I am sick. Not the best time to be sick, either… I work in the financial markets, and they are rocking and rolling at the moment. Anyway, I thought it was strep throat based on the initial symptoms, but it turns out to be mononucleosis (“mono”). Which means, according to my doctor, I will feel sub-par for about the next month or so. yay…

My reading today was about my sickness. I used the Osho Zen Deck for it:

That’s the Kinght of Swords, 4 of Swords, and 9 of Swords, and I put the cards in a simple three-card sentence.

Strange to get all swords (or “clouds” in osho zen deck parlance). Well, the Knight of Swords is me, the Gemini card. I see this spread as telling me not to struggle against the illness. After all, there is no cure for mono… you just have to wait it out. Rather than be sad about the stuff you must postpone, you might as well embrace the sorrow.

The osho book says that 9-Swords “sorrow” is about the fact that the things that hurt and hinder you serve to make you more aware. And, in fact, since I have been monitoring my condition, I can confirm that I am more aware of my body than I have been in the months previous. I was planning to take a Reiki class soon, and so maybe all this focus on what I’m feeling internally will better prepare me for that.

So, in true zen fashion, I should simply use my circumstances to become more aware and conscious. It’s a good message for me, so I appreciate this reading. But, I always have to stop to notice that all my osho deck readings seem to come back to simple buddhist concepts. I still say this deck is a little too zen…

I used my Osho Zen Tarot today at the Tarot Talk Dallas meeting. I hadn’t been using the deck much, and wanted to play with it.

I gotta say, though the pictures are beautiful, I didn’t enjoy it much. It’s possible for a deck to be too zen. You know what I mean? The readings I did kept boiling down to “the answer is: it doesn’t matter” That may be true on a deep spiritual level, but it’s not that satisfying when you are doing a reading to locate your car keys….

A smaller issue: The cards are just similar enough to RWS that I want to read them like RWS… but they are just different enough that it doesn’t always work smoothly to do so. I need to get over that and simply go by the pictures, I think.

Anyway, I haven’t written off the deck, but I think it will be relegated to internal, self-transformation kinds of meditations. I’m sure some people out there probably disagree with me, but that’s the conclusion I am coming to.