tarot – Oxbow

Choosing a tarot deck for yourself.

It is easy to see why people hesitate about buying their first tarot deck or adding another deck to their collection. It’s hard to predict before using it whether or not a particular tarot deck will work for you in the long-term. This is normal because tarot is a tool. If I am a carpenter, it will probably take me some trial and error to find the brand and style of hammer that works best for me. As I become more skilled, I begin to understand the features I like best in a hammer and make different buying decisions. The same goes for tarot. If you are hesitating about buying any decks because you’re afraid of buying one you don’t end up liking, let me assure you right now: you are going to buy at least one deck you don’t like. Don’t let it hold you back.

Unfortunately, with the floor starting at $20USD, tarot isn’t a very cheap hobby. Even if you’re not a deck collector, a collection of 8 or 10 decks could still set you back a few hundred dollars. Here are my main tips for choosing a tarot deck that is more likely to click with you and less likely to waste your money. (Although you should also just accept some wasted money as part of the process.)

Understand how important it is to you that you do—or don’t—see yourself in a deck.

One of the best things about the tarot renaissance of the last 5 or 6 years is that we are seeing a lot more diverse representation of people depicted in decks. Although it might have been the case that in prior centuries, readers saw the people in decks as symbols and not actual human beings, we are now in a world where people want to see people who look like themselves in the tarot. It’s still a small corner of the market, but the number of decks that feature diversity of race, gender expression, size, age, ability, etc. has grown a lot. If you know that seeing yourself in your decks is important to you, it will make the pool of available decks more focused.

On the other hand, some people do not want to see human beings of any kind represented in decks for various reasons. There are also lots of decks out there that do not feature humans or humanoid creatures. Knowing this about yourself will narrow down your search considerably.

Just because you’d hang it on your wall does not mean it works well as a tarot deck—and vice versa.

This was the biggest lesson for me to learn: art that looks beautiful doesn’t necessarily do well when it comes to divination. When we are reading cards, we need a few things from them:

that they’re immediately recognizable and distinguishable from other cards,
that they engage in some sort of symbolic language,
And that the imagery can be easily seen and understood without needing to hold the card right up to your face.

The (somewhat) exception to this are cards that are deliberately abstract so as to pull messages from your subconscious, rather than speak in a symbolic language.

There’s a lot of great art out there that would function terribly in tarot decks. Likewise, I have decks in my collection that are extremely powerful for divination but have art that I’d never hang on my wall. In tarot decks, I have learned to choose clarity and power over beauty. That being said, if a deck is so ugly to you that you feel repulsed when looking at it, then take that as a very good sign to not buy it!

Figure out what your deal-breaker cards are and try to see the whole deck if possible before buying.

You may not know it, but you probably have some deal-breaker cards. That is, cards that gauge how closely a deck creator’s understanding of the tarot aligns with yours. If the deck looks great overall, but they messed up this particular card, will that impede your ability to use the deck? Deal breaker cards are often cards that we closely identify with, or cards whose interpretation we feel strongly about. My deal breaker cards are often the High Priestess, the Queen of Cups, Death, Temperance, the Three of Swords or the Ten of Swords. If I am looking at a deck that interprets these cards in a way that I dislike or disagree with, I just won’t get the deck. Figuring out deal-breaker cards takes time. Sometimes you need to see someone really eff up the Ten of Swords or Strength before you understand it’s a deal-breaker card for you.

Knowing your deal-breaker cards is only half the battle, though, because sometimes it’s difficult to see all of the cards before you buy. The ideal scenario is if a friend owns the deck and you can flip through their copy and get their opinion on it. Some metaphysical shops will have demo decks so you can handle and flip through a deck before buying. In the world of online retail, more indie deck creators are understanding that providing low-res images of all 78 cards makes people more willing to buy the deck. In other cases, readers and collectors do deck flip-through videos to show all the cards one by one. If you have a rare or ultra-new deck yourself, consider doing a flip-through video as a public service! And if you want to take a gamble on spending money…in order to not spend more money… buying a tarot app is a good way to see all of the cards in a deck and read the guidebook before you decide to invest in a hard copy.

