XXII  Humility

Sacred Earth Seven Element Tarot was not my idea, per se but the two additional cards added to the Major Arcana, were. The Universe woke me up from a deep and delicious sleep on a sensuously sunny day at the beach, bugging me with this whole, "What about the other elements" thing, making me crazy for about two years until I finally got what was supposed to happen but at that point, when I added up the numbers - because numbers are such sweet little playthings and the harbingers of pattern - and the total number of cards in the intended new deck came out at 106, why that number was just too, too close to the magical, mystical 108 to resist adding two more cards...and, as soon as I thought of it, I could see how perfect that made the number of cards in SESE's Major Arcana as the final card, XXIII, would reflect the axis on which the Sacred Earth herself rotates. Plus, two new suits, two new Big Energy cards. Made sense to me.

And so, in honor of all thinking people everywhere, with good ideas and bad, the first of those two cards was this one, Humility. This is a card that would not have been necessary back in the days when tarot was new on the scene because the general populace was humble simply by virtue of its position on the social ladder and those in the ruling classes would have been blind to it, plain and simple, because when you're large and in charge, that is, after all, your job. Humble? What on earth for?

Now that civilization has begun leveling the playing field - and the final leveling may be up to Mother Nature herself - why, there's a boatload of us out here with what we like to call 'really good ideas' and we tend to think that they are ours alone. They aren't, of course. Some people, by virtue of their fortune or their geography or their propinquity to certain other people, get their ideas noticed before other people do and go on to be touted as originators but the real originator is a field of abstraction that envelopes us all, reaching out and touching us randomly, sending bakers dreams that only an astrophysicist would understand, sending brain surgeons inspirations that could only be grasped by an HVAC tech. This field of conceptualization is what keeps us - or should keep us - humble.

The realm of ideas is a dimension in itself. It has touched you and me and everyone at some time or another and we are, by virtue of the data processors we carry in our heads, neither better than on less than anyone else on this planet. We simply are...and sometimes we need reminding.