sticks, this is a philosophy for my own thoughts as much as it is a practice I have incorporated within my daily life. 

I’ve been reading my Tarot over and over since I’ve gotten back to Melbourne. Fresh in the face of a familiar setting but with an unfamiliar protagonist (myself) these cards have been a resourceful way for me to stir my psyche and push new journal entries. I’ve always said when it comes to my own tarot deck, the order itself is random but there is nothing random about the 78 cards I shuffle between my shifting fingers. 

For centuries these cards have been expanded and informed by the reader and the querent (individual seeking knowledge) who partake in this established ritual. These cards have never been idly static, instead they have shifted in design from deck to deck and by interpretation from reader to reader. These cards have been selected and informed by the deepest pools of our collective psyches. These decks run with archetypes that Carl Jung simply drooled over for the expressive ways they communicated our collective inner consciousnesses. 

"It also seems as if pictures in the tarot cards were distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation...The symbolic process is an experience in images and of images."

Page 38 

The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

Carl Jung 1969

I love both the clarity and space present within a tarot reading. There are enough links to shared archetypes for anyone to reach into, as there also is enough wiggle room for us to paint ourselves in the blank space left on the canvas. This is why Tarot is such a valuable tool for myself. Finding the story and the path between disparate and sometimes contradictory cards has allowed me to reflect into disparate and contradictory parts of my own self. The ways in which different readers and differing decks can have such rapidly different explanations reflects how we all interpret the world through our own lenses. Our trajectories are all initially laid out from within our own psyche, our own selves. We all walk through the vibrant light of paths that we have carved out. Walkways of thought and progression that are cast both as much by the lights of others as the shadows of ourselves. Never must we overlook the power of self-interpretation even when we are reflecting on shared cultural paradigms. 

So this is where I’ve carved out my own Camino to explore my psyche, relentless Tarot reading. Over and over, with different spreads and different rules, I stretch towards the questions and answers these Arcana cards can bring me. 

Interestingly enough when I find a spread of cards disconnected to myself on initial observation this is most often where I’ve found the most bejewelled of insights. Because in the end, we are such layered and context driven creatures that with enough reflection we will always be able to find part of ourselves that can relate to the divinatory meanings of these 78 images. 

We all experience subjective experiences and thus we can always find our own subjective narrative built of shared archetypes. Shared archetypes that can call us to seismic action like the three of wands or images like the six of swords that recall us to remember that through life comes hardship and through hardship will eventually come release. In these cards that I have in my hands I can spread them out to prompt questions that I didn’t know were within myself. By hovering and dwelling on these archetypal cards I can construct new narratives and thus see the potential routes to be taken in life. Through this reflection the mental and physical structures of my mind are forever altered.

Cards are read and reflected, neural pathways are shaped and woven. 

And if having the literal matter in your brain shifted by a spread of selected cards cannot be called magical, I don’t know what can.

Embrace your own magic, embrace your own devine stories, throw some cosmic spaghetti to your own wall and see what sticks. For with only a couple cards in hand you may expand a couple more things within your own mind. 

Pollack R, 2012, The New Tarot Handbook,Llewellyn Publications, Woodbury, USA

Jung C, 1969,The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Princeton University Press, Princeton, USA