Be prepared for some trial and error, and have an exit strategy for your decks.

Even if you do your best research beforehand, decks will surprise you. One deck may click with you while another turns up answers that don’t make any sense. Sometimes, a deck will sit on your shelf for years until one day the readings start to be meaningful. Other times, you’ll find that you have outgrown a deck that worked for you right out of the box a couple of years before. Unfortunately, none of this correlates with how much money a deck cost or how much you wanted it before you bought it.

If you have been cherishing the fantasy of the One True Deck that you can use in every context forever, know that it might take years and a lot of money to find that deck. (Also, as a polyamorous person, I’m just gonna say—it’s a lot of pressure to put on one deck to serve all of your needs. Needing multiple decks is OK!) As you grow as a person and a tarot reader, you may find that what you need in a tarot deck changes. Being flexible and willing to swap out your decks over the years means you’ll have a collection that’s in tune with you as a person.

If you do want to sell, I have found that it’s pretty easy to re-home unwanted decks. If you already have an online store for something else, just put your used decks up there. You can sell over social media or on tarot forums to people you trust. People are also often willing to swap a deck of theirs for one you don’t want. There have been a few decks that have been hard for me to sell or swap, but you can likely find a willing person in the right place. Giving a used deck as a gift to a friend or a stranger is also a good strategy to send a deck on the next stage of its journey.

Before you open the flood gates, a note on tarot deck shopping addiction: it is real and it can damage your finances. This isn’t unique to tarot; you can wreck yourself financially over shoes, enamel pins, board games, or anything else that doesn’t seem expensive yet adds up very quickly. If you find yourself obsessing over decks and buying one every time you get a little spare cash, you’ll probably want to get a clear picture of how much you’re spending on your deck habit. Don’t try to justify deck buying as a need. Even as a professional reader, there’s no way that I can justify the 25 or so tarot and oracle decks that I have! It’s ok to be truthful with yourself and want something just because you want it.

For the first couple of years I read tarot, I spent a lot of money on decks. I even wrote a post about it. The good news is that I eventually did get over it. If you are struggling with wanting to buy decks, sit down and create a document or spreadsheet of all your deck purchases and their costs (including tax and shipping!) to see how much you’re spending. I have seen people give themselves an allowance for decks in their budget, or allow themselves to buy a certain number a year, or have a policy that they can only buy a new one if they sell one first. A big part of curbing my deck spending was getting off of social media so that I wasn’t flooded with pictures of people buying shiny new decks all the time. Finding a strategy that keeps deck buying in the healthy range also means that you can have a relationship with tarot that isn’t tinged by guilt.

Anti-Supremacist Statement

All discussions of tarot on this blog are specifically anti-supremacist. As a person of European descent, I reject the narrative that tarot is a purely European phenomenon or that it should be used only by “white” people. I understand that some of my ancestors, specifically those from places like Alsace and the Rhenish Palatinate, may have used these decks for game play and I am interested in what the imagery of those decks has to say about the world in which my ancestors lived. But I reject any claim that tarot is only authentic to those descended from Europeans, or that tarot decks need to feature Europeans to be legitimate.

The four-suited card deck was not invented by Europeans. It was co-created over several centuries by people across East and Central Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa before arriving in Europe in the 1300s. The specific contribution of Europeans is the 22-card trionfi, or trumps, now often known as the Major Arcana. In discussions of historical and present-day tarots, there is no room for Euro-centric purism. As a card game and as a tool of divination, tarot is by the people and of the people; it continues to change and be enriched as it encounters new cultures. And that is as it should be.

