In the cards this week: Fire

For thought and action

This week’s cards:

Maid of Daggers: Allow your creativity and imagination to run free. Don't just think outside the box; forget the box even exists! Conventional thinking is failing to find the solutions you need, so it's time to move beyond what's traditional and expected.

Ten of Daggers: You're feeling the weight of your responsibilities, and it's getting you down, making it hard for you to feel fired up about anything. Maybe it's time to lighten the load. What can you set aside or ask others to do? Rearrange a little to make room for your Fire - your passion and creativity - to come to life again.

This week’s cards are a Fiery pair, full of ways to help us find satisfaction in life.

The Maid of Daggers is one of my favorite cards. In this deck, the face cards are in masculine-feminine pairs, with the Youth and Maid as the “youngest” pair. In each pair, the masculine card represents the active use of the suit’s energies in the outer world, while the feminine card represents the embodiment of those energies, the internalization of them into a person’s very being.

The pairs of face cards represent personality traits that people of all genders have, far more than they represent any kind of gendered physicality. We all have both masculine and feminine traits within us, and the cards can help us identify those traits and honor them in ways that are beneficial to ourselves and others.

Since she’s young, the Maid is still learning how to get around in life. But that also gives her a kind of “Zen beginner’s mind” advantage: she doesn’t carry around any preconceived notions that might trip her up.

The Maid of Daggers is especially good at thinking outside the box, or perhaps we might say she ignores the existence of the box altogether!

She’s suggesting that it’s time to move beyond whatever paradigms we’ve been using and try something new, something off-the-wall or unprecedented in order to solve those sticky problems that we’ve been having trouble with.

And the Ten of Daggers suggests one way to do that. Feeling a heavy load lately? I mean, the Big World isn’t exactly all rainbows and unicorn farts these days , so that certainly isn’t helping.

But within our daily lives, many of us (myself included) often feel pressured to take on more and more, to be ruthlessly efficient with our time and energy.

But we’re not machines in a factory. We’re living, breathing human beings with emotions and passions and needs and desires.

I like what Brian Klaas had to say about this kind of pressure for constant efficiency, for doing more-more-more in every available moment of time. It’s bad for business, sure, but it’s also bad for us in our daily lives, because it puts us in danger of crashing entirely when we hit stumbling blocks like illness and other emergencies.

Resiliency is a better option, as Klaas explains. And in our all-too-human lives, that also includes making sure we’re not carrying too heavy a burden on a daily basis.

What responsibilities can you hand off to others? It can be hard to trust other people to do things the way you want them done. But if it’s a choice between having someone else do it less-than-perfectly and continuing to do it yourself until you eventually collapse from exhaustion, I think less-than-perfect is probably the better choice.

What other responsibilities can you simply say no to? Yes, that will displease some people, but again, prioritizing your own mental and physical health is a good idea in these pandemic-and-storm-ridden times.

The image on the Ten of Daggers card shows a pile of daggers, a heavy stack, balanced precariously on a single hand. Obviously, it’s a good idea to remove a few of those daggers to lighten the load.

But it’s also a good idea to build in what the influencers annoying call “me time” — time for rest, contemplation, rebuilding your inner self. It can be as simple as sitting quietly for a few minutes and looking at the trees or listening to music. Longer spans of time might involve playing a video game, creating art, or joining with friends for fun and games of various sorts.

Taking the time to do the things that refuel our inner selves is vital. In the image on the Ten of Daggers, I imagine these R&R activities as space between those daggers, helping them to float with less weight above the hand that supports them.

Can you slide one of those daggers out and replace it with some space to breathe?

I wish you a week of resilience and bright ideas!

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About Laura Perry

I'm the founder and Temple Mom of Ariadne's Tribe, a worldwide inclusive Minoan spiritual tradition. I'm also an author, artist, and creator who works magic with words, paint, ink, music, textiles, and herbs. My spiritual practice includes spirit work and herbalism through the lens of lifelong animism. I write Pagan / polytheist / magical non-fiction and fiction across several different subjects and genres. My Minoan title in the Moon Books Pantheons series is now available for pre-order and will be released on 26 August 2025. While that process percolates along, I’m working on an illustrated book of modern Minoan myths. I’m also an avid herb and vegetable gardener and living history demonstrator.