Queen of Cups

 When you look at the Queen of Cups, the woman entranced with the fantastical cup that she has created, it is a warning from the cards not too get too lost in your own thoughts, to make sure your fantasies match reality. 

 But that can sound a bit judgmental.  I found this amazing mosaic by Irina Charny,  (I just love her work!) and to me it just looked like the Queen of Cups.  Here the Queen is losing herself in her own music,  and that just felt to me like a much more loving way of viewing her.  

 I just have to edit this because I saw this beautiful Queen of Cups by Robert Scott - the artist whose deck I bought through Kickstart a while ago (he's yet to finish it,  but it's definitely going to be worth the wait!)

and this is what he writes about her:
"The Queen of Cups represents the role of water in the context of water; the emotional center of the court cards. She is kind, affectionate and comforting. She is perfectly accepting - receiving others without judgement of any kind, and stands for calm reflection and introspection. She is the queen of the still pond, the surface of which is a mirror. The Queen's own nature is hard to grasp, for when you gaze into her depths, you only see yourself."

Was he unfaithful?

One question I find the tarot can always accurately answer is ‘ is s/he having an affair’ 

However recently I did a reading where a woman asked,  ‘did he sleep with other people while we were together?’ and she drew 

King pentacles / 9 of swords / 6 cups R / 4 cups. 

She felt he could have been a good boyfriend/ but also felt huge anxiety/ she needed to see the situation very clearly, without rose tinted glasses or being overly romantic/ and she was getting lost in her own thoughts.

That is not a clear answer and I was puzzled.  Usually the cards are really specific around this question.

6 of cups

 

So I asked more about the relationship.  Turned out her big fear was that he would be pressured by his family to have an arranged marriage.

Now I can understand the cards. They indicate that he did not sleep with anyone else while they were together, but he was emotionally unfaithful; he did let his family introduce him to other women.  There was no sex, but he did think about marrying them…   

The second I said that she nodded vigorously, that made complete sense to her.

4 of cups

Those cards, they are so subtle...

Loving what we want to see

A friend and I were discussing the recent movie version of the Great Gastby,  and I said something like,  Gatsby's tragedy was that he didn't even know Daisy,  he never really saw her.   And it reminded me of this quote from Gone with the Wind...

 “I loved something I made up, something that’s just as dead as Melly is. I made a pretty suit of clothes and fell in love with it. And when Ashley came riding along, so handsome, so different, I put that suit on him and made him wear it whether it fitted him or not. And I wouldn’t see what he really was. I kept on loving the pretty clothes—and not him at all.”
Scarlett in Gone with the Wind

People come and tell me things like this all the time... it's so important to see the person as they truly are,  and not put your own suit on them...

Flirting with New York

Often people come to me, knowing that the old relationship is over, but still entangled with that person, and ask me if they should date other people.  The cards often tell them that they need a break, to give them time to adjust to their new situation - they draw the 4 swords or the hermit.   

But doing nothing is hard: you feel empty, you want some action to fill the void.  So I tell them to go and flirt with New York. This is an amazing city, but it’s also a tough one.  If we don’t take advantage of all the marvelous things that go on here, we are paying the price of living here – huge cost of living, crowds, lack of personal and psychic space – without taking the benefits.  

 

So I tell them go out with humans (as opposed to dating) old friends, new friends, potential friends, and flirt with New York. Find music, lectures, theatre, and museums.  It doesn’t have to be intellectual, go to new restaurants, comedy shows, and find the best Bloody Mary in the city or the perfect brunch place. Go play tennis,  cycle,  improve your one mile time.   Flirt with the city and that will help let the old feelings go and give space for new relationships to start.

Tarot of Quotes

That Pinterest - aside from me having a new rule of not visiting the site after midnight,  it has given me great pleasure.  There are such a range of Tarot images out there,  that explore and shade the meanings of the cards.
 

I have discovered some new tarot decks there that I hadn’t seen anywhere else.    Tarot of Quotes is from an English tarot card reader who is creating something really beautiful (it’s still a work in progress) I love that the internet lets me access all these amazing thoughts about tarot,  lets people put their own imagery up -  even if it's only one card,  one new image can just tweak your understanding and let it fall into place. 

After a reading we usually decide which cards were the most important and I recommend that you Google the image,  find a version of the card that speaks to you and then put it up in your office or on your computer, to let it keep guiding you.

Yelp and filtered reviews

I notice that I’ve had some harsher reviews on Yelp lately.  I don’t object to people voicing their heartfelt opinions, and you can never satisfy everyone, but I have real trouble with Yelp allowing those reviews in and filtering all the good reviews out.  I have 69 reviews filtered away.  If they put all the reviews,  good and bad,  I would be happy to see them all,  but filtering away the good and only leaving the bad?  Not so much! 

So every so often I like to pull one out and highlight it, to let you see some of the stuff that Yelp is hiding away.  If you want to read any filtered reviews you go to the bottom of my yelp page and click on the filtered review number, and then type in the code Yelp gives you, and they all come up.

This was written last year by a lovely woman I’ve now seen a few times:

She's so approachable and she's the real deal.
Liat cold read the cards for me and I was really astounded by the accuracy. I even used a pseudo name so that she could not research me prior to our appointment. We didn't speak at all... she started the conversation (which was pretty much one-way while she was reading!) Wow. That's all I could think... She was not vague at all. Details were spoken about that I didn't tell her (or ANYone).
I was not only impressed by her knowledge of the Tarot (yes, I know she *should* be), but her acute insight into the human psyche.
As an academic, I have studied psychology and am familiar with many "tricks of the trade" when it comes to psychic readers because I also studied the Tarot for a couple of years.
Why was I there? Because I have a lot of open issues that I just wanted some guidance on... You are not supposed to read your own cards, and I didn't want to talk to anyone who knew me, because I think their opinions are biased.
Plus, something about Liat completely made me at ease and open to the idea of a reading...I researched her reviews, too.  So I set up an appointment with a generic email address (so I couldn't be traced) and waited anxiously to meet with her.
If you have never been to a psychic before or you came to Yelp to check her reviews - you should just make the appointment and be the judge yourself.
I certainly was not disappointed with my reading and will see her again soon... after putting her advice and cards to the test, I feel as though I have more direction with issues that were once so bothersome.

Sunny K Lee,  Flower Vase and a Bird

 

 

It’s the friends you can call at 4 am that matter.

"It's the friends you can call at 4 am that matter..." 

It’s funny, because I’ve quoted that line from Marlene Dietrich before during readings. I’ve thought a lot about this saying and I have to say that I disagree.  Anyone who knows me can call with some emergency at 4 am:-  my next door neighbors can knock and say they have to go to hospital,  can I look after their son - and of course I would do it.  Any friend out and about and in danger and need in the wee small hours can call.  4 am implies some sort of emergency, some sort of crisis.

For me, it’s the friends you can call at 4 PM that matter – those you call when there is no emergency, no outward urgency, and you can tell them the difficult, ordinary truth of the moment.  The people you can call when you have that feeling of being boring, or frumpy or ugly or unloved and say, I hate myself today, and they remind you why they love you – they are the friends that matter!