Tarot Tuesday-A new beginning:

I’ve decided to begin at (what some believe is) the beginning of the Major Arcana of the Tarot here in Thorne’s World, beginning this week. I’m going to go through the deck one card per week, sharing with you my general impressions of each card.

It’s not done yet, but I’ll be adding a Tarot Page up there on the nav-bar where I’ll archive the tarot posts as I go, and where I’d love to include your comments and interpretations of the cards as well. Maybe we can create a little database of tarot impressions, but I need your help, so please comment!

The Fool (0, 22)

When I see The Fool I always think of the innocence of childhood. The Fool is not stupid or foolish; rather she is full of wonder and absolutely without preconceived notions. I don’t think of The Fool as childish; rather as childlike. She is open to receiving and experiencing life and beauty and vision and her world from a place without judgment or cynicism.

The Fool still believes in Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. She knows that magick is real- after all doesn’t she take flight whenever she runs fast and sings loud? Doesn’t she see animals and castles in the clouds and find fairies where adults see only fireflies?

When the Fool card presents in a reading or a single card meditation ask yourself if you are meeting the issue at hand with contempt borne of so-called common sense. If you take yourself too seriously. If you are coming from a place of fear or insecurity or stuck in your intellect.

Can you find your innocence regarding the issue at hand? Can you accept the wonder and beauty that is you and the world around you? Can you embrace the journey for the journey’s sake and let go of the destination? Can you view the situation through the eyes of a child?

The Fool is a perceiving or perception card, and can be a journeying or awakening card if you embrace it.

This post is part of Chameleon’s Tarot Tuesday Meme. Join us in posting your own Tarot thoughts, images and readings. Don’t forget to leave your link in comments. Trackbacks also welcome!

I found this list over at A Gentleman’s Domain (and he is; Nicholas- a true gentleman), and it looked like fun.  He says “the BBC, or whoever is in charge of this sort of thing at the BBC, reckon that most people (maybe they meant British people, as opposed to people in the English speaking word.  Anyway, I am eligible in either case) will have read only six of them.”

That’s kinda trippy, I think. I’ll put the ones I’ve read in green, since the bold style doesn’t really show too well on this template.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen So long ago.  I read lots of Austin around 12 or 13 years old.
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien I was just telling Nicholas that I first read and fell in love with this at 11 or 12 years old.  I’ve read it over and over again in the (many) years since.  It’s like returning home for me…

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee Another fav since forever.
6 The Bible – I have read most, if not all of this. You know the old saying “keep your friends close- your enemies closer” LOL
7 Wuthering Heights -Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell I was terribly impressed with this when I read it. I still am. I think I was between 12 and 14. I wasn’t near as impressed with Animal farm back then. I think I was a bit young for the politics.
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens My fave Dickens book.
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott I LOVED this book as a young girl! Jo was my hero!
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare Pretty much all of it. :-)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk )I’m almost sure I’ve read this- a bell is clanging away in my head but I’ll be damned if I can remember what it’s about!
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger Another one I read young (11 or 12) , and was mightily impressed with. Of course, I understood it better on subsequent readings.
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell Read this in my 20′s because I thought I should. Eh… whatever.
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald I was so unimpressed with the movie, that it took me awhile to get around to this, although I loved FSF. I was so pleasantly surprised when I finally read it!
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens (I believe I’ve read all of Dickens’. I loved him growing up)
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy It was hell, but I did it. Not that it didn’t have its redeeming moments, but it was hella long and super boring at times.
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams I loved this when it first was published. Lately I’ve been thinking I should read it again, since it seems to have come back ’round as a fad. Haha.
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky I was too young when I read this one, too. Still, it made a strong impression.
28 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck I love Steinbeck, still. And although I loved this one, Of Mice and Men was always my fav.
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy Hehe. I picked this up about 10 years ago, thinking I hadn’t read it then remembered it vividly from when I was a teen.
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis I actually didn’t get around to these until I was in my 20′s. Loved them.
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding This is a simply incredible book! I read this first when I was 11 or 12, and then again and again. I tried to get my 14 year old nephew to read it last year, but he just wasn’t into it. He had trouble with it not being relevant to today as he understands it, which was so sad.
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen As much as I liked this book, I love the movie even more. Emma Thompson…Alan Rickman! Yummy! it’s one of my comfort movies. I watch it when I’m sick or if I need to cry.
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens Perhaps my least fav Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley Another great book first read at 11 or 12 and loved and reread ever since!
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck There it is!
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov Of course, although it pisses me off now.
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville Don’t laugh. I just reread this about 2 months ago. I love it. “They call me Ishmael…”Hehe
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (Another that hs bells ringing)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Read a lot of Holmes mysteries as a kid.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery Oh! I read and loved this when I was 16 years old!
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Bank
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams I loved this. And Plague Dogs, and Shardik and Maia
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Content Warning: Thorni is feeling deep today.    So here in front, I’m simply going to post my truest understanding of love in honor of Valentine’s Day  in the simple yet elegant words of Kahlil Gibran, and wish you all:

Love.

Love not in a hokey, jokesy way, but love in all its depth and beauty; in all it’s light and shadow.

Behind the cut, should you care to join me, I’m going to write a bit about this piece and how it has shaped me and inspired me throughout my life, from my first reading of The Prophet at age 12.

Kahlil Gibran on Love, From The Prophet

When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked. He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness. He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.

When you love you should not say,
“God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heart of God.”
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

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