Daily Draw: 10 of Wands

my description:

Overall color - deep purple, flashes of deep rose, orange figures and staves.  Looks like forced applied with difficulty.  An orange figure wearing metallic armor, back turned, is erect at the bottom center of the card, holding what seems to be a metal staff vertically in front of him and pushing forward with it, slowly and methodically.  The background on his side of the card is composed of small squares - he seems to be wading through them - on the horizon of the sea of squares is what might be surf?  In the center of the card are eight wands, radiating out in pairs to form an X shape and woven together in the middle to hold their shape.  The pair in the NW quadrant are crossed - things have not fully come together, but his task is almost complete.  The upper background of the card is a swirling vortex - things breaking loose after all this effort.

Reversed, there is a figure with much less armor, using his staff to try to untangle the crossed staves, and standing somewhat to the side, as if attempting to avoid the oncoming push of the combination of wands.  He is standing in the vortex and it seems as if the sea of squares is hanging over his head, ready to splash down on top of him.  At  the center of the X, what could be surf seems to be white energy bursting out from the tangle of wands.

The key differences I see between the two sides of this card is  in the posture of the figures (determined forward movement through  difficulty vs.  focusing on one detail and attempting to avoid the onslaught of the rest), starting from a place of stability and moving toward freedom vs. having no stable foundation and needing to deal with the limitations of imposed order, and the amount of protective "backbone" each figure arms themselves with to begin with.

The 10 of Wands in general often seems to be about being loaded down with burdens, but the upright image here seems to be more about preparedness and determination to push through those burdens long enough to complete the task.  And it's not just one task but  the whole collective project - it seems as if too much focus on the details is detrimental.

I've seen many times when I do that...start reciting to myself each challenge, and in the recitation start feeling buried by them.  Or letting too many things go unattended while I focus on one part of the problem and wind up getting swamped by the parts I'm neglecting.  With this card, the sort of energy that needs to be applied is keeping the big picture in mind - including a realistic perspective on it's end point and keep moving at a steady pace without getting sidetracked by the details or the difficulty of it.

It's not an easy card, for sure - but I like the positive advice here about how to handle burdens, rather than simply describing the weight of them.

Comments

[AJ]

What an interesting deck you are working with. Thanks for sharing your thoughts

[lfeb]

It really is! This is the first time in months I've really played with it, and I'm thinking I may find it useful to use this deck comparatively with another, to get a feel for the 'range' of a situation. While there are those couple of things that I find limiting, it really does bring an interesting take on things that wouldn't otherwise occur to me.