The last card is the Star, which is an energy of hope, especially after a difficult period. It’s the energy of early spring, which is when the first flowers start to break through the melting snow and frozen earth. In this image, this woman is surrounded by chaos but calm, at one with it. One of the students in the class pointed out the bird holding a flower resting on her hand, which calls to mind the myth of Noah’s Ark. After God flooded the earth, everything was gone but Noah’s family and his menagerie of animals, floating in an ark on an ocean of nothing for over a year. Noah sent out a raven who didn’t come back, then a dove, then another, until one finally came back with an olive branch, indicating that their long wandering was finally coming to an end.

I’m having one of those weeks that I know many of you have had (or are having right now), where, due to no choice of my own, I’m hanging out in the Upside Down. It’s not my first time here, and I know by now that struggling and fighting it isn’t going to get me out of the tree any faster. I know I have to surrender to it. To breathe through my feelings. To trust that I won’t be stuck here forever. Even if I really don’t want to do any of that.

When the Moon tarot card comes up (especially in the Dreamkeeper’s deck, above), I am also called to ask about grief. For me, this image is about waiting, about being in that twilight place in a long embrace with the past. What losses have I not fully processed? If I allow myself to change in the ways that I really want to, in the ways that I am really excited about, what will I have to let go of?

Of course, it can be helpful to have some familiarity with the cards, especially the major arcana and the underlying meaning of the suits and the numbers, and there is plenty of information out there on these meanings. But no particular card explanation will be as important as how you feel when you select a card from the deck and take some time to contemplate it.

I first learned about the term process-focused or process-oriented Tarot reading from Jessica Dore, a Tarot reader and teacher whose first book, Tarot for Change, just hit the shelves. Her approach is so much more intuitive than I had often seen when I was trying to leaf through guidebooks and memorize the meaning of each card. She offers Tarot the way I had already been reading it: by observing the images of each card and noticing what comes up.