Card of the Week: Six of Blades

There is an ancient but well-known saying among sailors: A good seaman weathers the storms he cannot avoid, and avoids the storms he cannot weather.

The Six of Blades suggests a need to gain perspective from conflict, distance from difficulty, relief from stress and anxiety, passage through difficult times, taking a path out of danger.  This card is sometimes called the Navigator.  A larger map can offer a better view of the patterns formed by its routes, and their many relationships to your position, to help chart a longer path forward.

Inverted, this card refers to a difficulty that may require a major revelation to resolve.  Even when lost at sea with a broken compass, sometimes the clouds can part to reveal a more certain direction. 

In “The Alternative Factor” the Enterprise is charting a boring uninhabited planet when it suddenly experiences a massive space disturbance that briefly “winks out” all magnetic and gravitational fields.  Despite being felt across the galaxy, the effect seems centered on the planet the Enterprise is orbiting, which now contains a human that hadn’t been there before.  A landing party finds an apparent madman named Lazarus who claims to be pursuing the person responsible for the destruction of his entire race.  The crazed Lazarus uses his timeship to set a dimensional trap.  Instead, Kirk steps into it and meets Lazarus’s calm counterpart from a parallel dimension, who explains that the opening of the interdimensional corridor itself is the danger.  Kirk insures that both Lazaruses are in the corridor and destroys the timeship to save both universes.