beginagain Posted October 2, 2018 Posted October 2, 2018 Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale By Dan Albergotti Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days. Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals. Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices. Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you. Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart. Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope, where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all the things you did and could have done. Remember treading water in the centre of the still night sea, your toes pointing again and again down, down into the black depths. This spread is written for those who are struggling with memory loss and how it has affected their life and passage of time. Many spreads interpret the past strictly from the perspective of current and future paths which, for someone who cannot remember where they were and how they got here now, may only offer confusing information. Memory can be affected by many things: trauma, mental and physical illness, abuse of both the self and from others, distraction from other things happening, or even just the passage of time. The Bowhead whale, for example, lives to be over two hundred years old. What it remembers and what it has forgotten are both crushing weights. This spread can be used with both Major and Minor Arcana, although using Majors only might work best for the individual. There are no reversals in this spread. Layout goes as this: 1. 4. 2. 5. 6. 3. 7. The centre three cards represent the self, and the remaining four represent the circumstances behind the loss and what has been lost. The outer four lie horizontally, the heads facing inward, depicting their outside influence on your core self, thus: ^ -> ^ <- -> ^ <- The meanings of the cards are: 1. Self before loss 2. Self in the middle of flux 3. Self after loss 4. How the loss began 5. How this loss affects your life now 6. What was lost 7. What remains I hope this spread is useful; please let me know your thoughts. Remember treading water in the centre of the still night sea, your toes pointing again and again down, down into the black depths
RavenOfSummer Posted October 2, 2018 Posted October 2, 2018 beginagain[/member], thanks so much for this. What a profound spread, and the poem you share is beautiful and very much captures the essence of the spread. My father suffered from Alzheimer's for the last seven years of his life. I wish I had had an opportunity to work through a spread like this with him in the earlier stages of his disease (though I didn't learn to read tarot until many years after his death). I can actually see this spread being used with other types of loss too- not only memory loss, but anyone who is experiencing loss for any reason. <3 <3 <3
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