By Sarah Taylor
No man is an island, they say. Yet you sit there
Alone.
Voluntary exile,
Blind to those there by your side — quiet, unquestioning,
Waiting
Until you see otherwise.
Two things happened when I was laying out the cards for today’s reading. First, there was a clear directive to position the first card that I drew — the Seven of Jades (Pentacles) — as the middle card.

This puts the protagonist in the Seven firmly in the centre of the reading, with the other two cards as events surrounding him. Had I placed the Seven at left — which is what I would typically do — then The Released Man (The Tower in the Rider-Waite Smith deck) would be the focal point. Here, it is not.
The Released Man will have an impact on the Seven of Jades, yes, but the message is a clear one: keep going, in spite of what may feel like the odds being stacked against you in an environment that is quicker to quash than to nurture. You have been conferred the responsibility for tending to what is bearing fruit in a part of your life.
The second thing that happened was that the two cards that accompany the 78-card Xultun Tarot (making it an 80-card deck) decided to do their own enactment of The Released Man, and fell off the table onto a chair and the floor. I wouldn’t have given it much thought if I didn’t know that the cards were created to represent the polarities of masculine and feminine energy — yang and yin — and are therefore symbolic of the fall of the man and woman from the Mayan Pyramid in The Released Man.
So we have two points of emphasis — first, the Seven of Jades, then The Released Man — followed by the comparatively low-key entrance of the third and final card, The Priest. The next thing is to listen to the narrative that all three are weaving for us.