Those of us who are of European descent have to be vigilant to make sure that our culture is not mis-appropriated by those who would distort our history and our sacred tools in order to build white supremacist and white nationalist narratives. That is why from March 2021 going forward, discussions of historical tarot decks, like Tarot de Marseille and the Visconti-Sforza deck, will link to this statement.

Uncomfortable Curiosity: The Page of Cups

Once during a weekend trip, my partner, his other partner, and I decided to play a board game. My partner’s partner is a board game enthusiast and they had a brand new indie game still wrapped in plastic. It was so beautiful and intriguing that even though I am entirely unfamiliar with that kind of game, I wanted to give it a try.

As we removed the pieces from their wrappers and set up the board on the dining room table, we realized just how complex this game was going to be. This was on an afternoon in early winter. It took an hour and a half to set up the board and read through the rules, and during that time the sun had gone down. Both my partner and his partner had played this general type of game before, so even though the game was complicated, they could at least see the overall structure. I, on the other hand, had nothing. It was difficult for me to understand what the game’s objectives were and what basic gameplay even looked like (each player’s turn had at least 5 separate steps.) As the sun went down and I sat there at that dining room table listening to the rules, I began to get angry, and then very, very sad. Without warning, I was fighting back tears and I had no idea why. As we were about to begin the game, I apologized, said I was tired, and laid down in another room to cry.

Why on Earth was I so upset about a board game? I was bewildered by why I felt so bad (I mean, I was sobbing) but I knew that I didn’t want to repress the feelings or blame them on someone else. I just allowed myself to be with myself as I went through it.

After a while, a thought struck me: this wasn’t about the board game. This was about something from my past. Almost immediately, an image came to my mind of myself as a child sitting at the dining room table on darkening early winter evenings, despairing of ever understanding my math homework. Feelings of worthlessness and frustration about math were a constant companion in childhood and my teenage years, but I almost never think about them anymore. However, getting lost in byzantine board game rules felt similar enough to those childhood scenes to trigger feelings from years before. I realized that I had never healed from this part of my childhood, I had just forgotten about it. But my body hadn’t forgotten.

Every instance in which we are triggered is an opportunity to work with the Page of Cups. While some may think that triggers only happen in the context of PTSD, my definition of trigger is any time our body-mind reacts to an event in the present as if it were something that happened in the past. In my case, my adult self was listening to the rules of a complex board game, but my body-mind reacted as if I were a child unable to understand her math homework and unable to get the help she needed. This is a non-intellectual, instantaneous response that involves the whole nervous system. The work, then, is trying to bring the trigger into conscious thought so we can heal the patterns that keep our nervous system stuck in painful loops.

The Page of Cups in the Smith-Waite deck looks kindly at the little fish that popped out of their cup—which can symbolize emotional or psychological material arising from the unconscious. The Page of Cups is not less developed than the Knight, Queen, and King of Cups, but they embody curiosity and willingness to learn from unexpected thoughts and feelings. Willingness to learn is one of the qualities that distinguish the four Pages from the other court cards.

While The Moon might symbolize material from the unconscious erupting into everyday life, the Page of Cups is about our relationship with that material. If the Page appears in reverse or is close to several Fire cards in the spread (suit of Wands or certain Major Arcana cards), it might suggest that we’re unwilling or not ready to work with that material right now. But in any case, the appearance of the Page of Cups means that we’ve found a piece of the puzzle.

Once I recognized that I had been triggered, I was able to take care of myself. I allowed myself to fully feel the feelings and cry as much as I needed, I told my partner what was going on and asked for support, I was able to understand what kind of food and sex I was craving. And after a few hours, my nervous system was able to relax. I think about what might have happened if I had not been curious about my feelings. I would have gone away from the experience thinking that I was really just that upset about a board game. Or maybe I would have taken it out on my partner or his partner. Or maybe I would have just concluded that I am crazy or broken. Instead, I allowed a deeply buried wound to disclose itself and gave that wound much needed care.

