HEDGEHOG

Keywords: Prickly Tenderness, Mother Hunger, Transmuted Pain, Found Nourishment, Garden of Self. Emblem of resilience, misunderstood nourishment, and the rebirth of love from the soil of longing. Individuation.

Hedgehog is covered  with flowers on its party prickers. It shows that flowers do not only love people but prickly beings just as well. The hedgehog has sought long for the milk of the mother and sometimes sucked on the straws of a broomstick, thinking it were the nipples of its mommy. He thought he aways pulled the 'shortest straw' or held onto everything as the 'last straw'. Placing a cup with milk in the garden for hedgehogs is deadly, where water is okay.

The hedgehog has wandered through many gardens before. While he walked the earth, its prickers punctured many balloons of illusion and he considered his hedgehog form therefore not as 'party prickers'. He had to part often from old settings for seeing through illusions was not always welcomed as a gift. He also punctured the clouds during his journey where rain of tears fell upon him. Yet, he started to realize, that when clouds were heavy and dark, the puncturing gave release to them and made the earth fertile. The flowers on the card, celebrate him. For his rebellion with the prickers came from love, for the sake of individuation.

Upright: This card speaks of wounding that shaped the heart—the pain of seeking maternal love in barren places, of mistaking the broom's bristle for the breast. "Milk," symbolic of care, became poison. Yet the hedgehog lives. And more than that, it gathers beauty on its thorns, proof that love flows toward the wounded too. Upright, this card asks: Where have you looked for love that hurt instead of healed? And how can you now receive what is true, even if it arrives in forms you didn't expect?

Reversed: When reversed, THE HEDGEHOG withdraws into itself. The flowers fall. The old ache threatens to define the self entirely. You may still be suckling the broom, reenacting the absence rather than seeing the garden that now surrounds you. Reversed, this is a call to gently uncurl—to test again the world, to notice that water, not milk, is now being offered. You are not still in that old garden. You are here. And the here holds what the past could not give.