Instant Gratification & Posting

The Goddess Power Oracle - Colette Baron Reid

In this day and age, social media platforms offer instant gratification in terms of accumulating "likes" and "followers", but I long for the days of blogging where I could browse through deck reviews and read about peoples thoughts on certain decks or tarot spreads.  They seem to have died a death in favor of the picture with short commentary and hashtag format.  I guess it's just easy - you don't have to upload a photo or worry about formatting.  You don't have to worry about being any sort of writer either.  Reading other peoples thoughts can be very boring - I'm the first to admit it.  Unless the writing has some sort of poetic, magical quality to it I'm rarely interested.  Even the meatiest information can be dragged down by clunky prose, so I totally understand the transition to more user friendly platforms.    

But there is something to be said for taking the time to word something more thoughtfully too.  I enjoy reading and looking at pictures. Watching YouTube videos on a subject can be laborious.  Granted, they seem to reach a wider audience, but I guess I'm a traditionalist and I have always felt that what we write is at the heart of everything.  The videos and social media are supporters - whereas the written page is the "piece de resistance".  

I remember a time where I'd have several blogs bookmarked, and I'd look forward to reading their updates.  It feels like a long time ago now!  I wonder if blogging will ever make a resurgence? 

I chose to feature the card Demeter, greek goddess of grain and harvest, as a representative of the abundance that comes from nurturing something lovingly, like a garden or a field.  It takes time and patience.  In her shadow aspect, she longs for what she has lost - her daughter Persephone who was kidnapped by Hades and taken to the Underworld - and roams the land despairingly, withholding her warmth and causing the land to fall fallow and the air to grow cold and grey.  

She represents my love of the old school written words and pictures, lovingly cultivated, and my sadness for the loss of it in favor of the social media bite sized information that promises a lot and delivers... very little.

I'm a huge fan of Archetypal metaphors, and I enjoy using them off offhandedly rather than in a serious scholarly fashion.   These days everything is for sale on Instagram too: "Become an Archetype expert" courses are for sale, promising to help you figure out who you really are.  I've spent years doing my own research, and I don't need a spoon fed version of things.  I want to use Archetypes and Astrology and Tarot and anything else I see fit to put my attention towards in a fun, oblique sort of way.  I believe that these things are already fully integrated throughout our lives and it's interesting to look at them with curiosity rather than getting all serious and profoundly psychological about them.  

I'm tired of everything being so heavy and intense.  How about a bit of lightheartedness for a change?  To shake Demeter out of her grief, the goddess Baubo made her laugh with lewd and bawdy jokes and gestures.  Let's have a bit more fun with all these weighty concepts.  It's not all about "shadow work" you know :-)  You don't have to choose your camp either and claim an identity that is either "Dark" or "Light".  

Anyway, I digress.  Here I am rambling away in a boring fashion when I just said a few paragraphs earlier how boring it was... Never mind, noone will probably ever read this anyway so what does it matter if nothing is perfect?