There was rain outside and I felt like playing
The clouds splashed down around me,
my toes digging deep into soft earth
soles wet with the sensation of sinking
coming to rest in the dark spaces below.

These grey days remind me of home
of rainforests which stretch up
and root down.
They remind me that I’ve been fully submerged
and parched beyond measure
and all the things between.

They remind me how the flowers love sun
but crave rain
They remind me to drink deep
and hold myself ready for the next blooming.
They remind me even if blossoms don’t happen this go-round
that doesn’t mean they won’t in the next.
And if that’s something I want to see happen
it’s up to me to shift the conditions
so that they do.

Strength is often quiet,
a small nod to acknowledge recognition
that it’s time to change.
It doesn’t have to be everything,
it doesn’t have to be sweeping,
grandiose,
a pronouncement to encourage accountability,
though if that helps, by all means, yes.
Sometimes it’s looking at yourself in the mirror and saying
I like you
I love you
I trust you
I trust that you care enough about yourself
to understand when we need sunshine
and when we crave the rain.

~~~~~

Today’s deck is Grimalkin’s Curious Cats by MJ Cullinane. I have a few cat decks, and I love them all, and I probably won’t stop collecting cat decks because cats. I don’t use this one as often as I might if the cards themselves were a little bit smaller. There’s always a struggle there. The art is so lovely, if the cards were smaller, it would be harder to see it. But if the cards were smaller, my tiny hands would have an easier time with them. And certainly, a lot of it is practice but I do hesitate to reach for them as compared to other decks because of that. Regardless, they give me such delight. Her cats are lively and behave exactly as one might consider cats would, whether they’re spending time in a tarot deck or elsewhere.

Strength is probably my favourite card in the deck. Often it’s a person with a lion, and I used to have a dog, named Auberon, who was so lion-like in the gentlest of ways and he helped me to embody this card to the extent that it’s lodged itself in my heart, like a tree growing over a sign someone posted there decades ago. I like the sentiment of this card, that the wildness or fierceness of something won’t be tamed with a heavy hand or force (though the card is called La Force in French, but it doesn’t mean the sort of force one might ascribe to strength) but meeting it in a place where you can see eye to eye. Where you let the wild thing be wild and in doing so, by encouraging it to be what it is, you create a bond. It’s very much a card (to me) of “I see you, I recognize in you what is needed for you to be strong, to thrive, and as a result am able to afford myself the same courtesy.”