Your first reading: one card, every day

You have now met all seventy-eight cards, at least in outline. The quickest way to turn that outline into something you really know isn't more reading about the cards. It's drawing one, every day, and paying attention to what happens.

Nearly every teacher recommends this, and most beginners skip it because it looks too simple to matter. It matters a great deal.

How to do it

There's no special ritual. Here is a plain version, close to the one Joan Bunning teaches:

1. Take a quiet moment and let your mind settle.
2. Shuffle, and ask for whatever you most need to notice today.
3. Cut the deck and turn over the top card. That's your card of the day.
4. Look at it for a minute before you look anything up. What do you see? How does it make you feel?
5. Put it back, shuffle once or twice, and get on with your day.

Morning works well, because you carry the card with you through everything that follows. Evening works too. What matters is doing it often enough that it becomes part of your routine. If every day is too much, Kim Huggens suggests a card a week instead. A slower habit you keep beats a daily one you drop.

Some readers draw three cards each morning rather than one. That can come later. For now, one card lets you meet each card on its own and see it at work in your life.

Watch it play out

The point is not to predict your day. The point is to notice how the card turns up in it.

Say you draw the Four of Cups: a young man sits under a tree, arms folded, ignoring a cup offered to him from a cloud.

By lunchtime you may notice you've turned down two invitations without really thinking about them. Or a friend tells you they're bored with everything. Or nothing obvious happens at all, and that's fine too. You're not checking whether the card "came true". You're building a link between a picture and something you lived, and those links are what make a card mean something to you rather than to a book.

Courtney Weber suggests a lovely variation. Draw one card and hold it up against things that have already happened: the last meal you ate, the last disagreement you had, the week just gone. She drew the High Priestess, and found it in an evening when she had calmly sent an overbearing organiser out of a room to look after a bride who was upset. As she puts it, the exercise isn't about getting it right. It's about letting the card show you more of itself.

The journal

The draw is half the practice. Writing it down is the other half.

Use a notebook, a file, or whatever you'll actually keep up. A beautiful notebook you're afraid to write in is worse than a cheap one. Each day, note:

• The date and the card.
• Your first impression, before you looked anything up: what caught your eye, how it felt.
• A line or two that evening about the day itself: a mood, an event, a conversation.

Keep it short. Long entries start to feel like homework, and then you stop.

Over a few weeks the journal starts to show you things a single day can't. Some cards keep coming back. A suit goes missing for a month. Bunning once counted her daily cards from a period when she was at home with two small children. Pentacles and Majors far outnumbered Wands, which fitted her life at the time: busy with practical things and big forces, with little room for her own creative projects. You don't need to count, but you'll notice patterns, and they're often worth a moment's thought.

The journal is also where your own meanings grow. A card that baffled you becomes familiar, because you've seen what it looked like on an ordinary Tuesday. Many readers find their own notes end up more useful than any book.

When a card looks hard

Sooner or later you'll draw a card that looks like bad news, such as the Ten of Swords or the Tower. Remember what it's doing here. It isn't a forecast for your day. It's a picture to hold beside your day and compare. A hard card on a calm day often points to something small: a worry you've been carrying quietly, or a habit that's ready to end. Those cards can teach you the most, because you have to look for where they fit.

What to take from this

• One card, most days. Draw it, look before you look it up, put it back.
• Watch, don't predict. Notice where the card turns up in your day.
• Write it down, briefly. The journal turns single days into patterns, and patterns into meanings of your own.

You don't need a physical deck for any of this. In the app you can lay out your own spread on the web or on your phone: shuffle, cut and place the cards yourself. A single card counts as a spread. Saving it costs nothing, and there's room beside it for your own interpretation, which makes a ready-made journal.

Next, what a spread is, and how the place a card lands gives it a job to do.