Summoning Page of Cups energy isn’t something that comes naturally to most of us, by the way. Often, we’re taught to repress and be ashamed of our feelings from a very young age. It took me years of therapy and meditation and self-help books to instinctually turn toward my feelings in that moment. Now that I know the energy embedded in this card, I can consciously call upon the Page of Cups whenever I am triggered and don’t know why.

Pricing Tarot Readings

I want to talk here about why I have priced my tarot readings at their current rates because transparency is important to me. Pricing services can be such a fraught thing. I remember a few years ago when I did some freelance tutoring, I AGONIZED over what to charge. A similar challenge faced me as I decided to go into business reading tarot. This time around, though, I was able to mostly set aside doubts about my own worth and price my services based on the math: my financial needs, how much time I spend on my business overall (not just doing readings), and what I am willing to be paid on an hourly basis. The result is that my rates may seem a little pricey, but I also know deep down that they are fair. My prices are based on a few guiding principles:

1. It is OK to have financial needs and ask to get them met. It’s OK to price my services according to my needs.

2. I have reached a point in my life where I will not work for less than I think I’m worth. I am asking what I think my time and skills are worth now and slowly building a client base, rather than underselling myself now and raising prices later.

3. The practice of tithing (h/t Sarah Faith Gottesdiene r) is important to me. Asking for what my time and skills are worth is important because I am going to pay a substantial portion of my profits toward reparations. The more money I bring in, the more I can give away.

4. Accessibility is important to me, which means that I will always have sliding scale or another instrument of financial accessibility built into my pricing. Currently there are four tiers on my sliding scale and a long list of goods and services that I am willing to barter for.

5. I am worth a lot. I have four years’ experience reading tarot, but also a PhD in English (interpretation of symbolism; communication skills), 6+ years’ experience as a meditator engaging in formal spiritual practice, and a wealth of life and relationship experience. I am not the Font of Wisdom, but I have learned a thing or two, and continue learning.

But how did I come to the actual number I charge—in this case, $75 for a single reading? I’ll break it down here.

Each of my readings involves drawing the cards, making a recording of myself doing the reading, writing a document with journal prompts and symbols to consider based on the reading, taking a picture of the cards, uploading all of these files, and emailing them to the client. All in all, it takes me over an hour, so I am essentially charging a dollar a minute. Unlike a lot of other readers, I do not charge different rates for online and in-person readings. I believe that my clients get the same amount of value from both, even though they are different experiences.

One thing to consider about this dollar-a-minute rate, though, is that for every one minute I am spending actually doing tarot readings, I am spending at least 2 minutes working on other aspects of my business—social media posts, answering emails, bookkeeping, blog posts, etc. When you take that into account, I am actually charging $0.33 a minute, or roughly $20 an hour. (While these activities are not part of the tarot reading itself, I would not be able to run my business as a tarot reader without them.)

But that doesn’t mean I am making $20 an hour. I hold a quarter of that aside for taxes and overhead. I may need increase or decrease that amount after my first year, but we’ll see. Then, I take a third of what’s left over and give that away as reparations to black and indigenous people in the U.S. The rest is what goes in my pocket.

In terms of ACTUAL CASH, every time I receive $75 for a tarot reading, I set aside $18.75 for taxes and business expenses, I give $18.75 away, and keep $37.50. In terms of RATE, I am earning about $10/hr for my work to give readings and maintain my business. These are numbers that I feel comfortable with. $75 for a reading my feel a bit steep—even cheeky!—for a tarot reader who I just entering the scene to charge. But I feel that it is at the intersection of the value my services bring to others and the value I place on my own time and work.

I want to be clear that this is not a judgment on anyone else’s pricing. Everyone’s reality looks different and everyone’s needs are different. Because I have the stability of a day job, I can afford to charge higher prices in the beginning and build a client base slowly. Some people may need to build a client base as quickly as possible, while others just do readings for fun and some coffee money. Privilege comes into the equation, too, which is again why I want to make more money to give more away.

