My birthday was Saturday, and I got an email from a friend:

"I asked what kind of year you'll have and drew a Tarot card for you from the Revelations deck. It was the Queen of Pentacles. From the book:"

She is a warm-hearted woman surrounded by luxury and wealth. She gives from her wholesome heart for the pleasures of the body.

The Queen of Pentacles represents goodheartedness, a love for luxury, a great cook, a patron of fine clothes, and a frequenter of elegant places. She is also a friend who can be practical in times of need and supportive when the chips are down. As a lover, she is deeply sensual and is comfortable with her body. She is methodical in her business sense and pragmatic in her dealings. She budgets out of practicality and perseveres through chores for the good of herself and of others.

In situations, this card heralds a period of luxurious material wealth and the acquisition of beautiful things. Here, wealth that has been earned is spent as a reward or as a treat.

I had gotten an email from Tarot.com offering a free Celtic Cross reading, so I did that yesterday, and the Queen of Pentacles came up again, which I thought was very interesting. It came up as the "Near Future" card:

Be prudent. Concentrate on what is most realistic and practical when it comes to your immediate prospects.

The card in the Near Future position indicates which way the wind is blowing with regard to your situation. If you follow the Advice card, however, you can improve on or neutralize tendencies.

With the Queen of Coins in this position, you will soon have a chance to test your dream against reality. The effort and time you have invested in some enterprise or relationship is about to bear magnificent fruit.

We shall see how sensibly you behave when there are no external limits on where you spend your energy, talents and money. To maximize what is good about the Queen of Coins, you should focus on what is practical and sensible. Invest your energy and resources wisely. Otherwise her more exuberant side could take over and your gains will degenerate into one long, expensive party.

I've always thought of myself as the Queen of Cups, but maybe this is going to be Queen of Pentacles year. I could use one.

Interesting article at Llewellyn: Terrific Tarot Talismans:

Not only an excellent and accurate tool for divination, Tarot cards are also a successful means to magically attract positive energies into your life. By using specific cards as luck-bringing talismans, you can increase your well being, develop a greater affinity with the Tarot, and also give yourself another reason to buy some of the wonderful new decks that are out on the market.

I just did the Dream-Joy-Magic spread. I'm on my lunchhour at work; I prefer to read the cards at home, in the morning, but I was stressed this morning (spent a half hour on the phone with my cell phone company about a missing payment), so I stuck the cards in my bag and brought them with me.

I was doing a little research on the meanings of various stones that I use in my jewelry, and I had just read about Chrysoprase at Rings & Things, who have a wonderful gemstone index, and it said that, among other things, Chrysoprase enables the wearer to understand the language of lizards (shades of Harry Potter!), and if you hold a piece of Chrosoprase in your mouth, you will become invisible.

Knowing this made me very happy, and I felt in a good place to lay out the cards.

My reading was:

Interesting that they were all Cups -- I've used the deck exclusively for several months, and it's well-shuffled -- but maybe not so strange seeing as how happy I felt at the time.

The Page of Cups generally portents a message of love. The Pages are all messengers, but this one symbolizes love, emotion, intimacy, or the possibility of them, anyway. Joan Bunning says, "Sometimes the Page of Cups implies that your entire situation is suffused with the spirit of love and emotion." The "Dream" card represents our desires, and right now my desire is to create and grow a business creating and selling my jewelry; I think this card is saying that I desire to make this happen in a way that feeds my soul, and so far, it definitely does.

The "Joy" card represents "that for which we have reason to be happy." I've always thought that the King of Cups in my life is my friend David, who has been encouraging me and coaching me through as I'm working toward my goals. He's the one who is always encouraging me to "dream bigger." I have a lot of love and support in my life (my husband is the King of Swords, and my boss at work is the King of Wands, both of whom are supportive in different aspects of my life), but in this particular situation, I'm especially thankful for my King of Cups.

