spreads for falling in (and out) of love

hello, friends. my wife has been sick and i've been trying not to catch it, so it's been a busy week of caretaking and open windows and endless cups of tea over at our place. but i wrote you two tarot spreads for november, and i hope you find them supportive this month.

i've been writing about relationships so much lately — the relationships we have with people, with loved ones, with pets and places and values and beliefs and dreams, but also with our tarot cards. and while i know we all idealize things to various degrees, from wishing our relationships could just be easier to wishing our partners could just read our minds to wishing that our friends would show up more or whatever your current thing is, the reality is that relationships take effort, engagement, time, energy, and care.

not that we have to be perfect all the time, not that we always have to do everything right. but that good relationships are reciprocal, even if that doesn't mean 50-50 every single day.

your tarot cards are the same way. sometimes you might find it really easy to show up for a reading, to clarify your question, to interpret their answers. that's lovely! it's so great when that happens! and other times, you might sit down and stare at the deck for awhile, and struggle to find the right words for your question, and then pull cards and have no idea what they're trying to communicate, and get irritated, and put the deck away feeling more confused than you were before you started.

you're not a bad tarot reader for getting annoyed at your cards sometimes, or for not always knowing what they're trying to say — just like you're not automatically a bad partner if you forget to take the trash out sometimes (like i did this week) or a bad friend if you forget to get back to a friend after they called for your birthday (like i did this week). it's not ideal! i wish i'd done better! but it's fine, and it'll be okay, and it's just what happens sometimes.

consistency is nice but it's not the be-all, end-all of a tarot practice. clarity is great but it's not the only way to evaluate if a tarot reading is useful for not. certainty is valuable but it's not a mandatory quality in your tarot interpretations. your relationship with the cards is going to ebb and flow, all the time, and that's part of why it's a tarot practice.