My goal is not to make six figures. Really, my pie in the sky goal would be to bring in US$1,000 every month with tarot. At this point, I am not even sure that I have the time or energy to do $1,000 worth of readings a month, but it’s my stretch goal. At this level, all of my household expenses would be covered and I would no longer have to pull money from savings, plus I would be able to give away over $300 each month. If I actually reach that $1,000 goal, then it will be time for me to reassess if I want my business to grow further.

Realistically, I would be happy if I brought in $1,000 during 2019 in its entirety. I know that by launching my business, I’m starting at a bad time (January and February are slow for tarot readers), and I need to build my client base. I am OK with growing slowly. I am also being realistic about my startup costs and understand that I need to cover them before I begin giving money away, which make take some time. My costs include: tarot decks, my logo, website hosting, and business cards.

Overall, this is my hope: clients will be attracted to me not only because they like my style, but because they will respect the fact that I value myself. I want this endeavor to be one that grows organically and in line with my values, rather than being about making money for its own sake. I deserve to be paid for my time and skills. But I am also looking forward to learning so much from my clients, the cards, and yes–my mistakes!

I Ship It: A Tarot Spread for Fandom and Personal Development

A strong marker of my life, and of many people of my generation, is the propensity toward fandom. Fandom being, in my own definition, an intense intellectual and emotional attachment to the characters and world of a book, movie, TV series, or something else. I was predisposed toward fandom from a pretty young age, no doubt because, as all of the adults in my life said when I was growing up, I have a strong imagination. From pre-pubescence to my early 20s, I bounced from fandom to fandom, going through cycles of obsession, writing and reading fics, contributing to discussion forums, and engaging in light cosplay (generally only on Halloween.)

However, while I have respect for fandom in a lot of ways, I’ve since given up on it almost entirely. I almost never watch movies or TV anymore, preferring to spend my time reading, knitting, doing tarot, taking walks, etc. I have done this because I have begun to realize that I actually don’t like the feeling of having someone else’s fictional universe imposed on my mind. I said that I spend a lot of time reading, and even that is usually non-fiction or poetry because I don’t even really like to read novels anymore.

All of this is apart from the actual quality of the novel/TV show/movie in question. I understand that there’s a lot of really good stuff out there that I would enjoy reading and watching, but I just don’t like being immersed in fictional universes. Why? It feels like limerence to me. (I had a lot of experience with limerence in my late teens and early 20s and have to say that I have come to intensely dislike it, as much as our culture fosters and promotes it.) Fictional universes pull me out of the present moment and set me on a track of obsession. I have spent a frightening amount of my life fantasizing about people who don’t exist, even when said fantasizing brings me no material or even social benefit.

However, there is one fandom—not even the entire fandom, just one ship within a fandom—that has continued with me. There’s a fanfic in my mind that I have been composing on and off for about 15 years. I’m not going to say what ship it is, but I have started to think about it in different terms. For a long time, I wished that I could just get rid of this fantasy, but it would always come back. I do wish that it played a smaller role in my life and took up less of my energy, but nowadays I’m examining it with curiosity more than anything.

This is why: I’ve noticed that, as I’ve matured as a person, so have the characters become more deep and complex. The lessons that I’ve learned in my life, especially about relationships, then make their way into the fic. In other words, the fic has become a tool for witnessing my own personal growth and testing my beliefs about relationships and personal development. Usually, the fic only exists in my mind, but I’ve been writing about it more openly in my journal to record these insights. I also decided to build a tarot spread about it, which is why I’m sharing here.

This spread is very customizable, and can be modified based on the particular details of whatever fic or recurring fantasy that you have in your head.

Card 1: In creating/modifying Character A as they are, what do I long for in myself?

Card 2: In creating/modifying Character A as they are, what do I long for in others?

Card 3: Same as Card 1, but with Character B.