The "Magic" card stumped me for a moment -- the Nine of Cups is traditionally what I've seen called the "party hearty" card -- wish fulfillment, having everything you want or need, a feeling of accomplishment accompanied by a certain smugness. But the card in this position is supposed to represent the work I need to do to overcome my personal limitations. The Nine of Cups would indicate that my wish will come true, but I believe it also means that I have to do the necessary work -- it isn't going to come to me on a silver platter, there will be a lot of work that I need to do, but if I do that, I can be proud of my accomplishments (and my golden cups), like the man on the card.

Also -- thinking about the smugness factor -- maybe it's a warning that I need to remain humble, although that generally isn't a problem of mine. Certainly something to keep in mind, though.

I don't have the Fey Tarot (though it's on my wish list), but I love the spread recounted in: Blogickal: A Tarot Lesson: What Does Your Tower Look Like?

The spread is Dream-Joy-Magic, with Dream represeneting our desires, Joy representing "that for which we have reason to be happy," and Magic meaning "the work one needs to do to overcome personal limitations."

I meant to do a spread this morning, but I was rushed and forgot, and I don't have my cards with me. I'll do one tonight.

Again. :) What a lovely card, so hopeful and happy. A child wearing a garland of flowers astride a white horse, inside (?) a walled garden, with a field of sunflowers behind him.

A perfect card to get on a Monday morning, forecasting nothing but sunlight for the day (and the week?).

I don't recall ever having drawn this card before. The card shows a well-dressed woman, obviously well off, and elegant, refined woman, walking through a beautiful garden at her leisure. You can imagine her putting out a hand to stroke a particularly beautiful flower, raising the blossom to her face to breathe in its fragrance.

There are also pentacles (coins) in the scene, but Joan Bunning points out that they are low to the ground, symbolizing that while the woman is wealthy, and wealth is important, the "finer things" are also important, meaning not the trappings of wealth, but perhaps the leisure to enjoy art or music. This elegant woman is holding a falcon on her left hand, which seems incongruous. It may be indicating the presence of a darker side that is being (or needs to be) controlled.

An interesting card.

I've been using the Universal Waite Pocket Edition deck lately, which comes in a wonderful sturdy box with a lift-off lid. I picked up the box this morning and took off the lid, and there was one card sticking up a little further than the rest. I remember reading somewhere that when you're shuffling, if you drop a card, the cards might be trying to tell you something, i.e., if there's a card that separates itself from the rest in some fashion, you should pay attention to it.

So I carefully pulled it out of the deck, and it was the Queen of Cups, which I always use as my significator. It, more than any other card, seems to represent me.

That made me smile, and then I put it back in the deck and shuffled and cut the cards, and selected the card of the day off the top -- The Six of Wands. The Six of Wands is the victory card. It shows a man riding a horse, with a wreath fastened to the top of his wand/staff -- I imagine that he is riding back to his city, victorious, or it could be a victory parade.

In Learn Tarot, Joan Bunning says of the Six of Wands:

In readings, the Six of Wands appears when you have been working hard toward a goal, and success is finally within reach. The recognition you have sought so long is yours. Now you can receive the acclaim, honor and reward that you deserve. If you do not feel close to victory now, know that it is on its way provided you are doing all you can to make it happen.

I've been working toward finding something that I can produce with my hands to sell. I enjoy working with my hands very much, and it would be wonderful to be able to turn that work into a monetary profit. Most of the things that I do, i.e., knitting, are so labor- and time-intensive that I could never recoup the time and materials that I put into them. So I do those things only for myself and, occasionally, my family and friends.

But lately I've been making jewelry-like stitch markers for knitting, which I love making, and I've also been learning about making jewelry. I put some of my things up at my online Etsy shop, and have sold several things, but the thing that makes me even more excited is that yesterday I was contacted by someone about a wholesale order. It was a fairly small one, but it makes me very optimistic that this might indeed be something that I can enjoy doing, and also make money doing.

So the Six of Wands is very welcome, and particularly apropos for today!