Friday fortune: Одиночество

Say what, now? Well, I have this deck, the Osho Zen Tarot...which I bought in St. Petersburg. It was the only Russian-language tarot deck that Dom Knigi carried, and I really wanted a Russian deck, so I bought it. But it's been nearly impossible to use. Not only are the cards different from the traditional tarot deck, but the commentary in the companion book is both Russian and zen. Even after I've translated to the best of my ability, I have to sit and stare at it and ponder what the heck it's trying to say. So...

Card of the day: Loneliness (Odinochestvo)

The level of Russian in this book is far beyond my ability, so I resort to Google Translate. It takes me quite a while to type my transliteration of the Russian text from the companion book into Google and try to get it to re-transliterate into Cyrillic, and then get the translation itself. Invariably, the translation comes out rather mangled. As near as I can figure, this card is about recognizing the difference between the negative state of feeling alone (loneliness) and the positive state of being alone with oneself (solitude).

Then it says this, the one paragraph I was able to get clearly:

When we don't find support from others in the truths that we feel deeply, we can either choose bitterness and isolation, or realize that our vision is strong enough to overcome the core human need for approval of family, friends, and colleagues.

Wow. This is totally for writers. Writing is a very solitary pursuit, and even when we do have supportive people in our lives, they can't totally get how immersed we become in a world of our own making—that drive to make the story as true as we can. So the Zen Tarot is telling us that it's up to us to believe in the story we're compelled to tell without expecting or relying on external validation. That's a really hard one for me, and it hits home with what I was thinking about in my last post: how to believe in the good stuff people say about my work as much as the bad. In the end, no one can tell me if I've told the right story. I have to believe in it whether anyone else does or not.

So it took me several hours to get this post out and it's no longer Friday, but there it is: your Friday fortune, a day late.