Draw/drop of the day

[bloodygranuaile]

Two cards fell out of the deck while I was shuffling, so I decided to read those, since that's the sort of day it's been thus far (I ran into the emergency stop button at least three times during my workout this morning).

The first card, the Six of Cups, panicked me a bit when I first looked at it, because the design for it on this deck is almost identical to the Robin Wood deck's illustration for the Five of Cups, "Loss and Disappointment." Although this is a cups card, the long trails of liquid give it an immediate "look" that more closely resembles a wands or swords card, to my eye. The pouring-out is an interesting pairing with the woman in the next card who appears to be washing her hair, but is not surrounded by liquid.

Despite the foreboding appearance, the Six of Cups is actually just the nostalgia card, "The Good Old Days," suggesting that I should revisit something in my past or that something in my past will be popping up to revisit me. I'm not sure what this could refer. I have spent much of my day either working on the magazine or pondering the difficulty of cutting white pasta entirely from my at-home diet. It will be easier to deal with if I do start buying potatoes again, I think. I used to eat a lot more potatoes than I have been doing this summer, since it's not really bake-a-potato-for-an-hour season, but somehow I don't think the card is suggesting nostalgia for potatoes. Or hummus, for that matter. Honestly, I did spend most of the day thinking about how to shake up my grocery shopping.

The second card, the Nine of Pentacles, depicts a woman ringed with pentacles washing her hair, which looks nice and relaxing. In many decks, the pentacles are coins instead, which would make this card basically depict a treasure bath. I wish! I am planning on having a nice luxurious Lush bath at a casino again this weekend, though. (Perhaps the last one is the thing I am nostalgic for.) But overall this card feels sort of calm and clean and decadent to me.

I was pretty spot on on this one, since the Nine of Pentacles is the "Self-Reliance" card, and often depicts some version of a woman luxuriating all by herself. It is the significator card of The Toast. It represents material comfort, financial security, well-being, and generally having your hard work pay off so you can sit back and enjoy some nice comfortable peace and quiet in the space you've carved out for yourself.

The two cards together seem to indicate either that I'm nostalgic for a time when I had more money, which is true, or that I am in a position to draw on some element of my past, possibly skills I haven't used in a while, to increase my self-reliance and move closer to financial security/material comfort, which I hope is true. I think I've done a decent enough job of becoming fairly self-reliant for the past few years, but I wouldn't mind a little more financial security, and I've got 28 years of assorted learnings and experience and nonsense to help me get there, so I wonder what it is I need to draw on.

Or maybe it just means I need to move my bloody 401(k)s over already.