I am in the process of having some new tunics made to go with my costume. Julia (Needlman www.julianeedlman.com) is making them with the help of a very good local fabric artist named Jennifer Smith. This last week, they perfected the basic pattern and showed me some design elements they will be using to make the new tunic. The patterns are beautiful. Jennifer is young and new at all this and she was nervous. I told her a story,
Years ago, I said, I had my hair permed like Cher in the movie Moonstruck. All curls and wild all over my head. People would say to me, “If I had naturally curly hair like yours…..” and I would tell them, “My hair is as curly as a yardstick!” They never believed me. I finally got tired of it and had my hair dresser cut it all off.
She had me grow it out a few extra weeks then I came in and saw her. She held up a hank of hair a good 5 inches long, with the last of the curl in it and her scissors hovered over it. She looked at me questioningly. I clapped my hands over my eyes and said, “Go ahead!” The resultant short cut was a classic Sassoon which was coming back into style right then. I have since gone even shorter but that cut was a revelation. I even disrupted the psychic fair I had just started at when I walked in the next weekend. I TOLD them my hair was straight!
Now I told Jennifer the same thing: I clapped my hands on my eyes and said, “Go head!” I did have some say in the process of creating my new outfit: I chose some wonderful fabric for it and told her which design I liked better, but also, I told her to do what she thought would look best. I am not being lazy here, I am just trusting the artist.
If you are trying to get to a goal, my mentor and the creator of my deck of choice, the WorldTree tarot, told me, you must let go of the path that gets you there. You have to trust that you will get to the outcome you want, but it may not be the way you ASSUME you will get there. We all find this so very difficult. I was reading a pattern for a knitting item I made. The pattern writer said that people had questioned if the pattern would work out with “only” one row done this certain way. “Trust the pattern,” she wrote, “it works out.” And indeed, it does. But we don’t know that until we are part of the way through.
The Tarot gives us this lesson: the 3 of Pentacles shows a craftsman at his work. In the Rider Waite version, some people are studying the pattern while the craftsman works, in other versions (Robin Wood and the WorldTree for example) the person is just doing their work and taking pride in what they do. We are forced to trust that the craftsman knows what they are doing and wait until the end to see if it looks as good as the plan. Clap your hands over your eyes, let the artist work and marvel at the result. If you have a clear vision of the outcome you wanted, you will get there. Trust the artist (you) and let go of the path.