The Orange Tarot – XIX The Sun

Orange the colour and orange the fruit – both are happy, healthy and full of vitamin C. The Sun is the last card I have to share with you from the Orange Tarot (for now) and Orangutan Awareness Week is almost over. So, do you feel more aware?

Well, perhaps not, because unless you had oodles of time on your hands and a sudden hankering to do lots of reading, you probably didn’t follow (m)any of the links I posted. Which is totally understandable. So here’s a quick summary – How To Be Orangutan Aware in 3 Easy Steps:

1. Know that orangutans are endangered (Sumatran orangutans are critically endangered) because their rainforest home is steadily being wiped out. 90% has gone already and almost 3 million hectares are lost each year. If things carry on the way they are, wild orangutans will become extinct within a few decades.

2. The main culprits of deforestation are: OIL PALM PLANTATIONS, illegal logging, acacia plantations (for wood pulp), mining and fires. Of these, the most evilest is PALM OIL. Huge swathes of rainforest are cut down and replaced with miles and miles of oil palm monoculture, which is devastating not only to orangutans but all the thousands of species the rainforest supports. Orangutans and the majority of biodiversity supported by tropical rainforests cannot co-exist with oil palm plantations, yet the demand for palm oil is increasing.

3. What we can do:
– buy sustainably source wood and paper products
– campaign for supermarkets and large manufacturers to use sustainably source palm oil (which is found in all sorts of foods such as biscuits, cakes, bread products, as well as soap and various other things – often disguised as ‘vegetable oil’).
– write to MPs, sign petitions and generally kick up a huge fuss about rainforest destruction. Orangutans aren’t the only ones who need trees to survive…

And if you do have oodles of time and a sudden hankering to do lots of reading, this site has amazing info about palm oil and other issues concerning orangutans and does a much better job of explaining things than I do.

Well, that’s me done. Seven cards, seven days and the Phantomwise auction ends at 14:45 GMT on Saturday 13th November (that’s tomorrow). You have been warned…

Thanks for putting up with me. I’ll shut up now.

The Orange Tarot – XVIII The Moon

Everyone knows the moon is made of cheese – Red Leicester cheese in this case, which was very tasty.

The Moon is a deep and complex card, with hidden depths, and the Orange Tarot version is no different. No doubt tarot scholars will spend hours examining and analysing the particular shape of the bite marks, for instance – how they ulitise sacred geometry to both conceal and convey the secret teachings of the Golden Dawn. And note too the subtle markings on the Moon’s surface: Hebrew letter? Yods? Stellar constellations or the strange familiar hieroglyphs of a language not yet discovered? And what of the cheese itself? A flight of fancy, like some child’s nonsense verse, or a nod perhaps to an ancient tradition of cow worship?

Only 1 day and 18 hours until the Phantomwise Tarot gets squashed by the auctioneer’s hammer. Can you feel your heart racing? Are your palms clammy? Is your index finger twitching excitedly on your mouse? I thought so…

The Orange Tarot – XVI The Tower

Another card made possible by the unstinting generosity of my little girl. As she will testify, the higher you build a tower (and the smugger you get about how high it is) the more likely it is to collapse.

There’s a short film (well, shortish – it’s 48 minutes long) called Green that you can watch online that’s about a female orangutan rescued from an oil palm plantation in Indonesia. Although many parts aren’t easy to watch, it shows directly the very real, and unnecessary damage, caused by deforestation.

Happy Orange for Orangutan Day! May there be many many more to come…

The Orange Tarot – XIII Death

How lucky am I that Orangutan Awareness Week falls in autumn? Death was such an easy card to make, all I had to do was step outside my back door and look for the nicest – and orangiest – leaf I could find.