Card 4: Same as Card 2, but with Character B.

Card 5: In bringing these two characters together, what do I want from how the parts of myself relate to each other?*

Card 6: In bringing these two characters together, what do I want in my relationships?

Card 7: What shadow is in this story that I can’t see?

Card 8: Is this even a healthy story for me to be telling?

Card 9: How can I take steps to make this story useful for myself in my own life?

The answers I got were interesting. They did not dredge up any deep shadows, but they showed me that continuing to work with the fic in this vein will be useful and that there are insights that I can put to practice in my life if I look at the fic with curiosity and detachment. That is—if I stop running away from it and being embarrassed by its existence, but also stop getting completely caught up in it.

This is a preeetty embarrassing topic to write about, but I decided to put it here because I bet that many of us have a ship/fantasy/story rattling around in our heads that might be better served by curiosity and analysis.

* This very awkwardly phrased question comes from my realization that each of these characters represents different parts of my own psyche.

On the Collective

It’s not surprising to me that I was in a tarot slump in the months leading up to the election. I was having trouble looking deeply into anything because I was in a state of numbness/denial about the possibility of Trump becoming president. No wonder that I didn’t have a lot of patience for slowing down, sitting with myself, and understanding what was happening inside me. Since the election, however, I’ve been turning inward–and turning toward darkness. I’ve been absorbing a lot of lessons about power, not only the kind of power coming out of the White House right now, but power dynamics between people and in movements, and where power resides in me.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of time with my cards, a lot of time alone in the dark with candle light. I’ve been using Slow Holler pretty much exclusively, although the Animal Spirit oracle by Kim Krans recently came into my life and I have a feeling I will be using it quite frequently for a while. Right now, I’m very interested in the spread of movements and ideas and Slow Holler is perfect because its wisdom is very much focused on the collective, and on seeing individuals as part of collectives. The deck substitutes the Kindred for the Empress, the Guild for the Heirophant, and Intersection for Justice and throughout the guidebook we’re asked to think about how our actions affect the collective, and vice versa. This deck landed on my doorstep when I most needed it, but I couldn’t have known that when I backed it on Kickstarter nearly two years ago.

I have been thinking about the collective a lot, and I have been acting in the collective, too. On January 21st, I went to my local Women’s March, which ended up being 11,000 people strong (about 1/5 my city’s population.) That night, I slept through the night for the first time in months. Just yesterday, I attended a protest against Trump’s Muslim/refugee ban at Detroit Metro Airport with about 7,000 other people. Being an introvert, I feel pretty drained after protests and marches, and have to do some conscious breathing when things get tense, as they did for a minute last night when a Homeland Security cop threw a guy to the ground. But I want to keep going to them because knowing that I’m not alone, that there are thousands of people willing to get out in the street (and in the case of last night’s protest, on less than 24 hours’ notice) with me, and that I’m willing to get out in the street with them, is the best way I know how to avoid feeling powerless.

There is so much to be scared about right now–the ban on Muslims and refugees has been at the forefront of everyone’s mind for the past couple of days, but the gag orders and hiring freezes at the EPA and other government agencies, the re-starting of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, attacks on the Affordable Care Act, are all deeply unsettling. I think what’s most unsettling to me is that Trump is clearly bent on destroying the US government, both as a functioning democracy and an institution that is supposed to support and protect the people. (I’m not saying that the US government actually has been doing these things as it should, but it’s better than Government As Business Making Profit for the Very Few, which Trump clearly wants.) He’s doing this by appointing people to office who want to destroy the agencies they would head.

So what did the two protests I attended actually accomplish? Nothing. Nothing, except that they gave people hope, helped make connections, inspired other people to act in similar ways, normalized our outrage, de-normalized Trump, and said to all of us, very powerfully, that we are not alone.

I have been doing reading and listening, too. Here are a few different voices that have made their way to me through various means, talking about what is being asked of us, and how we can take care of ourselves for the long term.

