The Deck Resets — And Strength Walks In First

There’s something almost ceremonial about resetting a tarot deck.

You gather every card back together — the wild ones, the tender ones, the ones that made you sit quietly for a long while — and you return them all to the beginning. The order is restored. The slate is clean. And then, when you’re ready, you pull the very first card of the new cycle.

That first pull after a reset carries its own particular weight. It isn’t just a daily draw. It feels more like an opening statement — the deck announcing its intention for what comes next, or perhaps reflecting something back at you about where you're standing right now.

I reset my Wild Unknown Tarot recently, shuffled with intention, and drew the first card of the new cycle.

Strength.

🦁 The Card

In the Wild Unknown, Strength isn’t depicted the way you might expect. There’s no crowned figure gently taming a lion in a sunlit meadow. This deck strips everything back to its raw, symbolic essence — and in Kim Krans’ interpretation, Strength is often rendered as the meeting of two forces: the wild and the inner. The animal energy. The fire that lives beneath the surface.

The card doesn’t ask whether you have strength. It assumes you do. What it’s interested in is the relationship you have with it.

Can you hold power without needing to unleash it? Can you be fierce and still? Can the force inside you become something you work with rather than something that works through you when your guard is down?

🔄 A First Pull After a Reset

There’s no coincidence in a first pull. I’ve been doing this long enough to trust that.

Resetting a deck is an act of completion and recommitment. You’re saying: I'm here. I’m listening. What do we begin with?

And the deck answered: Strength.

Not the Tower. Not the Fool’s fresh naivety. Not the World in its culmination. Strength — which sits at card VIII (or XI, depending on the tradition), right in that middle space of the Major Arcana where things get earned rather than given.

That placement always interests me. Strength doesn’t come early, when everything is potential. It comes after you’ve already moved through some things. After you’ve learned something about yourself that you maybe didn’t expect. It’s the card of integration — taking what is wild and what is disciplined and finding the place where they can coexist.

🌿 What I’m Taking From This

Pulling Strength as my first card of a new cycle feels less like a message and more like a mirror. It’s not predicting anything dramatic. It’s not warning me of some test ahead (though maybe it is, gently).

More than anything, it feels like the deck is saying: You know what you're made of now. Use it well.

There’s a quietness to Strength that gets overlooked. People see the word and think of force, of pushing through, of gritting teeth. But the deeper invitation of this card is almost the opposite — it’s about the strength that comes from not forcing. From moving with clarity and presence rather than with urgency and will.

That feels right for this new chapter with the deck. Less grasping. More knowing.