How one tarot card can answer so many questions

In the process of writing a tarot deck review I always read at least the introduction and the opening chapters of the accompanying book. If that’s not your thing I would suggest you give it a try. But, that’s not what this post is about. Rather it’s about a little exercise that was suggested in the “Tarot Basics” chapter of The Steampunk Tarot by Barbara Moore and Aly Fell.

The instruction is to pick a card and use that one card to answer the following questions.

1. What is my greatest strength? (or a strength)
2. What is my biggest weakness? (or a weakness)
3. What is my current challenge?
4. What will help me?
5. What do I love?
6. What do I fear?
7. What do I need to release?
8. What should I do today?
9. What should I buy ____________ for their birthday?
10. When will I ________________ [fill in the blank with something you want to accomplish]

This is a great journaling exercise because:

1. It helps you to understand an individual tarot card better.
2. It helps you to develop and strengthen the ability to see an image in different ways
3. It’s a great creativity primer.
4. It shows you the potential that is contained within a single tarot card.
5. It opens you up to thinking in different ways.

The card I drew to answer those questions was the Four of Swords pictured below.

Here are my answers.

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1. My greatest strength is my patience and my willingness to take the time needed to understand things.
2. My biggest weakness is that I can be unmotivated when it comes to day to day chores.
3. My current challenge is finding ways to balance all the demands on my time.
4. Listening to the messages that come through to me will help me.
5. I love unravelling how things come together and how seemingly disparate things can, and I believe do, belong together.
6. I fear that I may become overwhelmed by all that I want to do and that things that are important to me could come to an end because I don’t find ways to dedicate enough time to them.
7. I need to release ideas and thoughts that I hold on to even though I know they no longer serve me.
8. Today I am on my third day of a headache so I probably should take it easy and rest up a bit.
9. Looking at this card made me think I should buy my grandson, who has the next family birthday, something with moving parts that he can put together.
10. Based on this card, I feel I will have transformed how I approach my work towards the end of the third month. This happens to be next month. I took that timing from how much sand has gone through the hourglass and the four swords. The fact that one is lying down made me think it won’t be the beginning of the month like I had hoped. It also made me think I had three more things to consider but that isn’t relevant to the question.

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I honestly found this a fantastic exercise and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to understand how cards can mean different things depending upon where they show up in a spread. I also think answering a series of questions using only one card is a great way to get to know individual cards.