🌱 Patience, Care, and the Last Moments before Full Bloom

Weekly Forecast for 6/16

This week’s cards brought to you by the gorgeous Spolia Tarot

Sometimes less is more, and nowhere is that more true, in my experience, than in a tarot reading. I’ve gone to the cards with big questions and kept on drawing from the deck. Reading for friends, especially, it’s easy to be tempted to draw another and then another card in search of more insight. But like getting too much advice, too many tarot cards can leave us lost in the ether and distanced from ourselves. What do we really think? What are we really feeling? We then have to dig back through the mounds of information we’ve accumulated, trying to uncover our own perspective.

I remember once reading for a friend in my old tarot studio. I had this amazing antique table - dark walnut with swirly inlays in the corners - and we’d covered most of it with cards. Almost two hours into the reading, we were feeling light-headed and giddy, high on our own supply of tarot wisdom. We decided to continue down the rabbit hole and when I flipped over the next card it felt like a (loving) slap in the face. The distinctive, trippy Seven of Cups stared back up at us. Like the silhouetted figure in the foreground, beholding an array of cups with fantastical items emerging from them, we were staring at our own psychedelic array of images, reduced from specific and detailed characters to a generalized outline. Far from ourselves, we’d lost the plot completely.

All of this is to say, that when life starts feeling like the Seven of Cups, it’s a good idea to simplify things. Today, I’m feeling called to do a smaller, shorter reading; to really focus on a message from the cards and then use the rest of the week to enact the message.

And what a beautiful selection we have in front of us today.

The Star can be a message to re-orient ourselves to what matters, to find the values that guide us and then use them to direct our actions. For a month with the Eight of Wands as our opportunity card, it’s clear that things aren’t going to be moving at a slow pace, and if you feel like your to-do list is growing like a snowball rolling downhill, The Star offers us a helpful alternative.

Because the Eight of Wands is about aligned action, it’s important to remind ourselves what we’re aligned with. Walking away from any blame or guilt for getting off-track (how could we not in this hectic and intense world we live in?), this is a week to find the brightest stars in your sky and move towards them.

Yes, this applies to our daily actions and projects, but it also speaks to the ways we care for ourselves. It’s possible that we’ve unconsciously adopted some external messaging about what should feel good or what we should do to care for ourselves. Notice what practices have left you feeling drained, stressed, or insecure. If you feel up to it, see if you can discern why: What values do they point to? And where does the pull to embody them come from, especially when doing so makes you feel less whole, healed, or secure?

Our second card, the Seven of Pentacles, both supports this introspection (the traditional RWS version features a person assessing the fruits of their labor) and gives us a tangible way to bring these ideas into real life. I’m going to be very on-the-nose and use this card to inspire a little exercise:

1. Identify what you’ve been doing to care for yourself lately. This can include things that you do with the intention of caring for yourself, but that yield anxiety or discontent instead. (Hello, doomscrolling!)

2. Cut out the ones that don’t bring you peace or a sense of connection with yourself and replace them with practices that align with your values.

Bonus step: Write out your values and use them as a compass with which you can navigate these choices.

I also think that the Seven of Pentacles is pointing us towards some hope and mystery. This version, with its flowers just beginning to bud from each pentacle, suggests that we’re about to see a bloom of tangible joy, connection, and even material success from the work we’ve been doing with The Star. This moment could be the last of a period of darkness in which our efforts have been slowly and steadily growing. Soon, they’ll burst into the light, but for now we just have to navigate by the glimmer of the stars.

Embrace:

• Examining how you care for yourself

• Refocusing on your own experience, beliefs, and perspective

• The need for silence, stillness, slowness

• Practical steps to embody your values

• Trusting in the practice

• Trying new things when the old things no longer work

Avoid:

• Over-analysis, gathering more information

• Discounting the messaging from your body, spirit, and beyond

• Valuing complex, difficult solutions over accessible actions you can take now