20/05/2026
A client came to me asking whether she should give her relationship a definitive ending. They had already broken up, but she still needed some reassurance…
As she spoke, I shuffled the cards, and one suddenly fell from the deck. It was the Nine of Pentacles.
In the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, the card depicts a woman in luxurious robes adorned with Venus-like floral symbols, standing alone in a vast garden surrounded by vines. Even before continuing, its appearance felt significant, so I placed it on the table and asked her to pull three more cards: the Nine of Swords, the Ten of Pentacles reversed, and the Page of Wands.
Without analyzing the imagery yet, just looking at the numerology — IX, X, X — the process of closure already felt inevitable. Something was clearly reaching its end.
She said she felt like the figure in the Ten of Swords: exhausted, defeated, unable to carry the weight of it all.
So I asked her: “What still remains unresolved?”
Because the Ten of Swords alongside the reversed Ten of Pentacles gave me the feeling that something was still suspended in limbo.
“We still have to separate our things. He has some of my furniture, and I still have some of his stored away.”
That density is present in the Pentacles suit — objects, space, logistics, time. The slow process of disentangling a shared life.
The Nine and Ten of Pentacles repeat the imagery of the vineyard, as if what was once cultivated together continues to exist as material residue—something still waiting to be sorted and returned.
Then came the Page of Wands, like a breath of fresh air. A need to shed old layers and begin again.
The landscape becomes almost desert-like. A moment to relearn what excites you, and experiment again.
We also talked about a small detail in the Nine of Pentacles: the snail.
Pamela Colman Smith included it as a reference to Shakespeare’s *As You Like It*, where Rosalind says she would rather marry a snail than a man—because at least a snail carries its own house with it. The client laughed.
Sometimes the cards are painfully direct and sometimes, that’s what we need 🙂↔️
Better alone than badly accompanied.
