Man, Le Bateleur. The Magician. That card, it’s always just sitting there, right? Like it’s waiting to mess with your head or make you finally get off your butt. For me, it was definitely the latter, and it took a while to even figure out why that darn card kept showing up in my readings. Seriously, it felt like it was stalking me for a bit.
I remember when I first really started digging into tarot, not just for fun, but actually trying to get some real insight. You know, when life just throws you curveballs and you’re trying to catch them with a sieve. That’s where I was. Everything felt like it was going nowhere, spinning my wheels, same old, same old. I was stuck in a rut, a big, muddy one, dreaming about starting something new, something completely different, but just… not doing it.
I’d seen those online articles, sure, talking about the “power” of Le Bateleur, all that jazz about new beginnings and having the tools. Sounded great on paper, but my actual life? Nah, not so much. I’d pull a card here and there, just to get a feel for the deck, you know? And more often than not, there he was, Le Bateleur, staring back at me. It felt kinda mocking at first. Like, “Oh, you wanna start something? Well, what are you waiting for, genius?”
So, one evening, I was feeling particularly fed up. I sat down at my kitchen table, shoved aside the mail and a half-eaten bag of chips, and cleared a space. I grabbed my old Rider-Waite deck – beat up, some edges frayed, but it felt right. I took a deep breath, shuffled those cards, really tried to focus my energy, you know, ask the universe, or whatever, “What the hell am I supposed to do?”
I decided to do a simple three-card spread: Past, Present, Future. Nothing fancy, just trying to get some clarity. I cut the deck, laid out the first card, then the second. And then, for the third card, the “Future,” I flipped it over. And there he was again. Le Bateleur. Seriously, I almost threw the card across the room. It was getting ridiculous.
I just sat there, staring at it. My past card was something about feeling restricted, and the present was, surprise, feeling stuck. But the future? Le Bateleur. I knew what it generally meant – potential, skill, new ventures, taking action. But knowing and feeling it are two totally different things. I just wasn’t connecting. My brain was like, “Yeah, yeah, new beginnings, heard it before.” But my gut? My gut was telling me something else. It was like, “Dude, this isn’t just some random card popping up. This is a pattern. It’s yelling at you.”
I spent the next hour just looking at that card. Not reading a book about it, not searching online. Just staring at the image. The guy, all his tools laid out on the table, one hand pointing up, one down, like he’s channeling something. And then it hit me. It wasn’t about waiting for some big, magical opportunity to land on my lap. It wasn’t about someone else giving me the green light. It was about me. All those tools on his table? Those were my skills, my experiences, my ideas that I’d just been letting collect dust.
The “future” wasn’t going to just happen to me. I had to go and make it happen. The insight wasn’t some deep, hidden secret. It was right there, obvious as anything, but I’d been too busy overthinking and under-doing. It was like the card was shaking me by the shoulders, telling me to stop whining and start building with what I already had.
That night, I didn’t get some huge, earth-shattering revelation that changed my life overnight. What I got was a kick in the pants. A really persistent, nagging kick. I went to bed still feeling a bit overwhelmed, but also, weirdly, kinda charged up. The next morning, instead of just thinking about that side project I wanted to start, I actually opened my laptop, pulled up a blank document, and just started typing. No grand plan, no perfect outline. Just started. And you know what? That little habit, that little push from a stubborn piece of cardboard, it actually led somewhere. It started small, like anything new does. But it started because Le Bateleur, or whatever force was pushing that card my way, finally made me realize I already had everything I needed to begin.
