Card of the Day Archives - Attic Cartomancy

Published February 1, 2022

Card of the Day: The Lenormand Mountain

Today’s card of the day comes from my Butterfly Circus deck. The mountain card, visually one of my favorites from this deck, tends to represent an obstacle or a challenge. I can’t think of too many times in my life where there hasn’t been such a thing looming somewhere nearby. This reminds me to look around and see what is currently looming that needs to be dealt with.

When I was designing this card I had a lot going on in my life that was wearing me down. I very much felt the sensation of sitting at the base of something very tall and trying to find the energy to push myself up and over it. This is easier said than done. I was quite literal with my card woman laying at the base of a mountain of towers and staring up at the sky high above her. When looking at a challenge from the lowest point the task can feel incredibly daunting, even beyond reach. However, in the middle of the mountain of towers there is a doorway lit up offering the potential for either a rest in the climb or a doorway to bypass some of the obstacle. In other words, a spot of hope when things seem too hard. Sometimes we only need that one little thing to give us a kick in the bum and then onward up and over.

This Card of the Day was originally posted February of 2017. The mountain card featured is from my Butterfly Circus Lenormand. Are you interested in this deck? Check purchase availability at The Attic Shoppe Trading Co.

Published February 1, 2022

Card of the Day: The Lenormand Ring

It might have become noticeable that most of my card of the day posts are written in regards to myself. I also like to change up decks so I’m learning more about each deck card by card. I have come to find that with the Lenormand doing a one card reading isn’t always practical as the meaning of the card has a lot to do with the surrounding cards. So instead I just use that card to learn a bit more about it and what question it might suggest I ask myself.

Today I drew the Lenormand deck’s Ring card and this one is from my Butterfly Circus deck. I used my conjoined twins in the artwork with the ring represented in their headdress. One of the meanings behind this card is being in a committed relationship. These gals don’t get much more committed than being joined at the hip. 😉 The card suggests you ask: If you’re in a relationship is the commitment between the two of you equal? If you’re single perhaps there is someone about to come into your life.

This card also can represent going in circles or repeating a cycle. Maybe you’re stuck at a place you don’t want to be in and you need to find a way to pull yourself out of the repetition of that place. So in pulling this card by itself I might ask myself: Is my creature of habit ways getting a bit too creature of habit? How do I feel about that?

There are a lot of literal meanings attributed to this card and many of them pertain to being committed to something; be it a person, an agreement, a business arrangement, and so on. Today I’ll be brushing up on those things. That is after this very creature of habit gets some of my daily cycle cycled. 😉

This Card of the Day was originally posted December of 2016. The ring card featured is from my Butterfly Circus Lenormand. Are you interested in this deck? Check purchase availability at The Attic Shoppe Trading Co.

Published January 26, 2022

Card of the Day: The Lydia Tarot’s Seven of Wands

This is me at the moment. This has been me for the past three months. I’m on uneven ground and I’m fighting back at all the attacking things coming up the hill at me. It’s frustrating and wearing me out. Plus there’s all that vertigo at the top of the hill! I’ve had small victories along the way. I replaced my useless doctor with one who is incredible. She has understood that I have a variety of different issues that conflict and agitate one another. So she’s aggressively taken each one on. This led to good and bad things. My wounded leg is blood clot free – which is awesome. One of them was in a seriously bad place. I saw a blood doctor who put me on iron infusions. Exhaustion has gone away. It helps I was taken off my blood thinner – no more alarming bruising. I see physical therapy these days for three different issues and they are mostly improving. I have torn ligaments in my knee though, which if the therapy doesn’t give me better results may lead to knee reconstruction. I’m not pumped about that. But hey, still got that semi charmed kind of life (without all the drug use found in that song, hahah.)

What keeps storming up the hill even as I fight it back is the trauma sustained to my head. There is physical trauma and ptsd to be sifted through. I didn’t get any help for it right after falling. I kind of rippled in the breeze as I tried to find a local doctor. Found one and he never listened to me or laughed off my concerns. So instead of starting the healing process right then, I was delayed more than a year and that allowed for things to get worse. The vertigo has become life disrupting. The memory loss and problems with short term memory loss has just gotten worse. I have fallen several times as a result of the dizziness. I’ve forgotten that I packaged something up but haven’t shipped it out. I’ve forgotten if I’ve asked Maggie to help me with something. It’s obnoxious. I have no confidence in my walking because my knee is unstable.

