Tarot: Two of Swords

[pyraxis]

[This painting started off as the two of swords, but it got really personal, really fast. I didn't think it was going to work for a deck, because I don't think the symbols would mean anything to anyone but me, but according to Wolf, that is what the nature of a hand-painted deck should be. -Pk]


Young Lin - she was called Mai Lin back then - is on the run across the Karnese mountainside. She is only thirteen. It was through Karn that she escaped from captivity in kifu, spiritual and physical captivity to serve the ruler of Ua. Within the kifu, time and space mean nothing to her. She can create anything she wishes with the power of her mind. There is only one catch: she has zero contact with the outside world. It is the stuff of paradise - or insanity. While she paces the limits of inner space, the ruler (her mother, the raba) can draw on her energy at will. It is like having a personal genie with no limit to the number of wishes.

Her body still trapped in the kifu, Mai Lin ranged further and further out, until she passed through the spirit world and into a place called Karn. Here, she had a body. Here, she could meet people and speak to them, and if her senses led her right, she was hearing more than a reflection of her own thoughts. Never knowing whether she was imagining the entire world or whether she had truly broken the limits of kifu, Mai Lin searched Karn until she found a portal to the city of crossroads of the multiverse, and from there another portal back home to Ua.

It was then that they opened the kifu, and she found herself, indeed, back on Ua. But it left her mind in a place of untenable conflict. It is impossible to break out of kifu. Within kifu, it is impossible to receive any information from the outside. Was everything she had seen on Karn a product of her imagination? Was the kifu really opened, was she really free, or did she simply imagine it all as her driving need to escape made manifest?


One description of the card's meaning.
This is a card of choice, of the difficulty of indecision. The woman in this card is intentionally blinding herself in avoidance of a very difficult choice which must be made. Her avoidance brings her what appears to be a certain peace of mind, for she is very calm and seems somewhat relaxed despite the difficulty of her situation. Occasionally when we are face with difficult choices we attempt to hide from them and pretend to ourselves and others that if we ignore them long enough they will go away of their own accord. However, the decision will not leave us simply by our willing it to depart; the attempt to play at ignorance is not bliss. Our conscience will eventually force us into facing our refusal to deal directly with the situation.

Comments

[yonjuunana.livejournal.com]

I've wondered about this sort of thing before...

I think it may have to do with having the right tools to process the material. I think looking for the truth is great, but sometimes instead of being "just facts", the facts can have a strong emotional impact attached to them, especially when they contradict things that you have previously thought to be true, or that are important to you, or contradict things that all the people around you believe so you need to be able to find a way to navigate that as well. Or you might just simply not have the prerequisite knowledge to be able to understand it yet. And if you haven't built the right mental structures yet to be able to deal with that truth, it could hurt or crash you, or you could misinterpret it or not be able to use it effectively.

Personally I'm a skeptic, I love facts and trying to dig up accurate information, but at the same time I have had to use denial and dissociation to keep functioning. Discovering that really creeped me out at first in some ways, but I've been realizing that instead of flat-out denial it tends to be more of a temporary thing that only stays in place, not as a complete block, but as something that can let me continue to function and work at building up the structures needed to be able to take down the denial and understand the truth better without getting completely fried by it. In that way, instead of flat-out denial, it seems like more a step in the process of learning, and while not perfect, not bad and probably better than the alternatives.

Maybe a metaphor could be... Trying to learn a fact when you're not prepared could be just as useful as taking a kindergartener and sticking them in a college-level calculus class. It's just facts... but could they use it? Is it helpful to them? Would it be a healthy experience for them? Knowledge is good... but it helps a whole lot to be ready for it.

[pyraxis]

Except sometimes you have to decide even before you've figured out everything. I want to be good at both learning new things, and deciding things quickly and well. I think the deciding things part is going decently, but there's all kinds of richness in terms of learning new things that I'm missing out on.