By the members of the FaeryOracle On-line Discussion Group

Latest additions: 24 March 2005

52. Rarr

Rarr (onomatopoetic sound) RAHR
RRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRHHH!

26 February 2005 - &Copy; Copyright Jessica Macbeth, 2005. All rights reserved.
Quite a few years ago, when Toby Froud was very young, the Rarr used to play in Toby's room at night, zooming around and keeping him awake. Brian mentioned this briefly in the "Good Faeries/Bad Faeries" book. Brian painted the Rarr back then, and when the Oracle came into being the Rarr, quite naturally, wanted to be in it - after all, with his boundless energy he can certainly keep up with the work involved.

Here we are now, years and years after Brian painted the Rarr, and I have a granddaughter, Megan, just a bit younger than Toby was back then.

The other day, shortly before her second birthday, Megan and I were looking through the Faeries' Oracle. This was Megan's idea. She kept picking up the cards and wanting to play with them, so we sat down on the floor and I fanned them face down in an arc so she could draw and look at them one at a time. She'd draw a card, study it a while, and then hand it to me, and draw another one.

About the fourth or fifth card she pulled, the Rarr came up. She looked at it and her eyes lit up. Looking up at me, she exclaimed, "Rarr!" She began weaving it through the air in a figure of eight, shouting, "Rarr! Rarr! Rarrrrrrrrrrrr!" She looked up at me again and giggled happily.

Handing me the card, she motioned for me to swoop the Rarr through the air, while she laughed and laughed between shouts of "Rarr!" This is all probably proof of something, if we still needed any proof.

24 March 2005 - © Copyright Jessica Macbeth, 2005. All rights reserved.
Comparison between He of the Fiery Sword and the Rarr: He of the Fiery Sword is powerful energy that is pointed and directed—focused. But the Rarr is wild energy—not necessarily focused at all. Reversed, the Rarr might be ungrounded, too. When these two cards come up together, we might gain something by thinking about those two ways of having and using energy and how we want to work with that.

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