Medicine Cards Tuesday 1/10/2006

Medicine cards are something like Tarot cards, except they don’t seem as much aimed at divination as at being thought-provoking.

Or maybe it’s just the way I use them. Pull a card and the animal figure and what it represents help you look at your day or a problem from a different perspective. I like that they are animals rather than people holding cups or swords or whatever. Sometimes they are breathtakingly on-the-nose in identifying my hesitations or issues.

I don’t really know what to make of this sort of thing. I use them and enjoy them. There’s something about the element of chance that sparks the divine within us is what I think if I’m pressed to express it.

It’s sort of like writing from a prompt. The word “mushrooms” will give five writers five different stories. The same word on two different days will give one writer two stories.

Images and impressions are always flowing around us, and anything that surprises us into a moment of contemplation in which we capture one of them seems like a positive thing to me.