Step into your season of growth
Let's explore the seeds for growth that the tarot helps us plant and nurture...
Hi little coven. Please enjoy this following special excerpt from The Tarot Spreads Yearbook.
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My first book, The Tarot Spreads Yearbook, guides readers through four seasons of the soul, and includes a tarot spread for every week of the year. The book is designed so that readers can begin at any time of year, but it’s true that each of the four phases drew inspiration from the Earth’s seasonal rhythm, too. Spring is represented by the Season of Growth.
Here in the south of France, the trees around my apartment building have sprung back into lushness after a bare winter; on the morning walk, my dog Fletcher is getting lost in the tall, verdant grass that seems to have sprung up overnight while I duck to avoid bees seeking out nectar from fresh blooming flowers.
Growth and life are everywhere… so, of course, we find the theme in ourselves, and in the tarot too.
Read on for an excerpt from the Season of Growth chapter1 in The Tarot Spreads Yearbook, and for a peek at the first spread of the season.
Want to enrich your soul’s Season of Care through a community-based journaling experience? On 21st April, I’m hosting a FREE Growth-themed tarot journaling event. Drop-in journaling sessions throughout the rest of the spring season will follow.
Hit play to listen to me read the excerpt, or scroll on to read it for yourself:
Author L.M. Montgomery once wrote that while the body grows slowly, ‘the soul grows in leaps and bounds’.
But even our leaping and bounding souls need a little nurturing to facilitate that growth sometimes. And tarot provides the perfect fertile ground for growing your soul.
Take a minute now – in your head, or on paper – to reflect on the idea of growth as it relates to your life. Think back on the positive and negative experiences of growth you’ve had in your life so far. Explore moments in which you’ve felt inspired to pursue growth, and what prompted these pursuits. Consider how your personal values inform your approach to growth, and who in your life you consider a role model when it comes to growth.
Once you’re clear on what growth means to you, you might want to consider how that meaning will play out this season as you challenge yourself to grow. Here are a few questions you can reflect on around your personal growth to help you prepare and make the most of this season’s spreads:
How do I want to grow this season?
What’s a moment of growth from my past that I’m proud of ?
What are my biggest fears when it comes to growth?
Who are the people in my life who can support me while I grow?
Growth in the tarot
The quintessential tarot card for growth is the Empress – a card steeped in symbols of fertility. While the Empress is often associated with motherhood and femininity, in this season you can think of the card more broadly, as a facilitator for growth. Allow the Empress to represent a safe and loving environment that encourages you to pursue growth in the areas you want and need it most.
Think of this card as a lush garden where you can safely plant seeds for growth and change, and make the space and time to water them. Think about who in your life approaches their own growth like the Empress. How can you emulate and learn from them?
The Season of Growth also has strong links to the entire tarot suit of Pentacles (which may also be called Coins, Disks, or Wheels depending on your deck). The Pentacles are associated with the element of earth – from which life grows – and cards like the Seven of Pentacles and the Queen of Pentacles are directly related to facilitating and allowing time for growth.
In a number of illustrated versions of the Seven of Pentacles, we see a gardener paused in a moment of reflection as they survey their crop. I like to think that this card is a reminder that growth is not a race – that pause, reflection, and observation of your actions, your situation, and your attitude are crucial to keeping yourself nurtured and aligned to the path you set out to follow. The subtext of the card is this: You can’t know if something needs adjustment or additional care if you don’t take the time to look at it. And if you’re not giving care where it’s needed, your crop won’t grow; it will just wither.
The Queen of Pentacles prioritises time, too. In lots of ways, this Queen is a visual twin to the Empress – both cards in many decks are depicted as pregnant figures perched on thrones in the middle of a meadow or forest. But unlike the Empress, the Queen of Pentacles has a certain tension in their physicality. There’s a sense that this Queen is waiting for something.
While the Empress is fully relaxed, welcoming growth, how and as it comes, the Queen of Pentacles anticipates growth more intentionally, and considers the weight of their own investment in that growth. Both cards, ultimately, represent the idea that personal growth requires a fertile, nurturing atmosphere, but their approach to how to pursue that growth is in contrast.
In our lives, we sometimes may need to be more practical about our growth, like the Queen of Pentacles. At other times, we may need to take some space unapologetically and apply a come- what-may attitude, like the Empress.
Reminder
Growth is never really delegated to one season. If we look to nature, every season plays its own part in nurturing growth. Winter is a time of rest that makes room for spring’s fresh blooms, summer celebrates and basks in the lengthening of days, the fullness of the flowers. And autumn does the important work of shedding what’s no longer necessary and makes a fertilising mulch of dying leaves.
Take the opportunity this season to pay attention to how you grow, where you want to grow, and what kind of growth matters to you most, but don’t let your growth end when the season does. Trust that the seeds you plant through reflecting on these spreads will continue to rise and bloom throughout the year, so long as you continue to nurture them.
The Season of Growth Intentions Spread
When we want something to grow, we need to plant a seed. We need to water that seed, and we need to tend to it so that it can blossom into a strong flower and bear meaningful fruit. This spread is designed to help you plant those seeds for your growth, and to prepare yourself for the growth journey ahead.
To set intentions for the Season of Growth using this spread, shuffle your deck and lay three cards out before you, according to the following prompts:
How I intend to grow this season
A misbelief I intend to release while I grow
How I intend to nurture myself while I grow
Join me on 21st April to journal through this spread live, and have the chance to ask me questions about the cards you pulled, your Season of Growth journey, or other broader tarot topics. Click here to sign up.
Join the conversation in the comments:
What did this piece bring up for you? I’d love to know:
What does Growth mean to you?
How will you step into your own Season of Growth?
What tarot cards help you to nurture Growth?
Anything else you’d like to share?
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Thanks for reading x
This excerpt has been adapted, with some amends and cuts, from The Tarot Spreads Yearbook, published in April 2023. For the full reading experience, order a print or digital copy of the book here.