Today's
TarotReading

Strength carries the energy of the sacred first-gentle-lioness-keeper — the woman who can calm a wild force with an open hand. She is the eighth card of the Major Arcana, and of all the trumps she offers the most surprising picture of power: not a warrior, not a king, but a barefoot woman in a white robe, her hand resting on a lion’s jaw.

Strength does not, faithfully, mean dominance or endurance through gritted teeth. The card belongs to Leo, the sign of the lion, and its teaching is that our fiercest energies — anger, desire, courage, pride — are not enemies to be beaten. They are companions to be befriended. Her strength is patience made visible.

Today the sky gives her a full meadow. Mars and Jupiter are both in Leo, the card’s own sign. It is Tuesday, Mars’s day. And the Moon moves through Scorpio, Mars’s deep-water house. Fire and depth meet, and the lioness-keeper stands between them, calm.

A woman in a white robe stands barefoot in a green meadow. Her waist is belted with a garland of flowers, and a sprig of lavender is woven into it. Above her head floats the sign of infinity. One hand rests gently on the lion’s brow; the other cups its jaw. The great beast is calm, its tail curled, its eyes soft. A blue mountain rises in the distance under a golden sky.

The white robe is purity of intention: she wants nothing from the lion but peace. The garland of flowers links her to the earth and to gentleness. The infinity sign is the endless renewal of patience — strength that does not run out because it is not forced. The lion is not defeated. It has chosen to trust her.

Strength on Mars’s own Tuesday asks the sovereign feminine one small tender question: which of my wild energies am I ready to befriend?

Not to cage. Not to unleash without care. To befriend — to approach slowly, to rest a hand on it, to let it know it is safe with you.

The doubled fire of Mars and Jupiter in Leo can make this a hot day — impatience, ambition, or anger may rise quickly. The card does not ask you to cool them down. It asks you to stay gentle while you feel them.

And because this is only the third morning of a new cycle, the reflection is an invitation to set a tone: this cycle, my strength will be steady rather than strained.

Power, softly held, is not weakness. She is the sovereign feminine with her hand on the lion’s brow, calm because she is not afraid of the fire she carries.

I stand, softly, as Strength stands — barefoot and steady, my hand gentle on my own fierce heart, unafraid of the fire because I know it is mine.

1. What is your “lion” right now — the strong energy in you that most needs a gentle hand?
2. When have you calmed something difficult through patience rather than force?
3. Where do you tend to grit your teeth and endure, when a softer kind of strength might serve you better?
4. What fear could you look in the face this week, knowing that strength grows from the looking?

Eleanor Roosevelt — born in New York City in 1884, who lost both parents before she was ten and grew up a shy, solemn child; who became the longest-serving First Lady of the United States, transforming the role into one of public advocacy; who after her husband’s death chaired the United Nations commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948; and who died in 1962 at seventy-eight — wrote these words in You Learn by Living (1960), a small book of hard-won lessons published near the end of her life.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. The line continues in her book with the advice to do the thing you think you cannot do. Roosevelt did not describe herself as naturally brave; she described herself as someone who had been afraid of almost everything and learned, one encounter at a time, that fear could be faced. Strength, in her telling, is not a trait you are born with. It is a practice.

Today’s Strength lives in Roosevelt’s words directly. The lioness-keeper did not become strong and then approach the lion; she approached the lion and became strong. Every fear faced gently is one more garland of flowers around her waist.

“Hold On” — Wilson Phillips (from Wilson Phillips, 1990)

Wilson Phillips — the trio of Carnie and Wendy Wilson and Chynna Phillips, daughters of two of the great harmony families of 1960s California pop — released “Hold On” in 1990 as the first single from their debut album. They wrote it with producer Glen Ballard, and it rose to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 that summer, becoming one of the defining songs of the year.

Today’s Strength moves gently in this song. It is not a battle cry but a steadying hand — an encouragement to stay with yourself through a hard stretch, to change what needs changing, and to trust that you can endure. Three voices in close harmony make it sound like friends holding you up, which is exactly the patient strength of the lioness-keeper.