Hello to All my Tarot Friends on this Beautiful Spring Day,

I have been missing from my desk for the last couple of days due to the fact that I have been feeling pretty awful. I have been plagued with migraine-style headaches for the last few days and feel as if  I haven’t slept in a week. My eyes are heavy and I would just love to take to the bed but have had too many things to do. On Monday I attended hospital to have my six-monthly Pelvic MRI after undergoing Uterine Fibroid Embolisation in May of 2012.

My Cards for Monday were simple and straightforward:

The King of Swords was representing the Medical Staff who would be looking after me, Doctors, Nurses and MRI Technicians. The Two of Pentacles I believe was referring to my Reproductive System which was to be scanned to see how reduced in size the Fibroid was since the last MRI, along with an Ovary they were keeping an eye on because of an apparent blockage. The Hierophant stood for the Hospital itself, a Teaching Hospital where those with great experience and knowledge instructed and tutored their teams of interns and junior nurses. It represented an organised and established institution. My Cards were just acknowledging where I was going on Monday and why.

The particular MRI I had requires a dye contrast that is injected into one of my veins. I am not a hundred percent certain, but I have vague recollections of feeling awful for a few days after previous MRI’s, so it may be that the dye and me do not get on very well. Could it be why I was feeling so awful?

Then again, it could it be related to My Daily Cards on Tuesday which were.

Now what were these Cards trying to tell me? I could see immediately where they were coming from and maybe the Contrast Dye during my MRI had nothing to do with me feeling so terrible. Had I been pushing myself too much and was simply suffering from fatigue. The Reversed Knight of Wands told me that I had been rushing around non-stop and hadn’t taken a minute to rest over the weekend. All that cleaning I did, climbing up and down ladders, twisting my body at awkward angles to reach difficult to access corners so that they could be washed to within an inch of their life, banging my head off cupboard doors and bashing my legs off the sides of chairs and tables as I moved around the room. Then I was making sure to do my workout on top of all this; squats, lunges, planks, side-planks, hip bridges, push-ups. I did more than my program suggested because I wanted to push myself. Of course because it was the weekend, I also had late-nights and plenty of wine. The Reversed Knight of Wands could be suggesting that I had been burning the candle at both ends. When I had finished my scrubbing on Sunday I didn’t take a break either. Instead I turned up some curtains that have been eyeballing me for months and made table mats out of the cut-offs. I also let down a pair of curtains in my front room that were just that little bit annoyingly short. Oh did I mention that I barely ate over the whole weekend, but had felt quite fine. That is until Sunday night when I  began to feel shaky and weak. I thought it was just my arm muscles from all the push ups and scrubbing of walls. I still didn’t give up, and like The Nine of Wands had battled on determined to complete as many tasks as I could. The strain was showing though as all the aches and pains were beginning to set in. I  could feel my neck muscles strained and a tightness in my head and around my eyes.

However, I slept well that night and rose the next morning to prepare for my hospital visit still energised enough to clean the bathrooms and vacuum upstairs and downstairs before I left for the Hospital. My MRI took longer than anticipated due to the fact that the nurse could not get a decent vein for the line that was needed to inject the dye contrast. A doctor had to be called in and that involved waiting until she had time to fit me in. Meanwhile, I lay in the MRI Machine listening to awful Eighties Music on the headset provided. By the time my partner and I left the Hospital it was late in the afternoon. We hadn’t eaten since breakfast but had no time to grab something for we had to get to The Ikea Store before it closed. Up until Monday, we were both Ikea Virgins. We had never got around to going to this famous store even though we had talked about it often enough. We were not shopping for ourselves. Instead we had a list of items to purchase for my partner’s niece who lives too far from Ikea to go get them herself. They do not offer an online service.

We had no idea how large The Ikea Store was and thought we could just go to a counter, hand them our list, give them the delivery address and of course pay the bill. The Store was so large we couldn’t even find the Checkout Counters or Customer Service. We did find a lovely staff member though who informed us that we had to key in our item numbers onto a screen to check for availability. The screen would let us know if they were in stock and which department to find them in. He told us that we had to bring a large trolley with us and load our items onto it before bringing it to the check-out and from there onto the Home Delivery Counter. Now this would not have been a problem had it not been for the fact that one of the items was a Loft Bed and another a Desk. There were several other smaller items but these would be easy to deal with. Slightly unnerved, like newly arrived tourists in a foreign country, we headed off in search of a large trolley. It seemed we had to walk miles before we found where all the trolleys were before we could actually shop. The screen had given us Aisle and Location Numbers for the larger items and then the Department Locations for the smaller ones. Now we had to find where the Aisles were. Another few miles of a walk.

