Everything is a Story — flora | stella

Make a Tarot Deck With Me :: Volume 1

In the Beginning

The aces in the tarot hold the first space in each suit of the minor arcana. They represent the number one, the beginning, the gift offered, the opportunity to step onto the path, or not. They are the thing that comes into your field of attention and doesn’t let go, popping up wherever it can—folded into a paragraph of your current novel, sliding past in your feed, in a chatty conversation with the checker at the grocery store, even as a punchline in your kids’ favorite TV show—and when you finally pick up what the universe keeps dropping in front of you, it leads you somewhere you had never imagined for yourself.

That is how I came to the tarot, in a true Aces moment all the fiction I was consuming within a short time period ended up including tarot as a central theme. In The Death of Mrs. Westaway, Ruth Ware weaves her main characters’ skill with the cards so skillfully into the mystery I found myself abandoning all prior skepticism before ever having picked up a deck. In the very next books I picked up after Mrs. Westaway, Maggie Steifvater’s The Raven Cycle series’ tarot references are subtler and more sparsely dispersed making it all the more intriguing. And while Cyndi Lauper’s character Avalon in the television series Bones doesn’t quite use the cards the way I have come to, she is able to use the accuracy of her predictions to convince Booth and Brennan to follow her leads and advice—movingly similar to my experience with the accuracy and usefulness of the cards in my own life. With all these invitations knocking at my door, I picked up a Modern Witch Tarot deck and Jessa Crispin’s guidebook The Creative Tarot and (many, many decks and books later, let’s be honest) have been on this road for more than six years now. What a gift.

In 1986, (the year I began, in fact) Mary Oliver published a poem in her collection Dream Work that positively sings of beginning, with all four aces clearly present in its fecund and burgeoning lines. I’ve pulled my headings for this essay from among them (my apologies to the poet for not being able to keep her original line breaks), so read it, savor it, please, and then—let’s begin.

Blossom

In April

the ponds

open

like black blossoms,

the moon

swims in every one;

there’s fire

everywhere: frogs shouting

their desire,

their satisfaction. What

we know: that time

chops at us all like an iron

hoe, that death

is a state of paralysis. What

we long for: joy

before death, nights

in the swale—everything else

can wait but not

this thrust

from the root

of the body. What

we know: we are more

than blood—we are more

than our hunger and yet

we belong

to the moon and when the ponds

open, when the burning

begins the most

thoughtful among us dreams

of hurrying down

into the black petals,

into the fire,

into the night where time lies shattered,

into the body of another.

Mary Oliver1

From the Root

The aces are often referred to as the seed of their suit and the root of their element. But the place from where all the nutrients are pulled up into the many branches, the foundation that keeps each one anchored to their ecosystem, can’t grow and will never even exist if something doesn’t nurture the seed. The crux of the Ace is that one must reach out and take the gift. If we do, what will sprout? What pale roots will dig down and find everything the gift needs to grow? What bright green will poke up through the dark earth of our dreams and become something?

The Ponds Open

The Ace of Cups : The moon swims in every one

Tarot of the Witch’s Garden | Amber Tarot | Florana Tarot | Daria Ermolova :: Source: Comparative Tarot

Cups represent the element of water. Characterized by relationship, intuition, emotion, connection, devotion, and flow, they are the eternal wellspring. The depths of each of us bubble up with the One energy of the Ace of Cups, meeting the surface with a flush of feeling to quench our thirst. So how do we reach up and accept the overflowing cup that is being offered to us? Meg Jones Wall, in their essential tarot guide Finding the Fool, describes the Ace of Cups moment as one of vulnerability, of opening our hearts and laying them bare to be filled with the offering spilling over from the source.

“This is the moment when we decide to view the world through a lens of hope, to be ready for the full spectrum of love and emotion.” ²

Meg Jones Wall

My cups suit will be depicted in water gardens, vernal ponds, bayous, bogs, and fountains. Because the ubiquitous water lily or lotus is both deeply symbolic for its muddy, underwater root systems and its intricately glorious blossoms that signify purity3 and rebirth, I have chosen to use a cousin with some of the same symbolism for the illustration on my Ace of Cups card.

