Monthly Reflection: Three of Swords & Ten of Pentacles

At the start of February, we pulled The Devil - as if winter wasn’t hard enough, am I right?

It’s somewhat unsurprising to see heaviness in the cards at this time of year. We began the month in Year of the Snake, a year of shedding, before celebrating the Lunar New Year and entering into the Year of The Horse, a year that brings a lot of movement and momentum. Collectively, this seems to have been felt deeply, with that Snake energy shedding the last things you’ve been holding onto - for some in rather spectacular fashion. Being February, for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re also at the tail end of winter. In the UK, that has looked like rain, rain and more rain! Grey skies have been aplenty, and that kind of dreariness in our surroundings only adds to the heaviness we might be feeling after a long winter.

February Reflection - Three of Swords

And so this feels like an energetic match for the card we pulled for February’s reflection, the Three of Swords. It’s a card I’ve seen recurring in not only my own collective mini readings this month on social media, but also in other collective readings I’ve come across online too. Pain, heartache and disappointment pretty much sums up this card, and so when I see this appearing here, there is a sense that perhaps you have felt your own pain or disappointment rear its head this month.

When we consider that, at the start of February, we pulled The Devil, we can extrapolate potential reasons as to why. Painful or disappointing things can be the catalyst for toxic or unhealthy patterns, relationships or situations being revealed to us - the unmasking or glass shattering moment that we cannot return from. Likewise, these things can cause us great pain in themselves, the acknowledging and coming to terms with these things isn’t easy, especially because we don’t enter into these things thinking that they’re problematic. Nobody goes into a toxic relationship feeling nothing but pain. It starts out feeling good, giving us something, that blinds us to the red flags along the way, attaching us to it so that, as it becomes more and more damaging to us, it equally becomes harder and harder to separate from it. Whether it is indeed a relationship or something else, the insidious nature of these unhealthy dynamics is often the same.

And so breaking those bonds and disrupting those dynamics can be an incredibly painful process.

So, if you have indeed had a difficult month, I am very sorry, but please know that you are not alone.

Part of what I appreciate about tarot is that there is light and shadow, and honouring the shadow is sometimes just as important as the light. And this card in particular shows us that, because it encourages us not to try to ‘intellectualise’ our pain. It calls us to embrace the fact that somethings just suck. And it tells us that it’s okay to feel our feels.

Look, these moments of pain or disappointment are inevitabilities. We can have the most content life and experience moments that bring us great pain. It is a part of the human condition, and it does not take away from the good things that exist in our lives. The goal in life is never to be happy 100% of the time - we are setting ourselves up for failure. We are always going to have good and bad, disappointments and things that exceed our expectations, deep pain and immense joy.

The key here isn’t to fight the pain. It isn’t to soldier through it and insist we’re fine. It doesn’t make you ‘stronger’ to say that something didn’t hurt you. It doesn’t make you weaker to admit that something made you cry. Pain is pain. We all feel it. And if we try to pretend we are immune, it does us no good.

Because all we’re really doing is shoving our emotional response down inside of us where it can fester. We can’t let it go without facing it.

And so, my friend, if you’ve had a rough month, if you’ve experienced something painful or disappointing, the question I ask you here is, have you given yourself space to feel that? Perhaps you’re wondering if you should have done more, or ‘not let it defeat you’. Well, what if letting it ‘defeat’ you has done you more good in the long run, than if you had of buried your head in the sand and soldiered on?

If you have ‘soldiered’ on, this card encourages you to check in with yourself. Perhaps the strongest thing you can do right now is honour the truth of your emotional world.

Once we do this, the fog that clouds our minds can clear, giving us space to think about the stuff that really matters in the month ahead.

March Outlook - Ten of Pentacles

With the Spring Equinox approaching this month, we could not get a more appropriate card than the Ten of Pentacles! As I wrote about in this blog post, the Pentacles suit is a natural parallel to the Spring season, a time for planting seeds, welcoming rebirth and renewal - particularly in nature. And we see this most clearly in the journey that we take from the Ace of Pentacles through to the Ten of Pentacles - the Ace being reminiscent of a single seed in its potential, and the Ten being the majestic oak tree that grows from it. This is why the Ten is such a welcome sign for the month of March.

The Pentacles suit represents things that are worthwhile, long-lasting commitments, but that means that they are long-term endeavours. And so, in order to know which seeds we should plant in Spring, we need to first have an idea of what garden we’d like to grow.

So, as we enter into the month of March, we’re being called to consider what our long-term goals are. Where do we want to be at the end of this year? In five years’ time? 10 years time? What do you want your life to look like? How do you want it to feel? What would feel like ‘success’ to you? Action without intention leads to chaos, not progress.

As part of this, it’s important to think about the goals we’re already chasing and consider how they fit into that longer term plan and our overall priorities. Sometimes, we start chasing things that we think are the ‘right’ goals, but doing so takes us further and further away from the real ones. Notice that, in this card, the Ten of Pentacles (which presents us with success and abundance) shows not only the plentiful harvest, mature garden, large house and many pentacles, but it also shows family. While we might think of success and abundance in terms of wealth, we must also consider what it means to live an abundant life. Sometimes, it’s not about the house we live in, but the people who fill it.

So, what does this mean in practice? Well, sometimes we work a job we hate, to chase the big house we’re striving for, but our long-term goal is actually to sell it all and move out to the countryside or to the coast. Likewise, sometimes we chase a career that means we’re spending more time than we’d like away from our children, when actually, all we really want is to give our kids the best childhood they can have. In contrast, sometimes we sacrifice personal endeavours in service of our family that would be incredibly supportive and happy to see us pursuing the thing that makes our heart sing. What we define as the ‘right’ success from an external perspective, and the true success by our own definition, can vary greatly based on our own personal desires and the narratives we’ve been conditioned to buy into all our lives, and it can be a mess of a web to unpick. But this month, it appears to be a high priority to consider.

Because once you know where your heart really wants to go, once you know what having ‘made it’ looks like to you, the right seeds to plant might just become a lot clearer.

And during the springtime, when the soil is fertile and ready for new growth, there couldn’t be a better time to start tending to your garden.

Sending love, my friend.

N x