Butterfly Lantern

Here’s a recent sketch, using one of my favorite exercises from the Heart’s Compass Tarot and Writing Workbook I’m working hard to finish this month. For this exercise, you draw three tarot cards in order to create a drawing of your own. The result is a synthesis drawing or tarot doodle, for which you bring forth your own colors and see what imagery arrives in response to the three tarot cards. Here’s how I arrived at the Butterfly Lantern:

• Card 1: I pulled the Page of Swords for completing the Tarot workbook. Writing a book puts you through all the stages of birth itself…I’m going through some of that “let me see the baby” anxiety when you just want to hold the baby. Yet, there’s still work to be done. The card I drew: Page of Swords…a beautiful affirmation I’ll have the “idea fortitude” to finish. She’s the young energetic self brandishing her sword, the idea girl! Yes! I’m in the fun part of drafting, gathering into the basket all the varieties of tarot play I’ve enjoyed over the years and making them accessible to others.
• Card 2: I pulled the Judgment/Aeon card for offering love and connecting to others when I read for them which I translated to mean that I simply need to continue to practice with love, compassion, and objective empathy. And to celebrate the way reader and querent form a community of two working together to grow a new self, a new awareness without judgment, holding forth unconditional love.
• Card 3: The Hermit for the transition from online tarot deck making classes into face-to-face classes which I took to signify the way we turn in to take stock of what we’ve learned before we bring the lantern of our experience forward to help others see their own way, to reflect back to them their own beauty and strength. It also reminds me that by nature I’m more comfortable as a Hermit, but to stretch to grow, it’s time to welcome more face-to-face time in the communities I love, in person.

I looked at the three tarot cards (Page of Swords, Judgment, and Hermit) and this butterfly lantern is the resulting sketch. That youthful Page’s Sword turned into the red and blue rippling rays where sun and butterfly overlap; the thorax of butterfly became the Hermit’s lantern that anchors the butterfly wings, and the blue butterfly is a representation of non-judgment, an image of the new self rising with wings of compassion and self-love.

What might the lantern signify? The fearlessness to hold up the light to see what needs to be let go. The wings? What we gain when we face our past, our stress, our trouble, and prepare again for flight, lighter for having let go in favor of joy. I hope you’ll try your own synthesis drawing;  to stay in touch about the Heart’s Compass Tarot and Writing Workbook sign up for my Heart’s Compass Tarot monthly newsletter.

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