Happy New Year! May the new year be blessed with peace, happiness and abundance for all! Let's send our love, prayers and healing energy to the victims of the tragic shooting in Arizona and do all that we can to prevent it from ever happening again.
I hope you all will indulge me for a moment... the card image above is one of my own design that I did as part of a "artist trading card" or ATC collaborative Tarot deck creation project a few years ago. I found a copy of it a week or so ago when I was going through piles of papers and stuff on one of the workbenches in my offices. I felt that it really conveyed the message that I wanted to share this month with the advent of the new year. At this time of year, it is hard to not make resolutions--to not look at the year as a clean slate with which to plan the do-overs that were most likely last year's failed resolutions. The primary cultural consensus is that this is the time for starting over... or just starting something new, and that if it doesn't work now, oh well--there's always next year. The recent shootings in Arizona are a reminder that there isn't always a next year. Every day, actually every moment is an opportunity to start the next year of your life anew and to live each of those days, not only to do what is best for us, but also to give back to God or the Goddess or Universe or ? (insert personal belief here) so that common sense, logic, tolerance and good toward our fellow beings will prevail over this sort of darkness. Even if it isn't the start of the calendar year, let each day be the start of our next year. What was it that Charles Dederich said? Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Treat each day as the treasure it is in dealings with yourself and in interactions with others. Live each moment with the innocent eyes of a child, eyes through which anything and everything is possible.
Now, time to announce the winner of December's contest...
Congratulations, 3Jane from Hampshire, UK!!!
With her correct guess of the Moon from the World Spirit Tarot, 3Jane's prizes are already on the way to her, thanks to the FAST service of the Tarot Garden! They are one of the very few places that we were able to get both prizes from... so check out the cool and most likely not-found-anywhere-else stuff Dan and Jeannette have at www.tarotgarden.com!
Enjoy the issue and don't forget to enter this month's contest! The odds of winning are great!
XXI The World copyright (c) 2008 Sheri Harshberger.