Today begins the second half of the Texas Tarot, so what better card to draw than The Fool? And what better song to listen to than Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic?

There was never any question that a roadrunner would grace this card/collage, only which of the many images to use.

Since the first Texas critter I ever photographed for my first-ever blog post was a roadrunner, I knew I had to use it. But the image was extremely low-resolution, which posed a (solve-able) problem …

Undeterred, I turned to the books (which had an awful lot to say) …

• 78 Degrees: The Fool in almost every deck walks with a companion …and can symbolize beginnings, courageously leaping off into some new phase of life, particularly when that leap is taken from some deep feeling rather than careful planning

• Kitchen Table Tarot: The Fool has no agenda … she’s guileless … honest … genuinely happy … she’s also the one who told the emperor he was naked
• The Creative Tarot: The Fool walks into the world with no big plan for where she’ll end up and certainly no map. She just starts and trusts that she’ll figure it out as she goes along … trust that you’ll end up where you need to be … have faith in yourself and in your peers … be playful

So, I decided to trust my gut and use not just the roadrunner, but also an anole photographed by Don …

and Kokopelli, here depicted on a burnished coil pot made by Meliss when she was in high school …

Because each one captures the sense of wild joy that has been our lot since walking off the cliff of stable jobs in the Williamsburg, Virginia public schools and launching into a new life in the Texas Hill Country …

Now I wonder what’s next …

Huzzah!

39 card/collages … halfway through the Texas Tarot!!

I will feel bereft when it is over and done, but that is not now, not yet. Then again, tempted as I am to rename the project The Covid Diaries, perhaps an end sooner rather than later would be a good thing.

Today I drew the Six of Wands, another easy assignment from the many creatures on the blog. Rain lilies, with their six petals, only come up when there has been at least an inch of rain to awaken them. This past week, four inches fell in the rain gauge. Surely there will be blossoms in abundance.

When we lived in the Hill Country, we usually saw white Rain Lilies. Rarer, and therefore all-the-more appreciated, were the Rio Grande Copper Lilies …

They were well-worth waiting for. And as I searched through “copper” in the blog whilst humming Eric Clapton’s Let it Rain, I came upon another favorite …

triggering memories of the many treasures we found at By the Bridge, before it fell to the 2015 floods.

So this then …

• 78 Degrees: the emphasis shifts from problems to joy … a turning point (dare we hope the Covid curve is flattening?) … optimism produces the very success it desires … it requires only a true belief in ourselves to find the energy to accomplish what we want
• Kitchen Table Tarot: our heroes are being honored for their service and appreciated for their hard work and sacrifice (seriously, I can’t believe this synchronicity) … this card is optimism and hope
• The Creative Tarot: you have overcome the odds … [so] use the lesson learned to focus on breaking through to something bigger

It’s as simple and as profound as the hope and the joy that come with the rain and the sun …

like the lilies of the field.

When I was planning the Texas Tarot, I had a lot of fun choosing the Pages: the Grackle for Swords, the Tern for Cups, and the Prairie Dog for Pentacles.

I’ve only seen prairie dogs once. Back in 2014 when we were on our way to New Mexico, we stopped in Lubbock, home of Prairie Dog Town …

Somehow that stop never made it onto the blog –overridden by the wonders of Santa Fe I guess– but I’ve never forgotten those cute little critters.

They fit the Kitchen Table Tarot description perfectly: “this Page is just a great, goofy guy … the energy is light, honest, and really, really genuine.”

Prairie dogs star in one of my all-time favorite read-aloud picture books, The Great Fuzz Frenzy, complete with the elaborate underground domiciles for which they are renowned …

As The Creative Tarot points out, the Page of Pentacles “delivers a message to you about the real world … a new understanding of how things work … things that give you a new sense of pleasure.”

So I had to laugh, after initially crying out, “Noooooooo!” when I discovered I had pasted the card/collage upside down in my Texas Tarot book. It fit the whimsy, the earthy humor of the card. And oh but it felt good to laugh …

as I’m sure to do every time I return to this Page in the book.