17-- The Star

"When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."

                     Ralph Waldo Emerson

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It's been a while since I've written a little nothing about tarot cards, and I felt like tonight was the night.

Aren't you all lucky?

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When it comes to symbols, everyone likes to ascribe either completely positive or negative qualities to certain archetypes.  So far in the cards I've discussed, symbols like Death and The Hanged Man tend to draw nothing but the negative interpretation; cards like The Magician and Justice tend to make you think of nothing but goodness.

(Of course, if you bother to read through some of my posts, you will see that I enjoy pulling rugs from under feet.  But I digress.)

The Star is an ambiguous card, as it is a card of peace and calm and actual goodness, but the kind that you can usually only find when you reach into the deepest and often darkest part of yourself.  It is a card about finding that essence of who you are-- not of who you wish you could be, or who you project to the world you are, but the person that sometimes exists only deep within yourself.

The card shows a woman dipping a toe in pool of water --a symbol of the subconscious mind-- while keeping one foot grounded.  She holds water with her jug on one hand, maybe to drink from it or just to contemplate it as she pours it back into the pool.  The other hand is watering the soil beneath.

She is naked and vulnerable in the night, as many of us so often find ourselves-- lost in nightmares and horrible thoughts, sometimes of our own making.  Wading through the deep and murky waters of the things within us, that we can't even begin to understand, sometimes we can get lost in the mud.  We obsess.  We toss and turn and give up on sleep. We wake up in a pool of cold sweat, feeling that our lives may never again be the same.

But sometimes, we can see the goodness and the strength buried deep within ourselves.

There is nothing so horrible within ourselves that can't benefit from a little stirring of the waters-- a little contemplation, or analysis.  There is nothing so painful that we can't eventually embrace it and forgive that part of ourselves and be on the way to letting our own buried-deep goodness shine. 

If we let ourselves go deeply enough into that dark night, and trust that we can actually do it, we will eventually find the way to peace and self-acceptance, so we can let our little light shine.