icourtland!

OK – this is making me a little bit crazy – well a tiny bit more than usual anyway.

so, part of my spiritual daily practice work is to pull a Tarot card for the day. I usually do this right before I journal. Some days it gives me a little insight into my day that I can write about if nothing else interesting is going on. After all, sometimes I really just do not have three pages worth of stuff to write about, so falling into the image on the card can help me tune into my instinct and intuition. Some days go better than others, but it is the intentional act that is the key for me.

over the last couple of months I have been getting court cards a LOT – far more than statistics would seem to allow. after all, in a deck of 78 cards there are only 16 of them, but there they were popping up day after day.

the last two weeks have been quite different. but once again, some of the same cards over and over again.

I don’t use what most people thing of when they think of Tarot cards – the Rider-Waite deck. When I first started getting back into Tarot I happened on a deck called the Archeron Tarot and fell in love with it. It does have rather dark imagery, but for someone who reads cards from an intuitive side it is really easy to fall into it. The images are quite different from the Rider, and don’t often fit the same “standard” meanings.

in the last several weeks the 5 of Wands has been showing up. we are talking five or six times since mid-December.

and now, actually two days in a row, I have pulled the 5 of Cups

Yesterday when I was shuffling and near the end, the Ace of Cups just plain fell out of the deck, face up on my desk. I also went ahead and pulled another card, that was the 5 of Cups. So yesterday was both the Ace and the 5. Pretty crazy, eh?

and yes – I do shuffle the cards. Three times with a cut-shuffle, and then three times with a full riffle-shuffle, then cut the cards. This is a lot of mixing – so the chances of the same card coming up is slim. Professional card illusionists work at having the same card come up, in a deck of 52 – this is 78 cards so the possibilities are far slimmer even if you are trying to get the same card. This is freaking me out a bit.

This deck is really trying to talk to me. But guess what… I lost the little white book that came with the deck to see what the artist was thinking when he came up with these images. How annoying is that? The images don’t really match up with the Rider-Waite, so the meanings that are typically assigned to them just don’t fit. So it is down to my own intuition on what they are saying and what I feel that they mean. And then to have them come up over and over again – am I missing the message entirely?

the 5′s are about breaking out from the stability of the 4′s – growth and change. They represent all four elements combined with Spirit, the five points of the pentacle/star. The 5′s are also the halfway point in that suite run since there are ten cards per suit, so it is a time of transition from the beginning point to the end. I would have to say that there have been a lot of big growth and change in my life these days, so I guess I do understand that. But wow – do I need the reminders over and over again??

and oh yeah – Wands are Fire (creativity, spirituality and energy) – Cups are Water (Love, Emotion, Empathy) – odd combination.

I know the scans are pretty rough, but do you see anything in them that calls to you? What do they say to you that you might want to share with me?