4 of Swords. Rest and relaxation.

 The 4 of Swords is a card that I felt somewhat ambivalent about drawing. On the one hand it meant that rest was in order, while on the other hand I felt it meant it was unlikely to yield any great revelations. I feel I may have underestimated this card as I served only to prove me wrong!
    On the card we see a figure reclining on what appears to be a sarcophagus. It looks like he is no more than a decoration adorning the lid. His armour and sword suggest he may well have been a warrior in life. His hands are together in the universal symbol of prayer and a peaceful look is on his face. The sarcophagus is golden and contrasts strongly with the purple walls behind him. It seems the warrior has finally found peace and it is in death.
    It was Edgar Allan Poe who called sleep those little slices of death. He apparently loathed sleep and this is an outlook that is mirrored by a great deal of people. Rest and relaxation are looked upon with some form of disdain, as if they somehow steal part of our lives or allow it to fritter away in laziness. Our society deems rest and relaxation as being in many ways a necessary evil, that if we could do away with death, then sleep would become the next great enemy. Oh...that we could live our lives in constant business and industry. I for one do not follow such an ideal. Life without it's contrasts would be a terrible place.
      The figure on the battle is resting after a life of battling. So when I drew this card I decided that I should allow myself to rest, at least for the weekend. I put down all that I was working on, both internally and externally and allowed myself to rest...or at least I tried to. While my weekend was somewhat busy, it was pure relaxation, spending time playing games with friends and just generally taking it easy. I decided to relax my ban on games playing for that period since it was an in the interests of writing a piece on relaxation. I found myself feeling as if I was being lazy and unproductive..as if there should be someway to make my rest time more valuable. In the end I started to see the virtue of uninterrupted rest.
      On the wall at the back of the card hang three swords along with a stained glass window depicting a scene. The swords represent a rest from constant mental movement and the purple backdrop suggests a spiritual grounding for them, that there is a time to hang up your sword and simply rest. The stained glass window is somewhat confusing and it is a little difficult to work out what it is showing with any great clarity.  What I see when I gaze softly upon it is a saintly figure on the left giving something to a kneeling figure on the right. In the background of the window is a church or cathedral. It strikes me as being a holy sacrament of some type, that this period of solace and rest are requisite to receiving grace.
    The urge to fill one's time with productive tasks is a common one, but life has two sides and regardless of how we struggle at least one third of it will be spent resting in sleep. It would then seem that in order to fully balance our lives there should also be a period of time in which we also rest and relax during our waking cycle. This opens us to the idea that this would be wasteful, but in truth rest is necessary. After every in breath there is an out breath. After each movement there is a pause, stillness balances movement.
    It is only when we slow down and take stock, when we let our eyes adjust to the darkness do we see details we missed while we moved and acted. Like a camera on long exposure our consciousnesses can pick up background details, see details that are not visible to the cones in our eyes. Like the dark sensitive rods our consciousness needs a period of inactivity to become active. It is only when we close the gates of our minds and quiet the chatterings of our inner voices that we are truly ready to receive.
   What I discovered in the quietness was that in order to receive inspiration one must be willing to rest and receive. That not all down time is displacement. That sometimes playing games, switching off our minds and relaxing allows our subconscious to go to work on the area in our lives that our conscious working brains would never be able to grasp. That there is a difference between busy work and actual work, that there is a difference between avoidance and true relaxation. Ideally we can perform our work diligently then relax and enjoy our lives in an equally responsible manner.
    I personally discovered that being unconscious is not the enemy, it is the counterpart to consciousness. Without one another they cannot function.  Only by fully resting and relaxing can we be truly awake.