“Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one's conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.” - J. G. Ballard
I was in a car all day, so this will be a quick note – but I had a lot of time to think about today’s card, the Ace of Swords.
What I mostly thought about it was: Sometimes, when people start to get excited about intuition, they think about it as somehow opposite to logical thought. In a way, I think, this can be true. Most of us really overdo it with logical thought, often at the expense of intuition.
I certainly know that when I try to be more mindful of my body and environment, my conscious mind sometimes freaks out. It’s always trying to tell me that I need to figure out what’s going on, unfortunately meaning that I need to maintain a constant mental narrative about everything that’s happening and what I think about it.
Really, though, that story is much too simple, and the way the conscious and subconscious (intuitive) mind collaborate can be quite complex and amazing. Today’s card – from the R. Black tarot again – reminds me of the story about how good ideas often happen in the shower, which is a perfect example. It doesn’t actually have to be a shower, of course, but once you’ve absorbed the information you need about some kind of problem, you can often relax and trust that your subconscious mind will continue to process and experiment with that information in the background.
As swords tend to represent ideas, I like to think this card is a picture of one of those surprising, out-of-the-blue moments when your intuition will let you know that whatever you’re trying to put together has finally clicked into place.