Hello and welcome to My Tiny Tarot Practice.

I'm Amelia Hruby and on this show I'm exploring the tarot card by card starting with the Minor Arcana.

This episode is an invitation to our fourth season of the show where I will

be exploring the suit of swords.

I started this this podcast almost two years ago now, exploring the suit of

wands in spring and summer of 2022,

then the suit of pentacles in the fall of 2022 into the winter early months of 2023.

In summer of 2023, we journeyed through the suit of cups together.

And now if you're joining me when this releases. It is early 2024.

We are just beginning Aquarius season, and we are going to explore the suit of swords together.

This podcast is a real labor of love of mine.

If you're just tuning in, you may not know that I actually run a podcast studio

called Softer Sounds, where I make podcasts for creators and small business

owners all across the United States all the time.

We produce many episodes a week. Those get heard by hundreds of thousands of people a year.

And this space here at My Tiny Tarot Practice is where I turn to for my own

and spiritual practice.

Here on this show, I arrive as my most open and novice self to tap in to each

of the cards of the tarot and to share my discoveries with you.

As I often say on this show, I am not a tarot expert or a tarot professional.

I do not offer readings for pay.

I do not sell tarot decks or cards.

Instead, I join you as a fellow tarot lover and tarot learner,

and we get to be here and learn together.

My interpretations of the cards are certainly informed by my background as a

feminist academic, as well as by my podcasting practice.

Between those two careers, I have learned to listen deeply, to keep my heart open and my mind sharp,

and to attend to the earthly embodied parts of our lives as much as I do to

the spiritual ethereal ones.

In that practice, I then bring together the four suits of tarot,

the wands, the pentacles, the cups, and now the swords to help guide me forward

in my own day-to-day life.

And if you're tuning in, I hope that you're able to find solace and support

in the episodes that you're listening to as well.

So in this fourth season of the show, we are exploring the suit of swords.

Swords is the suit of air, if we're thinking of the tarot elementally.

And it's often associated with the intellect.

This is the suit of our thoughts, of our words, of our writing,

of our talking, of our speaking. It's the suit of ideas.

And as such, I often think of the suit of swords as one of a sort of swift,

swift decisive energy swords are

quite literally cutting and we can be cutting with a literal sword we can be

cutting with our words we can be cutting with our thoughts we can be decisive

in how we think speak and act and i think the swords really invite us into that

quick-witted energy that we can carry into our lives.

When I was reading and preparing for this season, I turned to my favorite tarot

books, as I often do, and I was reading Jessica Doerr's Tarot for Change.

And in that book, she talks about how the suit of swords are inherently double-edged

because a sword has two edges.

And in our contemporary society, Rachel Pollack talks about this as well in

and 78 degrees of wisdom, in our society, our thoughts are often really lauded,

like rationalism is seen as the utmost value.

We have to be logical above all else.

And there is value in that, but there are also other ways that we can know and be in the world.

And so with swords, we have the edge of that sharp logic, but we also have the

double-edgedness of the fact that our intellect is not the only way to know things.

And so with the swords, we're invited to uncover the places where we need to

embrace our intellect or where perhaps we need to put it down and learn and know in other ways.

Rachel Pollack reminds us that each suit has its supportive elements and its challenging elements.

And when we're faced with those challenging elements, we're not intended to

just put that suit down, to just step away from swords altogether,

but instead to bring the supportive elements of the other cards together with that suit.

So when the intellect of the swords is too sharp, we can bring the flow,

the fluidity, the gentleness of the cups of our emotions.

We can think with our mind and feel with our heart.

We can also bring the steady stableness of the pentacles of the earth and the

fiery devotion of the wands.

And so really, as we explore this fourth season of the show,

as we step into the swords,

after having journeyed through the other suits, I'm imagining we'll begin to

make more and more connections between the cards,

find more and more ways where they can alchemically come together and support

each other and be read together,

interpreted together in these episodes.

The last thing I want to share about swords and the suit of swords and the element

of air before I close this preview episode is that I always try to remember

that even though the swords have this sort of sharp cutting quality of air,

air can also be incredibly gentle.

Air can be everything from the sweet caress of a spring breeze to the all-encompassing

power of the tornado that destroys everything in its path.

And so air brings all of that together.

And in the suit of swords, we can find both that sweet, gentle breeze and that all-powerful tornado.

Those qualities are the spectrum along which we'll journey in this suit and

we'll uncover cover different relationships to air, to intellect,

to decision-making, to thoughts, to words, to speech in that process.

Thank you so much for tuning into this episode, for joining me for another season

of My Tiny Tarot Practice.

If this is your first time listening, I'd love to let you know that I do curate

a bookshop of my favorite tarot books and decks.

You can find the link to that in the show notes. And if you make a purchase

through that link, you will get yourself a wonderful new supportive spiritual resource.

And I will receive a small affiliate payment that helps me keep this show going.

So head to the show notes, head to the bookshop.

I've added a bunch of new things there in the six months since I have not released an episode.

So there's a lot of really fantastic, supportive and new books and decks for you to explore.

Once again, thank you so much for being here. I'm Amelia Fruby.

You're listening to My Tiny Tarot Practice.

I look forward to exploring the swords together.