I wonder if there is a more-feared card in the Tarot deck? Yet Death is, in many ways, a hopeful and refreshing influence if only we will let it be. It is the major card for change and alteration in the entire deck. Since life itself changes constantly, in order to harmonise ourselves more completely with it, we too must be in a state of constant change - working toward our goals, attempting to fulfil our dreams and developing the quality of our spiritual understanding.

When Death comes up as Card of the Day, the first question we need to ask ourselves is - what is it that needs to be changed or finished up? What situations have been lingering on well past their sell-by date? What should we have dealt with before, that this day challenges us to face and finish?

Imagine, for a moment, that your life is a plot of land. If it is completely overgrown, covered with unwanted and untended undergrowth, you cannot plant something beautiful and fruitful in it can you?

The Death card requires that we spend a bit of dedicated time cutting away the undergrowth, and clearing the debris so that our lives are clear and open, ready for fresh planting.

Sometimes a Death card day won't be one in which we need to do, so much as one in which we need to think. Most peoples' lives are very busy indeed these days. So busy, in fact, that we often tend to put off thinking about the difficult or demanding issues in our lives. Yet often it is exactly this type of issue that causes emotional and mental deadwood to accumulate, if we allow it.

If life is created by what we think, what we expect and how we feel about things, our deepest emotional urges, our wildest dreams, our highest ideals require a great deal of thinking about, don't they? If not, we stagnate, never creating new channels through which to direct our energies, never determining when a habitual action has run its course, never assessing what is useful, and what is not.

So, sometimes, a Death card day needs to be a day in which you re-evaluate the general patterns of your daily existence, and re-appraise your goals. You'll know if it's that kind of day by measuring how dissatisfied you currently feel. If you are largely happy and comfortable, then the Death card day is one for clearing the decks in a physical sense.