Reflections : Into 2012

2012. Pretty crazy, huh!

And with it, as with every New Year we move into, buzz about res­o­lu­tions and reflec­tions. What will you change? What will you make bet­ter? What went well? What went hor­ri­bly wrong?

It makes sense to do this, by the way. We’re wired to rec­og­nize pat­terns and cycles and the turn­ing over of that cal­en­dar page is a nat­ural kind of demar­ca­tion for us. You could be cyn­i­cal about it — refuse to take part. Decry res­o­lu­tions as set­ting one­self up for fail­ure. Or you might be an opti­mist, I sup­pose, and cheer­fully make your­self a list. I fall some­where in the middle.

Though I find that the year end time for me is best spent in reflec­tion. And oh boy, was 2011 a doozey for me! Good, bad, every­thing in-between. You know, the nor­mal life kind of year. How did yours go? Nor­mal as well, I’m guess­ing (no mat­ter how wrapped up in it you prob­a­bly feel).

I’ve got some­thing for you, if you’re the intro­spec­tive type like I am. I was sit­ting with my cards the other evening like I do when I entered into some fran­tic tantric tarot-inspired jour­nalling. I wasn’t read­ing cards in the sense that I was ask­ing ques­tions and divin­ing answers. Rather, I was pulling the cards and let­ting them ask me. It was a dif­fer­ent kind of expe­ri­ence for me. Kinda good. Kinda scary. A lot help­ful. Because the cards gave me mem­o­ries back that I might not have attached impor­tance to before. They reminded me of things that I had for­got­ten (but should remem­ber). They val­i­dated a lot of my feel­ings about painful events and helped me to see those .

And then I got to think­ing about it — how this might be help­ful to you, gen­tle read­ers. So I put together a book­let, star­ing the Payen Tarot de Mar­seille, with 22 reflec­tive writ­ing prompts.

As an experiement, I made this as a slideshow on google doc­u­ments. You can pre­view the pre­sen­ta­tion here:

Each card of the Major Arcana is paired with some ques­tions for reflec­tion and a prompt to make a list. If you’re not a com­pul­sive jour­naller like I am, you may enjoy mak­ing the lists instead. I rec­om­mend you write them on index cards, use a hole punch and binder ring to keep them together. Save them for next year and see how your expe­ri­ences change (or how much they stay the same!).

If you like what you see, I’ve got two options for down­load­ing. The first has four “slides” on each page with the back­ground. Down­load this option if you have no plans of print­ing out the slides.

Down­load 22reflect : 2011 (the pretty ver­sion) here.

If you think you’ll want to print the slides and make cards, I’ve got a ver­sion with­out the back­ground. Print them out on card­stock and bind them to use as you move through­out the next few weeks, or make your lists on the back of the cards.

Down­load 22reflect : 2011 (the print­able ver­sion) here.

And if you like it a whole bunch, you might con­sider buy­ing me a cup of cof­fee (or other cel­e­bra­tory drink).