hope

There are a few things on this card that draw me in.

The first thing I notice is the darkness everywhere and that the little candle that the vampire has lit brings and sheds light in the darkness. A candle doesn't carry a very strong light but sometimes you don't need to fill a room with light, that is originally dark. You just need to bring in a little bit of light so so you can see your next step. You don't always need to know where the final destination is.

Whenever you have hope in your heart, you have encouragement to keep taking that next step forward.

What I notice about the vampire in the picture is her body language and her facial expression. Those feel really important to me. Her body language is saying she's closed. Her arms are crossed, her legs are crossed. It's like whenever you cross your arms and cross your legs you're stopping the flow of energy through your body; you're causing a blockage, you're causing a stoppage. And it feels to me that, although the light is bringing a little bit of hope to her, I'm wondering and I'm questioning if she really believes in hope.

If you look at her face. Her face and her eyes look very sad. When you are consumed by darkness, when you see all around you darkness and negativity and hatred and anger, and all of those low vibrational emotions, it's up to you to shine a light, to bring a little  bit of brightness to the world that may be surrounding you. Your light may not be strong but as it flickers, it will attract others to you. If you imagine a room where it's really dark and you light a candle. Then somebody next to you lights a candle. And then somebody next to them lights a candle. And so it goes... Before long, the room is going to be illuminated.

By lighting one candle you may encourage others beside you to bring their little bit of light into the world also, to remove the darkness, the negativity, the sadness, the hopelessness, the depression that you feel and sense in the world around you. It just takes one light, one candle.

When she lights this candle, however, she sees what has been hidden in the darkness. If you look where she is seated, she is seated on skulls and there are skulls behind her. And we think of skulls as representing death. In oracle cards, and tarot cards as well, skulls and death don't mean literally death, they mean that things are coming to an end.

And it's saying to us, when you have the courage to shine even a small light in the darkness, you're bringing an end to that darkness. Yes, you may not always like what you see whenever it's illuminated, because whenever your eyes are opened and you start to see the light around you, you may start, initially, to see and experience more negativity. It's not because everybody is negative around you or becoming more negative, it's because the light in your heart is shining something different in you.

You may have been the same as those people you now see around you, you may have been consumed by negativity, by anger, by depression, by hopelessness, and, now that you are shinging your light, even if it's a small and dim light, you're starting to realise that people are all so negative. And it can be a bit more difficult to start with whenever your light starts to shine, to accept that becasue you want everybody to start shining their light around you, you want the world to become a better place, you want hopelessness to change into hope, you want there to be a better tomorrow.

Usually the phrase is, "Where there is life, there's hope" but for this card I want to say, "Where there is light, there's hope".

If you're standing at the end of a tunnel and you see a bit of light, there's hope because it's giving you direction, it's giving you guidance to walk forward.

The other phrase that came straight into my mind, as soon as I turned this card over, is a phrase that I have been hearing quite a bit recently. And that phrase is, "Hope is not a strategy". Do you live your life by hope?

What is a strategy? A strategy is like a long-term plan where you set yourself goals and you set yourself a mission, something to achieve in the long-term. But if you think about hope. If hope is your strategy, what are you going to achieve? Hope just brings more hope which brings more hope... and you're in this ever-evolving circle but you're not actually getting anywhere. The important thing about a strategy is that you have action steps to take.

So, whilst hope may be the first step because you don't want to be consumed by the darkness all around you, you want to shine your light, you want to be different, you want to be positive, you want to bring optimism into the world, then hope is a good first step. But you can't live in hope forever. You need to take further steps. You need to take action steps.

Hope starts to shine the light. But then you need to take a step forward.

How can you create a reality from hope? Well, you need to take action.

So how can you encourage people around you to be hopeful? Well, you do positive things, you share positivity with them. Perhaps you follow a gratitude practice. Perhaps you journal about how you want to see the world. Perhaps you journal about how you want your life to look in 10 years time whenever it is so much lighter and brighter. And you want to take the steps, no matter how small they are, you want to take the steps towards how you want your life and the world around you to be, because that's the only way to change it.

Sitting and hoping won't actually get you very far. It gets you started but you need to take action steps.

So, whilst hope starts to bring some light and ignite that little spark in you, it only ignites that spark. It's up to you to follow on, to do the things in your life that you know you need to do in order to create a more optimistic, more bright and shining light for yourself and create a similar world around you as well.

Whenever you take those action steps, whenever you start to shine your light even brighter, it will have a ripple effect on other people. And they will see how you are changing, how, by shining your light, you have been able to remove yourself from negativity. It no longer affects you like it used to. The depression, the anger, the sadness that you have been consumed by before, whenever you found hope and you lit your light and you took those action steps, things changed in your life for you and people will see that, people will see how you've changed and they will be inspired by your light and want to follow you.

And that's how you start to create a better world around you.

So, this card is focusing on hope. However, the message that the angels are sending us today isn't just to have hope, isn't just to light that candle and share the hope, it's to take it further. Hope is your first step. How are you going to follow that? How are you going to create more light in your life and, as a result, the world around you. What action steps are you going to take?

Reference: This beautiful card is from Les Vampires Oracle Deck by Lucy Cavendish, artwork by Jasmine Becket-Griffith