Day 10. Day of Nymphs - Dec 29th
This card encourages us to connect to our playful side, our inner child and how best to cultivate this aspect of ourselves.
Card: 7 of COINS
As I lay awake in the crepuscular dawn, wondering if I should go back to sleep or get up and start my day, I found myself thinking about yesterday's reading. The Huck Finn aspects made me consider how grumpy, persnickety, and adult-like I have grown in my old age. Funny that today's reading concerns exactly this.
The 7/COINS upright song,
Time Passes Slowly, is a description of pastoral calm and bucolic pleasure. I thought this morning how, like Huck on his raft, I would spend hours outside as a kid. The benefits of nature are visceral and irreplaceable, and this card unmistakably admonishes me to get out in it more often. The card's reverse song,
No Time to Think, is one of Dylan's most complex rhyme schemes. As such, it is intellectually intriguing but the music suffers as a result and the song fails by being too clever by half. Without outlets for play and the fortifying properties of being outdoors, one becomes so incarcerated in the mind that there is "no time to think" because, ironically, thinking is all there is.
Afterthought: As a boy,
Betwitched was one of my favourite TV shows, too. I don't know that I wanted to "be" Samantha, but I envied and empathized with her (for the record, I still sometimes say "Well..." just like she did). Darren and the creepy Larry Tate represented the adult world no self-respecting kid wants anything to do with. As JM points out, today we have much more magic at our fingertips than we did in the '60s. What we often miss is not that we need to choose between nature and technology in an either/or, but rather that we need to moderate both, use both wisely, and not get so wrapped up in either one that we lose sight of our inner child.
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