Oh look! A chicken! (maybe an egg)

Medieval chickens and eggs (source unknown)

I’ve been experimenting with the common practice of pulling three cards each morning to say, What will the day be like? I’ve found I assess the day’s spread with an inner criterion I’ll call resonance. When the cards resonate, they articulate the prevailing mood quite exactly.  Not that I knew what the prevailing mood was, beforehand. Up till that moment it was just a swirl of nebulous, disorganized bits of thought and feeling, cloud cover and barometric pressure.

A Sibilla Madrigal

Sibille del Originale 1890, Il Meneghello

I’ve been writing lately about a cartomantic deck I like a lot, the Italian Sibilla. Meanwhile, this month of April is National Poetry Month. So I had the bright idea of combining two loves, by sculpting a Sibilla reading into a poetic form.

Eeyore and Tigger Read the Cards: The Statistics of Optimism

Every Day Oracle (La Vera Sibilla): Malinconia and L’allegria (Lo Scarabeo); with A. A. Milne’s Eeyore and Tigger (E. H. Shepard, illustrator)

Have you ever caught yourself subconsciously picking which of your friends to confide in? When you’re bursting with exuberant feelings about that hot new date, you’re not rushing to Facetime your good buddy Eeyore. And when you have vague unsettling suspicions about how your boss is treating you, trying to get Tigger to stop bouncing and listen is a fruitless task.*

But there are times you want neither Eeyore nor Tigger’s one-dimensional world view. Because…tell me the truth! Is the world basically a happy place or a difficult one? Is the cup really more than half-full, or less than half-empty?

The Daily Round

La Vera Sibilla (Every Day Oracle), Lo Scarabeo

How to describe the Italian Sibilla cards?

It’s like going to your great-aunt’s house when you’re quite small, where the smells are old and the furniture ponderous. All is dusty and dim but for the brilliant light streaming in the kitchen window, spilling onto vivid purple African violets and red geraniums. Silence hangs heavy as brocade drapes, yet sometimes you think you hear laughter from another room. Your great-aunt is kindly, offering tidbits of unaccustomed food and conversation. She’s ancient, but sometimes unexpectedly, for an instant, her lissome, younger self bubbles forth.