CHARTED | Heather McCloud: Strength, Beauty, Whimsy, and Building an Empire by Hand

Heather McCloud is the owner of The Brass Hand, an independent home decor, plant art, and fragrance company, as well as Brass Earth, her in-house incense company.

Her work is deeply aesthetic, but not in a shallow way. It is beauty with roots. Beauty with values. Beauty with a nervous system. Beauty that says: your home can be a portal, your objects can hold meaning, and the things you make with your hands can become the foundation of an entire life.

Before we even got into Heather’s chart, she shared how much her life has changed over the last five or six years. She described leaving a long-term relationship, raising two young kids, working in corporate retail operations, bartending at night, and slowly having to ask the question:

Who am I when I am no longer surviving inside someone else’s life?

What emerged was curiosity. A willingness to try anything. To fail at anything. To make something. To build something. To follow beauty, art, curation, interior design, motherhood, friendship, and freedom until her life started to look like her own.

So when her Matrix of Destiny chart opened with Strength as her Inner Self, it made immediate sense…

Inner Self: Strength

Heather’s inner self is represented by Strength.

This is the energy of vitality, willpower, resilience, and an almost unreasonable amount of inner drive. Strength people are not designed for a passive life. They are built for movement, purpose, vision, and transformation.

They can often do what looks impossible to other people. Their 50% may look like someone else’s 100%.

But the lesson with Strength is learning that just because you can push through does not mean you always should. Heather immediately recognized this. She has lived the kind of life that required endurance. But now, instead of using her strength only to survive, she is using it to create.

She is building a business. Raising children who see their mother as an artist, not a cog in a machine. Creating incense with her hands. Speaking dreams out loud and watching them arrive.

That is very Strength. Not passive. Not accidental. Not small.

This is the energy of someone whose life responds when she decides she is allowed to want more.

Outer Self: The Lovers

Heather’s outer self is The Lovers.

This is how others perceive her: aesthetic, relational, magnetic, charming, and deeply attuned to beauty. Lovers energy cares about connection, environment, harmony, and the feeling a space creates.

Which is almost comically perfect for someone who owns The Brass Hand.

Heather’s work is not just about selling beautiful things. It is about creating a world people want to step into. A place that feels curated, intentional, warm, and alive.

The Lovers as an outer self also brings up the theme of perception. This energy does care how it is received. Not because it is fake, but because connection matters. Community matters. The mirror matters.

Heather shared that she has social anxiety and has been unpacking whether it is anxiety itself or a fear of being known. She loves gathering people, hosting people, building spaces for community: and she can also feel deeply depleted by being seen.

That is one of the great tensions of The Lovers:

The desire to connect, and the vulnerability of being visible.

The invitation is not to stop caring what people think. That advice is totally unrealistic anyway. The invitation is to care without letting perception become a cage.

Karmic Tail: The Empress, The Fool, and The Sun

Heather’s karmic tail is made up of The Empress, The Fool, and The Sun, a combination known as the Unborn Child.

This karmic pattern can point to themes around childhood, motherhood, inner child healing, rushing into adulthood too quickly, and learning how to reclaim wonder.

For Heather, this resonated.

She spoke about growing up in poverty, having to help care for her younger siblings, and not originally wanting children until she had them. Now, motherhood is one of the places where she consciously becomes what she needed when she was younger. She is raising readers. Artists. Free birds.

She also talked about whimsy and how freeing it has been to let life be less serious. To ask for every kind of potato at dinner. To let yourself want what you want. To live with the kind of curiosity that says, “Why not?” That is exactly the medicine of this karmic tail.

Heather is not just healing her inner child by thinking about the past. She is healing it through how she mothers, how she creates, how she plays, how she asks, and how she lets life become more magical than it used to be.

Money Energy: The Lovers, The Star, Wheel of Fortune, and Judgment

Heather’s financial line was fascinating because it echoed so many themes already present in her chart.

Her money lock is The Lovers, which means abundance can become blocked when perfectionism, comparison, fear of perception, or difficulty receiving take over. The Lovers asks her to stay in alignment without becoming trapped by the fear of how others may interpret her choices.

Her money line also includes The Star, which is a deeply creative and visibility-based energy. Money flows when Heather lets her artistry be seen. Her abundance is tied to beauty, storytelling, design, and the call of her soul.

In other words: hiding is expensive.

She also has Wheel of Fortune in her money line, which means her financial path may not always feel linear or predictable. It can come in waves, spikes, sudden opportunities, and surprising openings. This is not the energy of rigid micromanagement. It is the energy of momentum, gratitude, movement, intuition, and trust.

And finally, her money exit point is Judgment, which shows that money returns to her when she invests in lineage, family, legacy, education, community, land, home, traditions, and structures that can support future generations.

Heather immediately connected this to how she spends: investing in her children, her sister’s business, her family, travel with purpose, and things that build something lasting.

Purpose Line: The Lovers, Judgment, and The Emperor

Heather’s overall purpose energy is, once again, The Lovers.

Her sacred mission is to embody love; not just romantic love, but love as a way of being in the world. Love through beauty. Love through community. Love through values. Love through creating spaces where people feel more connected to themselves and their lives.

Before 40, Heather has been working through Judgment energy. This is the energy of ancestry, family, lineage, self-forgiveness, and integrating the past.

That tracks with so much of what she shared: coming from a difficult beginning, leaving survival mode, examining inherited patterns, and learning not to judge the earlier versions of herself who were doing their best.

But after 40, Heather moves into The Emperor.

And that is the empire card.

The Emperor is leadership, structure, stability, and impact. It is the builder. The protector. The one who creates systems that can hold something bigger.

For Heather, this does not feel like cold authority. It feels like feminine leadership with structure. The kind of leadership that wants her team to thrive. The kind that wants employees to be paid well, have security, and feel fulfilled. The kind that takes everything she learned from being mistreated in corporate spaces and says: I am going to build something different.

Heather is stepping into a phase where her work can become more than a business. It can become a structure of care, beauty, and abundance for the people connected to it.

The Thread of Heather’s Chart

Heather’s chart is full of beauty, but not delicate beauty.

It is beauty with backbone.

Strength gives her the stamina to build.
The Lovers gives her the eye, the heart, and the relational magic.
The Star asks her to be visible.
Wheel of Fortune reminds her that some doors open suddenly when she keeps moving.
Judgment asks her to heal the past and build legacy.
The Emperor shows that her next era is about leadership, structure, and empire.

The Brass Hand and Brass Earth are not random expressions of Heather’s creativity. They are deeply aligned with her chart.

She is here to make beauty tangible.
To build spaces people can feel.
To raise free children.
To reclaim whimsy.
To let her work be seen.
To receive the abundance that comes from years of becoming herself.

And maybe most importantly, she is here to prove that you can build an empire without becoming the machine that once tried to swallow you.