Waiting for my car talismans to have a home again…
Wednesday, it was my 34th birthday. But I wasn’t feeling very “birthday-ish”, despite all the loving well-wishes via facebook and twitter and text and social media and phone calls.
Why? Because my beloved car, Samus, was totaled in accident at the end of last month. A fluke accident of someone flying through a solid red light and hitting my little clown car in an intersection as I was making a left turn at the green light.
Thankfully, I am fine physically but unfortunately, my little car had to die for me to live. My little car that I loved and doted on. My little car that I somehow unwittingly used to define a portion of my personality. Now that hole is being keenly felt in the search for a new car. I have been comparing it to first love. You never forget your first love, no matter how many years have passed, or how very in love you are presently. I think it will be the same for me and my car. I loved that car. This past Monday, I said good-bye to her after cleaning her out at the towing yard. I hugged her and sobbed and thanked her for transporting me so faithfully and keeping me safe.
Every time I’ve become teary when thinking of the situation, I keep repeating to myself, “it’s just a car, it’s just a car, itsjustacar itsjustacar itsjustaCAR!”
After the accident, there was the headache of insurance claims and police reports and contact information, and finally the all-so-fun “hurry up and wait” scenario: It was coming down to two options: repairable or totaled, which would be determined by the field adjuster. I prayed, and I gathered together tarot cards and charmed them hoping for the favorable outcome of “repairable.”
Last Friday, I got the news: deemed totaled.
As I said to my fiancé more than once since the accident, “the world doesn’t give a fig for your plans.”
I’ve mused upon this before in my Witches and Pagans article “When Bad Things Happen to Good People: A Pagan Perspective”. In that article I was seeking to understand larger problems than a simple totaling of a car, but it boils back down to my NOT wanting to fall back on “why me? woe is me” reasoning. To some degree, I could have dealt with this better if I had SOMETHING to do with the accident, or if I had been the cause. I am grateful I am NOT, but it’s always easier to take responsibility for something that you had a hand in than a situation that was completely and utterly out of your control.
Events that are out of our control, well… suck. As much as we can do to prepare ourselves or mitigate or plan, the unplannable DOES happen. It is what we do when those events occur and our inner/outer reactions that make the difference, and show us what kind of people we are… and what kind of people we want to be if our reactions are less than stellar.
Lately, I’ve been questioning my occupation as a tarot reader in light of all this car trouble. Even when knowing that psychic and intuitive abilities don’t always work in the ways we want or plan to, I have been really berating myself anyway. I have been thinking all sorts of unkind thoughts toward myself, which doesn’t serve me and isn’t really a constructive use of my time. Truth be told, if I had driven even just a fraction of a foot further into the intersection during the accident, the outcome could have been tragic rather than figure-out-able. The Universe has seemed to sense my reluctance on the matter of tarot readings, and I have been relatively quiet on the client front. I’ve taken advantage of the reprieve to recoup and teach yet another group of people my signature class “Tarot and Spell-Work” (come to Brid’s Closet’s Beltane Festival and you can take the class yourself!).
Just because I’m a tarot reader doesn’t mean I should hold myself to the standard of “I should have seen it all coming.” I don’t think that’s tarot’s purpose, at least not when applied here.
Because that’s not how this shit works, unfortunately.
What I do think is that some things simply cannot to be avoided but instead experienced because the lesson is WITHIN the experience. I don’t know what the lesson of the accident is yet, nor am I going to drive myself nuts with trying to figure out the “whys” of it all. Those realizations will come with time.
Ultimately, none of us are omniscient nor omnipotent. I’m not going to say there was a “grand design” in my car being totaled, nor am I going to think that I was being punished somehow for past transgressions. As my High Priestess Courtney Weber quietly reminded me over Skype yesterday, “We are the only ones who can tell which category these fall into and we really won’t know until the situation is far behind us.” She calls part of this the 33% Rule. We do our best with the cards we are dealt, and sometimes part of the journey is dealing with the “wild card” circumstances that are beyond our control. Tarot can still guide us by showing us the past from a distance, the present situation through a different lens, and possible futures based upon what is going on now and in the past. Sometimes tarot WILL reveal bumps in the road… and sometimes, the bumps reveal themselves simply through experiencing them ourselves. Just because this one scenario DIDN’T reveal itself to me before it happened, doesn’t mean that tarot doesn’t work on the whole.
Blessings,
~*~Hilary~*~
www.tarotbyhilary.com
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