Daily Draw - Five of Rings, Princess of Rings, Strength

I was hoping the Strength card from this deck would show up sometime this week and say hello, in all its' 80s velvet painting glory.  I can just hear the musical strains in the background, "Just a small town girl..."  I am going to love unicorns forever and ever, I think.

Rings in this deck correspond to Pentacles, and as you can see there are two of them in this reading, the Five and the Princess, who would be a Knight, or at least the second youngest member of the court.  Except she is not a Knight, she is a Princess, and completely herself.

The blue skinned faery in the Five of rings has foolishly lingered too long at a Samhain celebration, and the doors to the Otherworld have closed, leaving her lonely in the first snow flurries.  She does not know how to care for herself, she is naked, and she has no resources, or so she thinks.  This card expresses all my deepest anxieties- being foolish, losing my home, being cut off from the people I love, feeling unable to care for myself.  The Princess of Rings is almost the complete opposite- she has used her resources so wisely she even has excess time to make beautiful things, like her wreath of posies.  This is the potential outcome for the first fae; she can pull herself up by her bootstraps and get by, even thrive, or she can lay down and die in the cold.

Strength isn't a card we get to promise some knight in shining armor arriving imminently, whether on just a white horse or a unicorn, but a card we get to remind ourselves that it is all up to us.  There is a rescue possible, but when we see Strength we are going to be the architect of it.  The promise of this set of cards is that we can travel, from even the most fearful place, to one of glory and beauty.  All Knights are hard working fellows, but the Princess of Rings does her work on the spiritual plane, so I know her advice is very practical, it is in all things that I can actually do, and not just in the way I think or feel.  So much of my inner work is emotional and spiritual, but she is pointing the way to actual actions I can take, and the message is coming through loud and clear.





These cards are from Twilight Realm: A Tarot of Faery by Beth Wilder for Schiffer Books.