Postponement

The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.
-Flora Whittemore


I have been pulling one tarot card a day from my Zen Tarot deck and on Saturday I drew Postponement. The card shows a woman standing in a gray landscape and in front of her is a picture frame and by looking through the frame she can see the landscape in its true colors. The woman is the same color of gray as the world around her but the blouse she is wearing is showing a faint rainbow of colors that match the colors seen through the picture frame. The book that came with the deck states that the woman wants to go through the picture frame (the colors developing in her blouse show that) but right now she can't seem to do it. She will wait. As the book explains:

There is still too much 'what-if' activity in her mind. Tomorrow never comes, they say, but no matter how often it is said, it seems that most of us tend to forget the truth of it.

I interpreted this to mean that I should not put off doing the things I already planned to do that day. I did briefly have the thought that the meaning of the card was deeper but I brushed it away.

I pick a card out of the Tarot deck by first shuffling the cards and then fanning the deck out evenly on a flat surface. Next, I lightly run my fingers back and forth over the backs of all the cards and at some point one of the cards will "stick" to a finger and be dragged out of its place. That becomes my card for the day. When I do this on Sunday morning the card that "sticks" is Postponement. Someone sure is trying to tell me something.

I pick up the book and reread the commentary and in addition to the above quote these lines right after it pops out at me:

In fact, the one and only result of postponing things is a dull and depressing feeling of incompletion and 'stuck-ness' today. The relief and expansiveness you will feel once you put aside all the dithering thoughts that are preventing you from acting now will make you wonder why you ever waited so long.

Well, that's correct, I have been feeling like my life is incomplete and that I am stuck. I have been drifting since January and all the good things I was going to add to my life then have quietly been allowed to float away. My eating habits have slid back to too much sugar and too many Cokes. I haven't been exercising, except to walk the dog once a day. I can tell my body is not getting enough water without counting the number of glasses of water I drink. I have not meditated once. Instead of doing any of these things I went into hibernation -it was easier. Now, Spring is here and I feel as if I am awaking from a long Winter's nap. Still groggy but ready to rise.

Postponement. Got the card two days in a row, so, what ever I am postponing is bigger that not sticking to New Year's resolutions. I know this but I don't want to face it. My life is changing and has been changing since the day I read that article about the Camino. The greatest change was finding out certain beliefs I held were true. Belief can be described as, "conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon," no real proof needed. Some people say belief is hard but I say belief is easy, finding out that what you believe is true, that's hard.

Before I walked the Camino I believed certain things that I had either read about or heard about. I believed that people can be contacted by the dead. That people have a third eye and meditation can open it. That miraculous things happen to people while walking the Camino. After the Camino I know that miraculous things happen on the Camino because they happened to me. I know that it is true that people can be connected by the dead because my mother has been contacting me. I know that it is true that people have a third eye that can be opened by meditation because the last time I meditated I could feel a strange pressure centered between and slightly above my eyebrows. All these things scared the hell out of me, which is why it was hard for me to write about the Camino at first and why I stopped trying to contact my mother and why I stopped meditating. Doors have opened, doors I am still afraid to step through.

...we need to be willing to let our intuition guide us, and then be willing to follow that guidance directly and fearlessly.
-Shakti Gawain