Eventually we found where we were looking for and the specific Location Number but almost crumpled when we saw the size of the boxes we had to lift onto the trolley. Bear in mind we still had not eaten and it was getting quite late at this stage. We struggled with the massive and extremely heavy boxes while the trolley did its best to run away from us every time we tried to load it. It was only then we realised that we should have located the smaller items first before heading for the large ones because now we had to steer our trolley with its wide load for another few miles until we had got everything we wanted. It was another few miles again to the checkout where we had to wait in a queue behind people who seemed to have hundreds of items in their trolleys. We were going to be there forever. The Ten of Wands was clearly depicting this marathon shopping expedition and us pushing the heavy load in front of us. Once we cleared the check-out we offloaded the trolley at Home Delivery and took only the small items back in the car with us.

It was dark by the time we got home. We still hadn’t eaten since breakfast unless you count the Nurofen tablet I had taken for a headache that had developed. We prepared dinner for ourselves and guess what I did? If the day had not been exhausting enough, I decided to do my workout while dinner was cooking. And guess what else? I did more exercises than my program specified. I was loading more and more Wands on my back and wearing myself out. I just kept going like the Wands do, even though my back was breaking from the strain of it all (The Ten of Wands).  So when I asked on Tuesday Morning what I needed to know for that day, my Cards were related to the previous few days in an attempt to explain to me why I might be feeling so knackered and awful. I guess they kind of explained things quite clearly to me.

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It has been very frustrating for me as I have lost two days of working on my site as a result of feeling dreadful and having to attend the Hospital. In fact I still feel dreadful, but today I will work regardless, and that is that. There is too much to be done and I have a schedule drawn up that I must stick to. When I lose days of work like this, I feel very out of sorts. My routine is broken and control is lost as I cannot keep on top of things. The Queen of Swords will be back any day now to check up on me after my last week’s Reading and I am not sure she will believe my migraine and yeucky-feeling story.

So bearing this in mind, I drew my Daily Cards today. Before I go into this Reading, I want to point out to you the relevance of doing Daily Card Readings for yourself as you will quickly see from this Reading and those above, how my Cards are mirroring my situation and the way I feel. These same Cards being drawn by someone else may carry a completely different message depending on their current circumstances, along with the fact that each Card carries several meanings and possible interpretations.

These Cards were My Cards and I knew instantly how they applied to me and which interpretation to use. So let us look at these Cards now. The Message is not complex or intricate, just straight forward and quite to the point. There was no profound message for me except an understanding of the nature of my personality and how it was affecting the way I felt and vice versa. I didn’t Reverse any of the Cards purely because I just couldn’t have been bothered this morning. That left me in a situation where I had to read between the lines when looking at the Cards. Was I to take their Upright or Reversed Aspects or even both?  

My Cards were:

The first Card that drew my attention was The Nine of Swords and it didn’t take much detective work on my part to decipher its message. It was depicting exactly how I have been feeling for the last few days. Headaches, exhaustion and feeling so very, very tired as if I haven’t slept in ages. The Two Preceding Cards clearly demonstrated how I should be spending my day or indeed the last few days. It had been my intention to be my normal Queen of Pentacles Self; industrious, hard-working, focusing on my goal (the Pentacle in her hand), and also getting out into the garden to do some major clean-up work after all the storms of recent months.

Since the beginning of the week, we have had a band of High Pressure come in over Ireland at long last. Therefore there has been little or no wind, bright sunny days, and dare I say it, at times even warm. Because it is still early Spring, this High Pressure brings cold frosty nights and early morning fog. The rising sun quickly burns away the fog and then creates a wonderful promise of warmer days ahead. Even the bird song is different. They sound more chirpy in themselves. Because of this much welcome and long overdue decent weather, my mind immediately turned to getting the garden sorted, the decking and pathways power-washed to remove all the green that had built up over the winter, and to begin any painting jobs so that I can enjoy my garden during the good weather and not have it look like a dirty bomb site. Alas, it was not to be and The Queen of Pentacles had to settle for staring out the window at my newly bloomed daffodils, for my head ached and I felt like someone had pulled the plug on me and drained all my energy while I had slept on Monday night. Today is Wednesday and it still hasn’t come back.

