Forecast for July: Half Way Point

Today is July 1, 2025 — the midpoint of the calendar year.
It’s a good time to take stock, reassess, and refocus where necessary — especially in terms of where we’re directing our energy and resources. Are we tending to what matters most? As writer Annie Dillard observed about the potency of our daily routines: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

In a fitting synchronicity, the channeled reading for the month brought forward the Seven of Pentacles from the Rider-Waite deck. In tarot, the suit of Pentacles (or Disks) relates to the material world — our bodies, our resources, and our efforts (physical and otherwise) to bring things into being. The Seven of Pentacles is a card about pausing to assess our progress. In its imagery, a person leans on a hoe, gazing at a burgeoning crop. The emotional tone is neutral and contemplative.

Mid-Year Prompt:
Did you begin 2025 with a goal, a resolution, or a guiding word? Whatever it was — does it still resonate? Do you want to double down, make adjustments, or simply move on? Regardless, this is an excellent time to recognize our lives as the beautiful, messy, never-finished works-in-progress that they are. We all live in the sacred space between start and finish.

A Note on Tarot
The tarot, as we know it today, emerged in the first half of the 15th century, directly influenced by the invention of the printing press. Prior to that, hand-painted decks of paper cards were used by wealthy Europeans for games and possibly for divinatory purposes, but the printing press democratized the medium. The earliest surviving decks originated in Italy.

A tarot deck is made up of 78 cards:

• 22 Major Arcana (archetypal energies)
• 56 Minor Arcana (energies related to daily experience) across four suits:
  • Cups (emotions / water)
  • Pentacles (matter / earth)
  • Swords (mind / air)
  • Wands (spirit / fire)

Sound familiar? The four Minor Arcana suits are the precursors to those in modern playing card decks — hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs — but stripped of the potent oracular Major Arcana cards and the original symbolic meanings of the Minor Arcana cards. The tarot is essentially a visual, large language model for communicating with the subconscious. If the reading above doesn’t "land" for you — what is coming through?

The Rider-Waite tarot deck (first published in 1909) was illustrated by British artist and mystic, Pamela Colman Smith.