Birthday Reading
I recently celebrated my birthday (45, thank you!), and my Darling Husband treated us to a weekend getaway at a place out in the middle of nowhere – no phone, no cellphone reception, no internet connectivity. Three days of nothing but reading, napping, and playing with several of the fabulous decks which I’ve acquired and haven’t managed to open.
Turning 45 was almost as good as turning 40 (turning 30 was the best, but that was due to celebrating in Florence, Italy, which gives that birthday a rather distinct advantage over every other). 45 is a magical number – 4 + 5 = 9, which happens to be my birth card number, so I knew this year was going to be a special one.
Having sunk into a sort of Tarot trance (what happens after about 36 hours of sleeping and doing Tarot), I decided it was time to do my birthday reading. But what spread? How to wrap this significant year into a spread?
I thought about doing one of the full deck spreads, such as the one Rachel Pollack outlined in the Llewellyn 2008 Tarot Reader, but that felt overwhelming. I decided to sort the cards by suit, and see what happened.
After staring at the neat piles of cards, I decided to shuffle each suit individually and pull one card from each, and one major. That would give me an overview of the coming year on the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual levels, and the major arcana card would give me the big picture.
I’m not going to share the cards I turned up just yet – I’m still pondering some of them. This definitely looks to be an exciting year, and I’ve decided I’ll revisit the reading and mention the cards as the year and the related events develop. Stay tuned!