Pretty self-explanatory this one so I won’t waste anyone’s time trying to say something profound about it. By the way, have you noticed? The Phantomwise is now at £62!! I’ll say that again because it’s so awesome…the Phantomwise is now at £62!!! I think that is enough to buy an orangutan a PSP or something. 🙂 Nah, orangutans don’t like PSPs. They have much more fun on the Wii…

Tomorrow is Orange for Orangutan day. If you’d like to join in, wear something orange – or eat something orange, or buy something orange, or drive something orange. And make sure you get other people to notice and ask you about it. When they do, point them to www.orangutan.org.uk

Anyway, that’s enough for today. Tomorrow’s card is going to be…

The Orange Tarot – XII The Hanged Man

This is perhaps the lamest card in the deck so far, for which I apologise. There possibly will be lamer in the future, but I haven’t had to do Judgement yet. 🙂

The Hanged Man as a clothes peg, how might one interpret that I wonder? “You feel like you’ve been hung out to dry?” Hmm…maybe not. What about? “You’re like a clothes peg that doesn’t have any clothes to hold. So you’re feeling helpless, waiting for someone to come along with a sock or a nice pair of pants.”

Orangutans like to just hang around you know.  They spend their lives just hanging out in trees, being orange. That’s how cool they are. When I grow up I want to be an orangutan.

Thank you to everyone who has bid on the Phantomwise – it’s at £28 already! I don’t know what that equals in fruit (which orangutans love to eat) but I’m guessing it’s quite a lot. Yay, everyone! If the Phantomwise isn’t your bag, perhaps a straight donation might be more to your liking instead…?

Come back tomorrow for another exciting installment of THE ORANGE TAROT!!

The Orange Tarot – VII The Chariot

To find out what the Orange Tarot is all about, see this post.

Here’s the Chariot. Yes, it’s a car. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get hold of any orange horses or a proper chariot so this will have to do.

Actually, this car looks a lot like a jeep. Jeeps and pick-up trucks are essential items for the Orangutan Foundation as they enable them to send out teams to rescue baby orangutans whose parents have been killed (because they’re seen as pests on palm-oil plantations). They’re also used to transport orangutans to release sites – carefully protected areas of forest where they can live out their lives in relative safety.

Want to see the cutest orangutan picture ever? Take a look at these wonderful orangutan photos by Brain Matthews on the BBC Wildlife Magazine website. And don’t forget to bid on the Phantomwise Tarot! 100% of the proceeds of the sale will be donated to the Orangutan Foundation.

The Orange Tarot – III The Empress

This week it’s Orangutan Awareness Week which includes – on Wednesday 10th November – Orange for Orangutans Day.

To do my bit, I have created the Orange Tarot. Actually, I am still creating the Orange Tarot – I was hoping to have a whole deck to show you but life got in the way so I only have 7 cards. Still, let’s call it a work in progress. Seven cards over seven days fits quite nicely anyway.

So, what is the Orange Tarot and, more importantly, why is it?

In making the Orange Tarot, I decided to photograph only orange things I could find that somehow expressed each major arcana card. Apparently, it’s more difficult than it sounds. I wasn’t allowed to buy anything – I had to use things I had in my house or garden. Fortunately, I have a toddler so she helped by letting me borrow some of her toys. The card you see here is the Empress. I figure she’d quite like these flowers – and she can sew them onto her clothes as well, so that’s nice. Please note, the deck is supposed to be fun and not…ahem…aesthetically pleasing.

I wanted to do something for Orangutan Awareness Week to help raise money and…er…awareness. The Orange Tarot is just a way of making you look. Then, as you’re casting a critical eye over my rather childish offering, I leap in front of you rattling my donation tin. See, it’s a genius plan!

My way of getting you to cough up is to ebay my copy of the Phantomwise Tarot. Basically, you can raise money to save orangutans (and the money really does save orangutans, loads of them) just by bidding on my auction. Here it is – go and bid now, please. If you don’t win, you don’t have to donate any money at all – but by bidding you’ve increased the amount of money raised. Great, isn’t it?

Of course, you can donate as well. Here is the Orangutan Foundation’s donation page on Just Giving which tells you how to do so.

Come back tomorrow to see the next card!