O darkest Year! O brightest Year! / O changeful Year of joy and woe,
Today we stand beside thy bier, / Still loth to let thee go!
~ Julia C. R. Dorr, poet ~
Happy New Year!
A brand new year and all that implies. New beginnings, new opportunities, new dreams. So much promise waiting in the New Year.
But only if you break the shackles of the past year.
Like Scrooge’s ghost of his old business partner, Marley, too often we enter a new year clinking and clanking with the chains of the past, including the year just gone.
The year that held successes and failures, good choices and bad ones.
Success hampers with higher expectations of what should be accomplished, while failures and mistakes hamper with doubts about abilities to succeed, and fears of what will happen if you don’t—or if you do.
I consulted Robert Place’s The Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery
and drew a card to answer the question, “What is necessary to break the chains of last year?”
Not surprisingly, the answer was the Major Arcana card, the Tower.
The card that everyone cringes at when it turns up in a reading. Because it is not an easy card, it is a challenging card. And, like the Tower, breaking the chains of the past year is not an easy thing to do.
The Tower is the structures that keeps you feeling safe and secure (whether it does or not), such as a job or career, or a committed relationship. Or the personal and even harder to shake loose structures of ego and self-identification.
When this card comes up in readings, I tell clients it is time to shake, rattle and roll or the Universe will do it for them. So it is time, as you enter this New Year, to shake, rattle and roll, to release old ways of being and perceiving, to release the past.
Because there is a difference between being guided by the past and being shackled by it.
- Be generous with your creative gifts. Do not, like Scrooge, ration them out, fearful there won’t be more.
- Be responsible as well as generous. Manage your resources of time, money and energy, so that you have what you need to continue to create.
- Don’t be distracted by fame and fortune. Commit honestly to your work and to do work that is honest, no matter its gifts or shortcomings.
Release the past, good and bad. And celebrate this new year of 2016. Another year to create, to practice your special magic.