I have a very intense moment with the vertigo, which has caused it to swan dive into very bad places since. My brother and his new wife paid us a visit. We all stayed at a hotel Over the Rhine (spot across the river in Kentucky) so we didn’t have to travel back and forth during the long weekend. I love my knew sister. I can’t put in-law on it because she treats me like a sister. And the weekend started out wonderfully. We had so much fun. At one point we went to the Cincinnati museum and were having a great time and decided to go see an Omnimax movie. In hindsight the what the hell was I thinking?! idea did pop up. Have you been to one of these theaters? The average healthy person can go in there and get a little woozy over the tight and narrow seating. I never gave it a thought because I have gone there all the time throughout my life.

My husband and family went in to get good seats for us. I slowly hobbled behind. I got up the steps fine, turned to walk to my seat and was overcome with vertigo. Overcome is not a strong enough word. Completely blindsided by fear and panic. I was stranded in the middle where I couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. My husband came and got me and helped me to my seat. Then I could barely sit because it involved me leaning over as I sat down. Finally I’m parked in my seat and trying to control my breathing. As I finally get my shit mostly together the movie starts: An hour over flying over active volcanoes and dramatically dipping down into them. Then I had to get back out. It was awful.

So we got out of there and cooled down. I didn’t want to take the shuttle back to our hotel. I wanted to walk and get some fresh air. Again, no one is thinking and we go out to the path that connects Newport to our area. We take the option of no stairs. This leads to me walking over a bridge you can see the street below, to a very narrow sidewalk path that is elevated a story over the street below. What had I done to be here? I couldn’t breath. It was embarrassing and I hated how it upset my brother and sister because they worried they’d been thoughtless to my needs. They weren’t.

Since then it takes very little to trigger the vertigo. I’m always afraid I’m going to fall over. I can’t remember the last 15 minutes of every night before I fall asleep. I keep notes to remind myself in the morning of what I did. I keep a memory board to try and keep all my things needing doing in sight. Therapy is helping, but its still difficult. Especially when I’m keeping up with a boom in my business.

This card represents fighting through to success and needing to continue to fight to maintain it. I have come a long way and aside from these trials I am a very good position. I’ve fought a long battle to find my successes in life and these details strive to pull me back down. My worst enemy has always been procrastination. It’s what caused my business to struggle in the beginning. I knew what I wanted and needed to do, but I figured I would do it tomorrow. These issues see me waking up to a day that I just want to turn off and ignore for another day. When I do this or place my responsibilities on someone else things stop working smoothly. People outside my little world are affected by it. So I struggle through it. I try to stand firm on my uneven ground and maintain my place I worked very hard to get to. That said, if you’re written me and not heard back yet I might have forgotten it without meaning to. Poke me again.

A side note about this card’s artwork. I used the work of female artist Artemisia Gentileschi for this card because she had courage, she won her battles, but she always had to be on guard to maintain her place in the world.

This Card of the Day was originally posted May of 2019. The seven of wands card featured is from my Lydia Tarot. Are you interested in this deck? Check purchase availability at The Attic Shoppe Trading Co.

Published January 14, 2022

Card of the Day: The Tarot’s Temperance

The Temperance card is a good card to meditate on. It’s a good card for me to study a little bit further and write a card of the day about. Why? With my accident there has been a lot of room for life and the world around me to kind of weigh down on me. However? It has not. With all that my body has been through and how beat down I should feel (and believe me, my head has been a bit weighed down by it) I still feel this overwhelming sense of contentment. This has helped me realize a few things: It will sound weird, but I think this more profoundly looking upon the somewhat aggressive and dark face of the beautiful and incredibly unique woman who offered her self portrait for my temperance card in my Black Ibis Tarot. There is a balance to be had.

The Temperance card represents the ability to find calm in stressful situations. You can channel coolness in moments of extreme not coolness. You can take a moment to take a breath, look down the long path, and find your place and be good with it. Through patience and calm you can walk through life and look at those things in front of you that would try to fuss with it all. It’s a place of understanding. This is how I’ve come to see it.

Can I tell you a secret? I’m a natural hot head. I’m the type of person who small flames used to set my inner fuse a spark and eventually led to horrible explosions. I come from a family of dramatic, aggressive, yell as oppose to speaking calmly type of folk. It has taken me much of my life to find the ability to take a deep breath and exhale before I react. This is no small accomplishment when you can see yourself as being the only chick in Fight Club. Had I not learned to relax a little and understand the ability to let go, these past few months of mine would have been a fight. A fight between my rage of circumstance and my own body. But I know it is better to just go with life, appreciate the positives around us, and let go of the anger. If I can recommend anything to you; when looking at the Temperance card take a breath, feel grateful for life, and take a calm approach to your life and move on.

