A queen of earth
I never sought to be.
Barefeet on the ground,
I felt wild and free.
I was fire and wit
heartfelt and weird,
Stable, quiet, and calm
Were words that I feared.

I wanted wind in my hair
and highways for miles
Contagious with laughter
and subtle with wiles
Actions and great loves
sharp tongued and wicked
Intact integrity
Never insipid

But time has a way
of giving perspective
motivations can shift
along with objective
I’ve found quiet and calm
To be quite affective
For those moments best spent
On being reflective.

I weigh more than I used to
in body and mind
But it’s come in quite handy
As I can easily find
A much better sense
Of gravity’s pull
Unerringly grounded
Like the moon when its full
Delighting in cycles
Brilliant and ripe
Discovering it does not
Divest from type

Still barefoot, still weird
Still witty, but wise
A queen of the earth
With her eye on the prize
An awareness of how
She might best devise
The balance between
The lows and the highs.

 

~~~~~

 

Today’s deck is the Herbcrafter’s Tarot by Latisha Guthrie and Joanna Powell Colbert and I absolutely love this deck. I don’t read with it very often because the absence of symbols and imagery I’m accustomed to can be intimidating when there is a desire to be accurate. Which is something I struggle with when reading. I want to be *right* so much, and that doesn’t leave a lot of space for feeling one’s way through things. This is very much a deck of feeling, of flow.

It’s beautiful, and the plants associated with the different cards and so well thought out. As well, the book combines the numbers, which I don’t often see. What I mean is all the Aces are grouped together, the twos, then the threes and so on. At first I was very resistant to this, I want to be able to flip through the book and access the suits in numerical order like I’m used to. But the correlation between the individual numbers and court cards is pretty brilliant.
For instance, Aces are what are normally considered weeds. Easy to find, accessible, common plants long used as medicine, a good place for an inexperienced herbalist to begin. Plus there are minidramas illuminating the journey the Herbalist takes as they move up through the levels. It’s really well laid out and I don’t think I’m doing a good job of explaining. But I love it.
As a sometime herbalish hedgewitch, it’s a lovely deck but I would say that even if you just like plants and want to explore the tarot along with them, this is a pretty good deck. Maybe not to learn on, but it does have a beautiful song to it.