Spatterdock, also called Cow Lily or Yellow Pond Lily is native in many parts of the world, identifiable by its cheery yellow flowers along slow stream beds and covering other calm waterways here in the U.S. My parents took us several times to the Uintah mountains to camp and fish near a small lake that was completely covered in cow lily, and I was giddily enamored with the riotous covering of the thin cleft pads dotted prolifically with golden blooms. It was always my first request when the topic of where to camp each summer came up in the early spring. I spent many weekends happily catching and releasing tadpoles, frogs, and minnows on the edge of what we always called Lily Lake (though I am sure it had more official names somewhere). I most recently spotted yellow pond lily in the warm geothermal spring-fed rivers of Yellowstone National Park earlier this summer, where steam rises off the water in the cool morning air and the yellow flower globes bob in the shallows.

The spatterdock is differentiated from most other lotus or water lily varieties by its globe-shaped blossoms that never seem to completely open, leaving them always with an energy of new beginning that the full, voluptuous lotus and water lily varieties can’t quite achieve in their extravagance. While I won’t promise that true lotus or water lily won’t appear in other cups cards or even in major arcana cards, for the ace this tantalizing perpetuity of being on the cusp of opening is key.

There’s Fire Everywhere

The Ace of Wands : What we long for: joy

Forager’s Daughter Tarot | Jessie Durham: Tetrad Tarot | Timothy Von Rueden | Robin Sheldon: Risograph Tarot :: Source: Comparative Tarot

The wands suit is fire, the heat that moves the steam engine. Lindsay Mack spoke the most resonant phrase into existence for me in this suit, naming it the pilot light. This is the place where our creativity, passion, and motivation flare, and while in my experience the fuel that keeps this flame burning can come from any element, this is the one that turns that fuel into something worth living for. Eros lives here, and yearning, the things we want, even the things we can’t have.

This ace is the hunger, the heat that gets you out of bed or off the couch to hunt for something more. It is the feeling that, as I read in today’s issue of the New York Times’The Morning,4 “Something better, something more fulfilling, could be within reach if you are willing to chase it.”5

The late Rachel Pollack speaks of the Ace of Wands as a manifestation of the love of life6, and in Radical Tarot, one of the most transformative tarot guides I’ve yet encountered, Charlie Clare Burgess enlarges the idea.

“The Ace of Wands can also represent a time of high energy, motivation, creativity, or sex drive, urging us to get out there and live our lives to the fullest…it encourages us to reconnect with our reasons for doing what we’re doing in the first place.”⁷

Charlie Claire Burgess

My deck is representing wands through the symbolism of the orchard, a place where abundant fruit grows from living wands, shafts of wood that pulse with sugar, sunlight, and the buzz of pollinators carrying the stuff of life between the open blossoms to begin the swelling that leads to a juicy and irreverent harvest. The apple holds pride of place in my Ace of Wands, beginning the year of the wands in the autumn, after the last of the last fruit has been picked and the fallen branches are ready to burn. The stripped and leaf-bare trees stand ready for winter, that beginning time when the spark in the hearth keeps us warm and we make plans for the following spring (a little hint for the Two of Wands coming up!).
In her gorgeous and thorough *Enchanted Plants*, Varla A. Ventura says of the apple: “Under the domain of Venus…apples are often used in love potions…the blossoms of apples have an enchanting fragrance and are common ingredients in herbal baths and concoctions to bring love into your life.”8 Folklore and myth are rife with mentions of apples as the ultimate symbol of quest, desire, and delight. Even the story of Adam and Eve uses an apple to begin the saga of humanity and our eternal struggle with wanting. What better place to begin the story of wanting in the tarot, as well? What do we need to do to reach out and pull the apple from its branch, to bite into its most rosy, inviting cheek until the juice runs to our elbows and the love of life can no longer be denied?

Source: The Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Most Thoughtful Among Us

Ace of Swords : What we know: we are more than blood—we are more than our hunger

Tarot of the Witch’s Garden | Timothy Von Rueden | SENSE Tarot | Ukrainian Night Tarot :: Source: Comparative Tarot

Ah, swords. The minor suit I pull for myself more than any other, and the one many people hate to see pop up. Many of the swords images drawn by Pamela Coleman Smith make people squirm. The potential for violence is heavy: a slip of the hand and you haven’t just cut the cord binding your ankles, you’ve lost a foot. Oops.

