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If, as a person unfamiliar with all this, you want one clinching argument for the
use of cards, perhaps it is this: it is the inner which
determines the outer, not
the opposite. I remember once listening to a young woman who had spent most of her
life travelling here, there and everywhere. On this particular evening, she had
returned to our home town. I was disturbed to realise that, behind her talk of a
myriad exotic locations was the parochial mentality of a small-town girl, intact
as though she had never set foot outside the municipality. Yet I should not have
been surprised. The country yokel who, when asked why he has never made the half-day
journey to London, replies ‘Oi bain’t tired o’ round ‘ere yet!’ implies the opposite
state of soul. It is not what there is to be seen that counts, but who I am seeing
it.
Rainring, then, is intended not only as a map, but also as a mirror. The map, if
you like, tells me where I am and where I could go; the mirror tells me what shape
I am in. As a mirror, the cards function like a microcosmic world – the world in
a pocket-sized format. I study them in the same way that I would try to study the
infinite variety of the events, encounters and circumstances which make up my day
to day existence – in order to try and progress in class.
Why am I in school, and what am I supposed to be learning? It seems to me that the
creation is a process of opening out, growing and diversifying from that undifferentiated,
unconscious womb of sleep which preceded the first awakenings of the conscious psyche.
I take it, therefore, that the meaning of each life, the purpose of school is to
become, to the fullest extent possible to me, the unique being that I was created
to be. Rainring, I hope and believe, can be of some assistance on that path. Give
it a whirl, and good luck!
Peter Ryley
England, September 2006
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The last survivor of the homemade production: Peter’s illustration for Umpire Bull
/ No Bull, the only 2-way divided card in the 4-mention pack
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