Just to backtrack a bit, I had spent my whole weekend as The Queen of Pentacles; washing down all my kitchen walls, cupboard tops and pulling out all the units so that I could hoover up dust and cobwebs. I had taken down a woollen wall hanging and carefully washed it in my bath,  thrilled to see all the colours come back to life again. With so much achieved over the weekend, I had planned from Tuesday morning (Monday was gone due to hospital), to get up very early so that I could get a couple of hours work done in the garden before I sat down to do my writing work. I had also planned to get out on my bike in the afternoon now that the gale force winds had abated. To find myself in such a useless situation on Tuesday Morning was soul-destroying (again The Nine of Swords).

The last time we had a really good spell of weather in Ireland was last summer. It lasted for several days with temperatures rising to record highs. While the good people of Ireland rejoiced and barbequed morning, noon, and night and children played excitedly with water cannons, and ran around our estate with barely any clothes on, I spent the whole time in bed, dying with the Flu. I had roaring high temperatures to match those outside, and my body felt like I had been hit by a truck. My eyes burned in my sockets. With outside temperatures of 50 degrees my Flu Remedies struggled to keep my temperature down so I was forced to soak towels in cold water and wrap them around my body in an effort to stop myself from self-combusting. To top it all, my partner was away and I was left to fend for myself. When he eventually arrived home he was shocked to see the state I was in and had to help lift me up so that I could sip the new Flu remedy he had picked up for me. I was as weak as a newborn kitten and could barely walk to the bathroom.

So The Queen of Pentacles had gone to bed on Monday night with great plans for the coming week, but woke to disaster. As she/I stood there trying to pull ourselves together it soon became clear that we hadn’t got a productive bone in our body. To say that we were frustrated at our lack of productivity is an understatement, and we struggled against it the whole day in an effort to turn things around, but it just wouldn’t happen. To wake again this morning in a similar state is just pure annoying at this stage. I have already lost Monday to the hospital and Tuesday to my hectic recent lifestyle catching up on me, but here  I am midweek, Wednesday, struggling to pull something out of the bag today so that this is not another wasted one. I still haven’t the energy for the garden but I am damned if I will go another day without getting some writing done.

With The Queen of Pentacles Card simply commiserating with me, she naturally led on to The Eight of Pentacles. This Card, another Pentacle, just amplified my situation and highlighted how I should be spending my day today; stuck into my work, giving it my all while multi-tasking at every available opportunity. It depicted me as I normally am and how I approach my work, simple as that. With The Nine of Swords coming in last, it was as if the two Preceding Pentacle Cards were pointing their fingers at it and saying out loud,  and accusingly enough for The Queen of Swords to hear, ‘look, this is how we normally are but we can’t get our work done because of that, don’t blame us for this is one of your own Suit, another Sword, causing us all this grief and draining our batteries’. Well it is true, I would have so much more done if that Nine of Swords would just give us a break and politely remove itself from our immediate proximity. Then I could settle back down to My Queen of Pentacles Self and get busy and productive once more. I need a bit of help from my Queen of Wands Side as she will help see off and out of town that dreadful Nine of Swords with its aching head and tired-as-hell feeling. I need my Fire back and I promise I won’t take it for granted again by overdoing it. I shall do my best to pace myself.

However, I have one final thing to say about my Reading and it comes back to the exacting high standards of The Queen of Pentacles and The Eight of Pentacles. Are they over-reacting and getting too stressed about losing a couple of days to feeling poorly? I am writing and it is Wednesday. I couldn’t have done any work on Monday because I was away at the Hospital most of the day and then Ikea. Therefore, I have only fully lost yesterday. The stress of being unproductive in that short space of time is adding to The Nine of Swords. I should let it go, for as awful as I feel, I am back at my desk and getting at least some work done! Mind you, it is still hard to convince myself of that. I sure hope I feel better tomorrow.

Spring Blessings,

Vivien (your Tarot Teacher)

Copyright © 2006-2014 Vivien Ní Dhuinn