Today, I’ll dive into the story behind our Trust card.
This is one of my favorite cards in the deck and perhaps the first one where I really started to sense something magical in the plants I was encountering and in the routine, I was building around them in my daily drawing practice.
This wildflower is based on an actual flower, though the way I drew it, is a bit made up too. It is based on a tiny plant with light purple flowers that grow in my backyard. The whole plant in the drawing could fit in the palm of my hand, and the flower blooms were each smaller than a fingertip. So I had to magnify it in my mind in order to draw it. And in the process, things were probably transformed a bit. I guess that makes it wild in many ways - it grows wildly (this is a tiny flower that just appears in the backyard every spring) and the drawing came in part from the wild place of imagination - the part of the mind that sees without the eyes.
There was a lesson to learn in having to draw without really being able to see. It required more intuition and certainly trust — which is how the word was paired with this flower. I had to trust my hand in making this drawing and trust what my mind could see without really being able to see. And if you really think about it, as artists of our own lives, there really are no guarantees, there are often setbacks and things that will never be totally clear. This flower seemed to be a reminder that in the end, all you really have to fall back on is trust in yourself.
If you look closely at the drawing, you can see the erased word ‘trust’ in the background. The first time I drew the word, it felt spatially too close to the plant. So I erased it and redrew it a little higher in the picture. And it felt kind of right that my first attempt to draw the word didn’t fully erase. Because trust is a little like that. It comes and it goes. It is hard to hold onto. It disappears but it actually still is there. It changes forms.
I see this drawing as a reminder that part of the work of trusting ourselves is to know that the clarity that comes with trust can be fleeting but it is something that is always available to us in that wild part of ourselves - even when we can’t always see it.