This duality of both purpose and result is symbolic of the swords’ element, air, which represents thought, intellect, words, communication, philosophy, and rationality. We need these characteristics and tools to make good decisions, but if we don’t balance them with the other elements available to us, we end up blindfolded and stuck, or worse, skewered to the ground with an excessive number of blades. It’s the proverbial double-edged sword, waiting for us in the confines of our own minds.

The Ace of Swords is one of the few in the suit that no one cringes to see, and with good reason. This is the harbinger of new ideas, clarity of thought, and confidence in your intellect. It’s the swoop of sudden curiosity, an intriguing question you can’t shake until you’re up at 2am in the living room falling down a research rabbit hole, the beginning of your novel arriving in the space between dreams and waking (you know, the ones you can barely read off your notepad in the morning after writing them in the dark). The Ace of Swords is new information, truth revealed, a sudden shift in the way you see the world that points you in a clear direction, honing your focus on a new goal, or better yet, refining an old one that had stagnated. Sometimes, this truth can hurt, it can turn your life upside down, it’s that dual-edged nature of the swords again, you often cannot have one without the other.

“Truth is perhaps the most powerful thing of all, and how we wield it makes all the difference.”⁹

Charlie Claire Burgess

My swords are set in desert gardens. I live in the Mojave desert and I can’t imagine a better place for this dry, crystal clear suit to thrive. Many of the swords cards in Pamela Coleman Smith’s tarot illustrations are also set in the desert, though not the scorching kind seen in her wands suit. Perhaps it is more akin to the Mojave in winter: wind-blasted and barren, with little vegetation other than ancient trees leaning into the gale and scrubby grass underfoot. The flora that grow here and in other arid regions of the world often carry their own built-in swords—long spines, hooked barbs, and protective thorns to keep all but the most famished animals at bay long enough to allow the plants to reproduce.
I’ve chosen the prickly pear cactus for my depiction of the Ace of Swords mainly for its incredible propagative rooting ability. This amazing plant can grow new roots from the broken end of a dropped paddle, in mid-desert-air (the kind that holds no humidity whatsoever), and then reach those new fingers toward the life hidden beneath the sun-baked soil, becoming an entirely new plant. It fully deserves the honor of representing the Root of Air. Its luscious golden goblet of a blossom also offers an ideal stand-in as the crown of wisdom shown on many Ace of Swords cards, the pinnacle of intelligence and the birthplace of the fruit that sustains so many lives.

Source: Biodiversity Heritage Library

When this card shows up for us, what can we do with the new information we hold in our hands? How can we be sure to balance it with what is already true in our lives, hold it with caution and kindness, offer ourselves and others grace while we adjust to this new way of seeing the world? How can we attempt to feed this new idea without allowing it to sever us from other parts of our lives, people who love us, work that requires our presence, interests that allow us to rest and play? How can we utilize the edge that serves us while remaining safe from the side that might cause harm?

This Thrust From the Root of the Body

Ace of Pentacles : Time chops at us all like an iron hoe

Sinaglala Tarot | Tarot of the Witch’s Garden | Forager’s Daughter Tarot | Timothy Von Rueden :: Source: Comparative Tarot

The pentacles, after the violent potential of the swords, feel like coming home to a warm dinner and clean sheets. And that is precisely what this suit embodies—all the daily needful things that we give and take from our bodies, homes, the land beneath us and the work we devote our lives to. It’s money (the suit is often called the coins instead of the pentacles) and food and the pounding of the concrete beneath your running shoes. Pentacles are the tomato sandwich with flaky salt, the stretch in your hamstrings along the length of a yoga mat, the scent of lilacs on a morning walk.

