January 2011 -- 4; The Emperor
He leads, not by lording over others, but by encouraging others with a vision of the possible.
This is going to be a hard run through, I can tell this from overlooking the first post of January and this year entitled -- Thus am I mine own prison. The beginning of January, and in general most of it, was a very bleak and incredibly hard place to be. I felt shattered (and yet proud of myself) by the weekend that bridged the gap between the end of December and beginning of January. My Mini Christmas that was nothing like I'd dreamed it would be.
My mother learned of my girlfriend in this month, amid the turmoil, and I told her as much as I could handle, but it would be weeks before she knew what really had gone on only a week before. I started at USAA in the second week. If it was a horrendously stressful time for my heart, it was an insanely magical time for the rest of my spiritual life:
"In the beginning, the dark places of the year. January. Ianuarius. The doorway of sleep and introspect, we find ourselves turned inward. Bade a small step further each day by each few each seconds and minutes of the sun's rays reaching through the winter veil. I can see, the slow coltish, sluggishness, settled in, beginning to shift in the smallest amount to the later shed.
This year will be a glorious time, steeped in hard work and magic. Divination will rule it for the first time in a very long time. From the Oak Grove wind my childhood symbols to their roots. From my sisters, comes now a grand and glittering plan, twelve months spent with the Major Arcana. Walking steps. Fingertips to glide. Upon stones and cards.
Archetypes. Ideas made manifest. Self as Seeker and Teacher. "
I was with Ariadne's Thread, in Chapter Two, in Yellow in my First Year of the Temple of Twelve, attended my first Twelfth Night for Oak Grove Tribe and then we began the Runes Classes. RCG held its Imbolc ritual and we were about to set off in the very beginning of our Tarot year for Path.
A poem from the middle of the month (though this is a good one from January's first night, too)
The quiet "little deaths"
of everyday existence
are mourned as much as those
of resounding magnitude,
for grief makes no comparisons
nor judgments,
and has no understanding
of degree.
-- Rusty Berbus
~*~
Closing Thoughts
I don't believe I was ready in this month, though I remember all the cracks and how the ground split me wide open. How many people were concerned, but even looking back, I use words and examples i hadn't yet then. The Emperor's Sword, and rotted tree, images that would not be with me until RCG's Emperor class much later this year.
I was not ready, and yet all of these open eyed posts showing I was so far from blind, as well. No blindness just a herculean force willing me to believe, through all hurt and fear, that everything could be righted. The stubbornness of Taurus, of my own will, of so much within my heart. I could wish I'd paid more attention to my friends, or to being pleaded with for make-ups, but it wasn't the time. I didn't want to see it then, the potential, the possible, the road before me.
And yet if I look at it in the ways towards my working at USAA, or towards what would be my budding leadership in RCG and Oak Grove, there was so much in the way of example, the first ripples of such amazing things to come. Visions of the possible and probable were just beginning. This whole year, and this month, gives me such an interesting insight into how I might consider approaching the new Growth Cycle coming for me.