Cliff Climbing

This week I'll be using the Sheridan-Douglas Tarot, created by David Sheridan and Alfred Douglas and published by Sheridan Douglas Press. The oracle deck I'll be using is Pages of Shustah, created by Ann Manser and Cecil North and published by Shustah Inc. Today's draws are the Star and the Black Cat:

We have to let go of the certainty people seem to love more than hope and know that we don’t know what’s going to happen. ~Rebecca Solnit

          When life is difficult for an extended period of time, we eventually feel flat - emotionally, physically and mentally. A break from this suffocating sameness is such a release that we may experience an immense sense of joy. The LWB for this deck describes the Star as a symbol of hope, a pause that gives us time to rest and get our bearings. But it's easy to trade hope for expectations, assumptions that our life will now follow the track of our preference. Rather than a sky full of possibilities, we narrow our multitude of choices down to a specific demand. Yet the Black Cat appears to remind us not to get so caught up in our fantasy world that we fail to see what is in the real one. As Jane Hirshfield said, "Awareness shows us the questions, the problems we might be able to solve and the questions that can’t be answered at all, and awareness makes the hand-holds and toe-holds appear as we traverse the cliff of our lives."