 |
A young, nude child sits astride a pony with flowers and feathers in her hair while a bright, red banner waves in the air. Behind her a wall is topped with sunflowers and a huge sun shines down upon the scene.
Joy, fun, happiness! This is a wonderful card and indicates that everything is going just right. It indicates that warm, comforting sense of existence when you’re going through a period where you’re satisfied and happy.
The child on the pony obviously indicates youth, both in the way the questioner feels right now and in her actual physical environment. New children or grandchildren may be on the way or perhaps the neighbor’s kids will show up to play. Life is good.
REVERSED: The weather forecast is for a cloudy day with the possibility of clearing. Good things may be on the horizon but that’s not assured, yet, and it’s important to keep a positive attitude.
Possibilities of problems with children or pregnancies. Perhaps the neighbor’s kids show up to play and they’re REALLY annoying.
A Few More Thoughts About The Sun
If you’ve ever done any Inner Child work you’ve got to love The Sun. It’s all there: the laughing child (riding a pony, no less) in a warm, walled in garden filled with sunflowers waving a banner or flag while the sun shines down.
Let’s focus on the flag for a little bit because it’s the one thing in the composition that just doesn’t belong there. And things that don’t belong tend to be the most interesting.
We can see first of all that the flag is WAY oversized for the child. It’s huge and would be appropriate for a large man or woman, not a child. Secondly it’s red, a color commonly associated with power. So combining those factors we’ve got a very small child controlling a large amount of power, which is a fascinating concept.
To say that our society is anti-child might be an overstatement, but it might not. Consider these common insults:
Do you have to be so childish?
Why don’t you just grow up?
I guess I’ll be the adult in the room.
Quit being such a brat.
You’re just a cry baby.
And on and on and on. The word, “puerile,” is from a latin word meaning, “boy.” Also juvenile, infantile, immature.
Most Inner Child work could more accurately be defined as, “Injured Inner Child work.” It’s all about working with that ego construct that we form as a child and which tends to be emotionally abused by parents, teachers, preachers and other authoritarians commonly known as grown ups. It’s about recovering and healing that part of us that was told that he/she was stupid, noisy, pesky, insolent, too big for our britches, and a general pain in the ass. Shut up and sit down or go stand in a corner and think it over until you’re willing to be, “good.”
And, yes, we tend to think of Inner Child as being weak, powerless, delicate, violated. But if that was all there was to it, what would be the point in trying to recover it or heal it? After all, it’s just a dumb kid.
The fact is, though, that there is tremendous power that flows out of the Child. Julia Cameron, author of, “The Artist’s Way,” places creativity squarely in the child ego state, as do many others. Here’s what Cameron had to say:
“Remember, your artist is a child. Find and protect that child. Learning to create is like learning to walk. The artist child must begin by crawling.”
Picasso said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
Amber K, in her wonderful book, “True Magick,” says:
“ . . . the Younger Self is a valuable ally to the conscious mind. . . it is in charge of emotion, memory and sensation . . . it is a powerful generator and channel of psychic energy . . .”
I know a therapist who is fascinated both by deaths and births because, “those are the moments when the veil is thinnest, when a Soul is coming into or passing out of the world.”
If you conceptualize it that way, Child is much closer to the Divine, to Spirit World than Adult. Each child is a traveler who just stepped off of the Astral Plane and is approaching the Baggage Claim area to pick up it’s new bag of karma. Each child is still magical.
Until we can talk her out of it.
Available dirt cheap on Amazon.com. Try it, you’ll like it!
Just the Tarot 