I was dipping in and out of the Kitchen Table Tarot and chanced upon the Three of Swords. “Ugh, what a miserable card,” I thought.

Of course that was the one I drew the next day. And honestly, the Cosmic Tarot version of the card is so incredibly creepy that I’m not going to include it here. These other versions from a Google image search are disturbing enough …

The “good” news is that I knew I wanted to use this picture of three Spanish Daggers from our front porch in the Hill Country …

At least, that’s what we called them, although I’ve never actually pinned down which of the many varieties we actually had. They were beautifully dangerous, and I asked Don to dig them up before having a bunch of little ones over to our house for Easter several years ago.

The angle of the shot had me a bit worried, until I recalled a series of sunset pictures taken from the window of the car as we drove back home through Wimberley shortly before moving …

just a flip, a slight rotation and some cropping yielded a perfect match between the image I settled on and the picture of the daggers.

So today’s card/collage is an incredibly simple homage to the wisdom that “trouble comes in threes” …

Or, as the books opine …

78 Degrees: “sorrow … pain and heartbreak … a certain calm in the symmetry of the swords … to true sorrow we can only make one response – take the pain into our hearts, accept it and go beyond it … we must not push the pain away … take it deep inside until it becomes transformed by courage and love … an embracing of life”

Kitchen Table Tarot: “you can’t really soften this card … something broke … there was loss, pain, tragedy and heartache … a transition of the soul … take a deep breath and brace for uncontrollable change”

The Creative Tarot: “the swords have been there a long time … the injury is an old one … it’s all but become abstract to the person who is suffering … the question is what happens after that … do we use it as a source of strength or an excuse to be weak? … old hurts hold a kind of influence over us our entire lives …  examine your own cause and effect, and those of the people you love … it takes love and patience to deal properly with the Three of Swords”

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Okay, deep breath. Here’s a more positive bit of news.

I read in Austin Kleon’s weekly newsletter about a letterpress in Detroit. Not usually one to go in for online fundraisers, somehow this one called to me and I did indeed donate.  The Pile of Bricks has since met its goal (please note, the video promo makes me laugh out loud). And I am the happy recipient of a mini-poster by virtue of being a part of that effort …

Even the envelope it came in is way cool. But since the text on the poster is a bit hard to read, here’s another version from Instagram …

Here’s to wellness in our world, however we might get there. But likewise, let us never forget …