Cardinal air: harmony, nourishment, artists

I’m thinking about art about artmaking. My own process is in disarray at the moment, and I am finding solace and guidance in the work of other artists grappling with these questions.

Mutable earth: roses, funerary plants, secrets.

The sweetness of Venus, with the fast movement of Mercury, speeds up the border between ripeness and rot, and between freshness and decay.

Mutable earth: Homecoming, mortality, transition

This card feels like a hopeful and homely card to pull - it gives a sense of things being in their rightful place - but the ten gives a sense of the next transition to be to something else, another stage of life. For some of us, that transition is into the realm beyond life, and the spectre of death haunts this card and decan.

Mutable earth: reality blur, possession, bodies.

The film unspools like a dream. The actors slip in and out of character. It isn’t always clear which parts of their histories belong to them, and which to the characters they’re playing. Artifice and performance are made visible but also blurred.

Mutable earth: blackberries, ripeness and rot, thresholds, brambles, boundaries.

Virgo II is about late summer slipping into autumn. Melancholy and heavy ripeness. Delicious fruits that mark the end of the harvest.

Mutable earth: mint, clarity, lamplight, ancient traditions

This atmosphere is guided by Mercurial movement, freshness, and clarity. It is the clarity and coolness of mint tea on your tongue.

Mutable earth: the craft, inner circle, art

But the film is also about the daily grind of showing up. Showing up to your job when you want to work on your art. Showing up for your art when you’re exhausted from your job.

Mutable earth: tiny cauldron, communal rituals, the unexpected

Water in three vessels – a cauldron, a glass, and a jug, hit at regular intervals with water poured between them to change the pitch of the notes and traffic as a background carpet of sound.

Mutable earth: locked room mysteries, the sacred and the earthly

I don’t know about you but I love stories set in haunted houses because they offer a closed set, a liminal zone for transformation to occur, and mysteries to be explored but not necessarily resolved. And because they remind me of dreaming.

Mutable earth: protection, spaciousness, sacred boundaries

The card in this deck offers so much comfort through that connection, modelling a form of self-knowledge that is formed through consultation of existing traditions, nurtured through understanding our place in a lineage, and strengthened through community.

Mutable earth: late summer, sexuality, harvest

Her serenity is apparent, the bird sitting peacefully on her head, the armful of produce, her calm view of the field, and a gentle hand on the pentacles, as though she isn’t too attached to them, doesn’t need to control them. There is plenty, she seems to tell us, there will be enough.