Tarot for the week ahead

Well. There’s an interesting set of cards.

This feels like a very broad reading, a toe dipped in to feel the currents that are at work for so many of us at the moment.

Let’s look at each card in turn today before we draw them together. The Eight of Swords is a card of mental stagnation or stuckness. Look at how the placement of the swords bring to mind the shapes in a barred window, and think about the ways we imprison ourselves – even if those bars are only in our minds.

The Princess of Disks (aka Page of Pentacles) is something of an antidote to the airy, head-based swords. She is doubly allied with the earth element. She is grounded, physical, rooted: in fact, her pregnant belly shows that she is the beginning of something new.

The Moon has us straight back in the clouds again, although with the added element of darkness, subtly altering the way we see everything. She speaks of shadows, secrets, the unknown, the lesser-navigated inner paths.

What story does this tell us about our week? It feels to me like laying a marker down for a process of transformation which will extend way beyond these next seven days and into the future.

Think how pertinent the prison window symbolism of the Eight is at a time when many people are still choosing, for safety, to stay at home as much as possible; sometimes the threat is real, even when the bars are not. However, something new in the physical, material realm is coming. The ways we go about our daily business are changing. We are already starting to venture out from behind our physical and mental barriers again. A new kind of life will be born. What we don’t know yet is what that will look like, exactly: all we have are glimpses in slivers of moonlight.

It may be too soon for us to know the full story of how all this will play out, but this reading asks us to pay attention this week to the shape of the future. How might we come to feel safe enough to venture beyond the bars? How long might it take before the new life borne by the Princess arrives? It doesn’t matter that we don’t know all the answers just yet. We don’t have to. What we do need, however, is to start asking ourselves the right questions.

Have a good week and stay safe x