…and I’m back. I said the 15th of April right? I like to be true to my word, as close as I can be anyways. I was a bit scared after my long absence that when I got back nobody would be here – is that a girl thing? – but I couldn’t be more delighted to see that is not the case.

Sadly I didn’t get as much writing done as I would have liked. I broke my writer’s block, yay! I hadn’t done any novel writing for 6 months. But as usual I didn’t write as much as I should have. Sigh. A good friend of mine suggested it’s because I have Neptune (dreaming) Retrograde in my 10th house (career) i.e. I have stories in my head but it’s hard for me to pin them down. Never mind, I enjoy writing and hopefully I’ll finish something one day. The tortoise always crosses the finish line in the end.

It was good for me as a writer and a plain ordinary human being to have a break from blogging. Instead of feeling crushed by deadlines I daydreamed. Instead of reading blogs I read novels. Instead of writing real stuff about what I’ve experienced with Tarot cards I wrote made-up stuff about characters I’ve never met in a place I’ve never been to. People kept telling me how good I looked at work today. Which makes me think (a) clearly I usually look like crap. No surprises there. I’m permanently jet-lagged at work. Out of my natural time zone i.e. Waking at 10. Sleeping at 2am. And (b) it confirms my belief that taking time out is good for the soul. And that shows in my face.

So I got to thinking about the Wheel Of Fortune card.

For me it’s always represented the ups and downs of life. You know, you have good times and you have bad times, that’s just how it goes. But it occurred to me today that maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe it’s also about the yin and the yang of life. Yin and yang is the Chinese philosophy that seemingly opposite forces are actually interconnected and interdependent. Maybe the Wheel Of Fortune not only symbolises the ups and downs, the ins and outs, the time on and time off of life, maybe it also suggests that these things are interconnected. That we need the yin as well as the yang in life. The ups as well as the downs. That without one you can’t have the other. They feed off one another. A classic example of this is how having regular breaks from teaching keeps me energised as an educator.

What do you think? Does Tarot have something to say about yin and yang or is it all my imagination?