This Card of the Day was originally posted November of 2017. The temperance card featured is from my Black Ibis Tarot. Are you interested in this deck? Check purchase availability at The Attic Shoppe Trading Co.

Published June 15, 2018

Card of the Day: The Tarot’s High Priestess

Late at night I hear a voice whispering to me from the hallway. I think it’s trying to give me subliminal suggestions as I sleep and dream. What does it say? Pay more attention to meeeeee…. pay more attention to mee…. and then makes clicky noises. I will wake up, sleepily look towards the door and see the shadow of my cartomancy blog standing outside my door. “I will update you tomorrow! Now get back in my laptop! I’m trying to sleep!” I will tell it as I lay back down and put a pillow over my head. To be fair, it has been awhile since I sat down and really got back into the swing of things. So here I am. Happy blog?

Today’s card of the day is the high priestess card from the Isidore Tarot, in both regular and tiny size! As a designer I adore this card for its symbolism and structure. As a student of tarot I adore it for the same reasons. Today I associate most closely to its suggestion of trusting my intuition. It’s telling me to set aside the very analytical and critical talky talky part of my head that wants to logic and reason everything to death and just listen to what my inner voice has to say.

I’ve always felt it very important to pay attention to your own intuition. So much so that I’ve always trusted my feelings when something didn’t feel right or something felt absolutely right. That has been a strong thing for me much of my life. The down side is when my anxiety comes to call, usually in times of stress, I don’t listen to my intuition. Dramatic events or changes in my life (the Taurus of all Taurus creatures of comfort and habit that I am) stress me out incredibly and the anxiety tags right along. When I fell I removed my comfort and changed my day to day drastically. My anxieties came to roust. And as they sat there on my inner fence squawking at me like crows, I had a hard time allowing myself to trust my intuition. I second guessed myself constantly. I couldn’t decide if I was making my decisions based upon my actual intuition or because of the fear anxiety was helping flower within me. This all came to a head at the first of May.

Last May I returned to Michigan to attend my big brother’s wedding. His second wedding actually. He’d gone through some really hard patches in life, from an unhealthy relationship he stuck with for the sake of his kids, to a near life stalling depression that followed after the divorce. We started to swim together at his apartment complex twice a week and just talked. And with great joy I started to see my old brother in there again. The cheerful guy who took me to see Star Wars when I was a kid and to see Beetlejuice when I went all goth on him. The wonky humor that runs in our family. It was nice. I missed that greatly after moving to Ohio. But not long after I moved he finally started dating again and by luck or chance he met a wonderful woman. I love and adore her and finally feel like I have a big sister. And as I said, he married her last May. It was a wonderful weekend.

This May I was returning to Michigan under very different circumstances. Just getting on the bus was the hard part. The morning I was last supposed to get on the bus for back home I fell down the stairs five hours before leaving. My anxiety played that up big time as my gent drove me to the bus station. I was terrified to get on the bus. I had a bad feeling about it. I couldn’t tell if that was my intuition or my fear. I decided it had to be fear. And once back home I was able to hang out with my new big sis again finally, but the tone of this May from last May was very different.

A few weeks before her son suffered a massive stroke out of the blue. He was at her house picking up his kids, made a stuttering noise and was out. He had massive swelling on the brain and was put in an induced coma while they tried to sort him out. My new sis’s life became one of a new marriage trying to find a house in an overwhelmed market, watch her grandkids as much as she could so her daughter-in-law could be with her son at the rehab facility, and start a new job. She had a lot on her mind and a heavy weight on her heart. It felt good to be an ear for her. It felt good to have her ear and support. I was able to take a bit of a sigh there and look past my anxiety. And this led to a conversation with my gent.

“We should get formally married.” I told him on our evening phone call. He agreed. The time felt right. Nothing fancy, nothing formal or structured. Just a park, a few loved ones, a friend to officiate, and the two of us. The thing that struck me was that it just felt right. For a moment my anxiety was not present, not whispering to me. Fear had to take a backseat for a moment. That felt so good. I remembered that moment as I sat looking at this card today. I have been able to remember what it is to listen to my inner voice again. Hopefully this is a start.

Take that blog! I got all insightful and introspective on you again! I went all my feelings on this on you! What’s that? Oh. My blog is purring again. 😉 (Sounds kind of like a lawn mower… hmmm…)

This Card of the Day was originally posted June of 2018. The High Priestess card featured is from my Isidore Tarot. Are you interested in this deck? Check purchase availability at The Attic Shoppe Trading Co.