The Moon is a complicated card. Very often it shows up in readings to represent a state of depression or melancholy, or just a sense of confusion: often we don’t know *how* to feel when we’re in Moon energy, but something feels off. The beautiful book ‘Meditations on the Tarot’ calls the Moon an “emotional retrograde”, and I can personally attest to that. We can find ourselves revisited by old longings in the Moon, and often old behaviors that we thought we’d overcome. A feeling of listlessness can sometimes descend on us here; I liken it to the Swamp of Sadness from the movie ‘The NeverEnding Story’, where Atreyu and his horse, Artax have to trudge through this foggy, gloomy swamp that threatens them with despair: if they give in to those feelings, they will be sucked into the mud and drown. So it’s tricky energy, the Moon. On the one hand, we can find treasures here. The ‘emotional retrograde’ can return precious jewels from our past, and we can rediscover parts of ourselves that we didn’t even know we’d been missing. On the other hand, we can fall into old patterns that keep us from progressing on our journey. It can be a simple statement from the Tarot that we don’t text our ex, for example, or a suggestion that we dive into dreamwork and excavations of the subconscious. There is a lot to be found in the Moon, and it is always worth a closer look. AND YET, we should not attach firmly to what we find here. That is the key to traversing both the Swamp of Sadness and the Moon. We examine things without identifying with them, here. The Moon, of course, moves in phases. Things are ever changing. And whatever is reflected for us in the Moon will also change, like tides going in and out, carving strange languages in the shifting sands of our hearts.