When we are gifted a new beginning here, it’s laundry day. The white shirts flap merrily on the line, breeze-freshened and ready for another week. We might be ready for a new job or project, a new paint color in the kitchen, or a freshly dug garden plot. It might be time to start that dance class or make a new recipe. The possibilities are endless, because, as Annie Dillard said of living in the present through the sacred mundane, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”10

There is nothing the other suits may ask us to do that is not supported by our relationship with the pentacles.

The Ace of Pentacles is a seed that if planted and tended with sustaining care will grow into the fruit of our lives. Time is coming for all of us, and what we each do (to quote Mary Oliver again) with our one, wild and precious life is what we are doing with it in this very moment, and what we will do with it in the next and the next until the iron hoe wins at last.

“Think of the Ace of Coins as an anchor. Think of it as the pen hitting the paper, the brush stroking the canvas…

The Coins card is subtle, because it is the beginning of making something…something that takes time and delicacy… It turns dreams to reality. If you’re waiting for divine inspiration you might wait forever. Start the work and see what happens.”¹¹

Jessa Crispin

My pentacles suit will be growing in the kitchen garden. Herbs and veggies, berries and blooms, perhaps the occasional stray laying hen. This is the place where sustenance is sourced, it feeds the human that makes the other suits possible. In the example cards above you can see a hedge wall and the traditional arched gate signifying that this is the beginning not only of material pursuits, but of all pursuits. The wall delineates the border between the safe, supportive haven and the adventures and horizons beyond the wall that are possible because of the home-base we create in our own bodies and spaces.The gate is the portal between them. This wall feels important to me, encompassing a soft place to land so that I am empowered to step out into the world, and it will be in the background of my Ace of Pentacles as well. The foreground will be occupied by seed packets illustrated in the vintage style and depicting peas (family, fertility, and abundance), lavender (peace, serenity and emotional protection), and the pentacle itself, the seed for growing a life.

Source: Biodiversity Heritage Library

Everything Else Can Wait

And yet we belong to the moon

Thank you for joining me on this walk through the Aces. The next post in Make a Tarot Deck With Me! will be my artistic process for drawing, adding color, and finalizing the Ace cards, along with an Aces Tarot spread. I have had my own Aces moment this summer, inviting me to devote my time here for the time being and see where it leads, and I adore this swept-up feeling, like everything else can wait. I am sure things will cycle, my availability to this project is greater than before but I am still a parent, spouse, sister, daughter, friend, and I am leaning on my Taurus Moon for grace through the waxing and waning of this creative process.

Please comment below any thoughts and share your Aces moments, the way you read them for yourself and others, and anything else.

If you have a friend who might enjoy following along as I create my Year in the Garden Tarot deck, please share this post with them! A subscribe, re-stack, like, or follow means the world.

Slow by nature and leaving a shining trail in my wake,

Jessica

1 Mary Oliver; Dream Work (Atlantic Monthly Press: 1986)

2 Meg Jones Wall; Finding the Fool: A Tarot Journey to Radical Transformation (Weiser Books: 2023) p. 187-188

3 When I use the term “pure” I mean it in the sense that something is in its most basic form, full of potential, “complete, sheer, or absolute. Being exactly that and nothing else.” rather than any of the word’s unfortunately twisted and damaging definitions i.e. purity culture, religious or sexual purity, etc.

4 While I don’t love all the actions of this publication, I have yet to find a more succinct daily wrap-up newsletter that keeps me quickly informed without burying me in despair. If you know of one, please share! I do also subscribe to the Guardian’s US Headlines round-up.

5 Rick Rojas, “The Pursuit is the Point” The New York Times: The Morning; July 3, 2026

6 Rachel Pollack; 78 Degrees of Wisdom (Weiser Books, 2020) p. 182

7 Charlie Claire Burgess; Radical Tarot: Queer the Cards, Liberate Your Practice, and Create the Future (Hay House: 2023) p. 170

8 Varla A. Ventura; Enchanted Plants: A Treasury of Botanical Folklore and Magic (New Page Books: 2025) p. 5

9 Burgess; Radical Tarot; p. 190

10 Annie Dillard; The Writing Life (Harper Perennial: 1990) {Emphasis mine}

11 Jessa Crispin; The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life (Atria: 2016) p. 109-110

Plant, Spark, Open, & See with the Aces