A little Easter reading

This Easter was my first hol­i­day as a sin­gle mama. I’ll admit, it was kinda bit­ter­sweet. Not that it wasn’t fan­tas­tic! The kids and I had a nice day and my par­ents vis­ited and we ate lots of Easter eggrolls… Still, you know, I miss the promise of my fam­ily, and hol­i­days are just going to be a reminder that I’m still mourn­ing that loss apparently.

Pull the tarot card first. This will set the tone for the bit of prac­ti­cal advice the Lenor­mand cards will offer!

I did a quickie read­ing this evening with the ques­tion, “What les­son do I take away from today?” One of the ways I like to use tarot and Lenor­mand together, is to draw a tarot card for a “high theme” and then draw a string of Lenor­mand cards for “action­able advice”. Of course, you can see how there would be many vari­a­tions on these spreads, but for a daily draw (and I don’t even rec­om­mend daily draws, hon­estly), no more than four cards are really necessary.

I used my Jolanda Tarot (I have lov­ingly cut the cards down so that they’re eas­ier for my small hands to shuf­fle — which is why you see them devoid of the pur­ple bor­ders). And I used my Judith Bärtschi Lenor­mand. Don’t you love my lovely cell-phone pic­ture illus­tra­tions?!?!

The tarot card I drew was Judg­ment. Fit­ting for Easter. In the Jolanda, it’s actu­ally illus­trated by a woman and a just-born baby (the umbil­i­cal chord is still attached), a stork, which is car­ry­ing the child, and the stan­dard trum­pet­ing angels in a cloud — city of gold on the hori­zon. (I know this is a very strange deck, but it’s work­ing for me these days.) I get the sense that even though the scene takes place at night, and it’s a cloudy night (full of musi­cal cherubs, no less), the woman’s vision is clear — the scene in the back­ground is crys­tal clear. And she looks up with con­fi­dence and a sense of enlight­en­ment about her sit­u­a­tion. For me, this rings true of hav­ing this oppor­tu­nity to really fig­ure out who I am and what I’m made of. Judg­ment isn’t a card that is painful in my view — it’s a card that says, “You are being awak­ened to a new level of con­scious­ness!” And I can get with that. That sounds pretty awe­some, actually!

From the Lenor­mand, I drew the Tower, Child and Fox. Chil­dren in both the tarot and the Lenor­mand… chil­dren are kinda my full-time job. The story I put together is — “Don’t get dis­tracted from what’s most impor­tant — pro­vid­ing struc­ture and sta­bil­ity for my chil­dren.” The Tower + Child (wel­fare, struc­tures sur­round­ing the child), and then the Child + Fox (smart kid) seem to indi­cate that my chil­dren are thriv­ing, so I should let go of the guilt (Judg­ment).

I sud­denly real­ized this in the Bärtschi though — which I thought was super fascinating:

We’ve used the same image to illus­trate the card!! (That is the Melissa Lenor­mand on the right — it’s a super fan­tas­tic lit­tle deck of cards, if you didn’t know!)

And then I was curi­ous, because I’m head­ing to New York in a few days to give a lit­tle talk about Lenor­mand car­tomancy and one of the crit­i­cisms I hear about these cards is that they all “look alike” and that it doesn’t even mat­ter which deck you buy because the cards all mean the same thing (as opposed to a tarot per­haps being read dif­fer­ently based on how it’s illus­trated), so I did a bit of a com­par­a­tive exercise:

The top row is the Tower + Child + Fox with the Melissa Lenor­mand. My Tower is a lit­tle more onimious, but I was really try­ing to con­vey “moder­nity” with this card when I cre­ated it. The Child in my deck holds a bowl full of berries and the Fox — in the back­ground, a woman dances with a fox. These three cards verses the Bärtschi – they’re still very whim­si­cal, but when I see the Fox in the Melissa Lenor­mand, I get the sense that there is an issue I’m avoid­ing — and that I need to focus at what’s really impor­tant and make it happen.

The bot­tom row of cards is from the Lenor­mand 2009 deck by Michael Bock — which I also love. But when I put them on the table, the mes­sage I get from them is “I’m a light for my kids, I have to pro­tect them (that Fox with the white bird!!).”

Cer­tainly they’re all sim­i­lar, and admit­tedly, I read Lenor­mand like a tarot card reader (which doesn’t inval­i­date my read­ings, by the way). But I think that see­ing the same read­ing from these three very dif­fer­ent decks should set­tle any ques­tions over whether or not they even can be read intu­itively. Ok, I’m done. And I feel much bet­ter this evening after going to the cards. And that’s what they’re for, right? To make me feel bet­ter…

Happy Ostara, Easter or irrev­er­ent chocolate-coated bunny day!! Hugs and kisses from my bas­ket of chick­ies to yours!