First, How to #StayOutraged without Losing Your Mind by Mirah Curzer. There’s much good advice here, but for some reason, the following is really, really resonating with me right now:

The movement works as a coalition of people focused on different issues, so don’t let anyone convince you that by focusing your energy on one or two issues, you have effectively sided with the bad guys on everything else. Ignore people who say things like, “you’re not a real feminist if you aren’t working to protect the environment” or “you’re betraying the cause of economic justice if you don’t show up for prison reform.” That’s all nonsense. There is a spectrum of support, and nobody can be everywhere at once.

By the same token, don’t allow yourself to be shamed for being new to the game. Ignore people who tell you that your protests of Trump are hypocritical because you didn’t protest Obama. That’s hogwash for many reasons, but most importantly, YOU ARE HERE NOW AND THAT’S WHAT MATTERS. Do not engage in activist one-upmanship, and don’t allow yourself to be shamed for not being fully briefed and up to date on everything, for not spending your days glued to CSPAN and Twitter, for not making someone else’s number one issue yours as well. That is a demand for emotional labor from you, and you do not have to give it.

I think this is resonating with me because within the resistance community, it can be hard to separate the signal from the noise, legitimate critique and dialogue from people tearing each other down because they feel helpless in other venues.

Second is a video that I just found this morning, by Jill Freeman, whose wise voice is emerging beautifully in the YouTube community. One of her main points that I’ve really taken to heart is that bullies like Trump do things very suddenly and quickly because they want to disorient you and see how you react. Jill makes the point that it’s imperative not to freak out right now because this is a test–because if we freak out, this is going to be a sign that our MO is freaking out, and we can be taken advantage of very easily. (She puts it a lot better than I do.)

I don’t feel like either the Women’s March or these airport protests are freakouts–even though the conservative media would like to paint them this way. The words that I’ve heard in these spaces are, “I am not afraid. We are not afraid.” They are messages that if you push us, we’ll push back. I have come away from them feeling stronger, not weaker. But if you are feeling scared and powerless right now, Jill’s video contains much good advice.

Third, a couple of Facebook posts from the author and activist James O’Dea. The first is from the day after the election:

This is not a time to fall into fear or project calamitous consequences for America but it is a time to be very, very vigilant. Vigilance is a state of conscious alertness and full-bore engagement:
Hold a vivid and dynamic vision of collective well-being and a truly positive future.
Act from a place of radical inclusion.
Listen with full-bodied attention to unspoken wounds and to the whispers of indefatigable hope.
Activate the fullest expression of your own morally inspired conscience.
Incarnate and manifest your values down to the finest detail.
Attune to Mother Nature’s gathering voice and speak her language with eloquent clarity
Attest to the power of love and warm its fires by building beloved community.
Put a light in your window to welcome kindred spirits, those afraid of persecution and as a sign that you are always, always open to healing dialogue.

The second is from two days ago:

The death of complacency…the birth of conscious activism

What does it mean to be complacent? Well, you know it will all turn out fine. Let’s not get all hot and bothered: a wrinkle here a wrinkle there doth not the great unraveling make. Right?
Wrong. Dead wrong. On a day when refugees from majority Muslim countries who had visas and undergone full screening were taken off planes and detained at airports we can’t be complacent. Christians were not affected by the ban.

No more shrugs about cutting funding for climate change research; deportations , refugee bans, reviving fossil fuels, supporting torture, coddling dictators etc. If you have been shaken from complacency frenzy is not the answer.
Have a little burial ceremony for our collective complacency then celebrate the birth of truly conscious, visionary and inspired activism.

And, finally, this beautiful meditation on Instagram from Dori Midnight:

Friends, we are magic. Our magic is our power, our resilience, our protection, our way. It’s a rough day, and by day I mean a time outside of time, a dream, a folk tale we are living in in which the shadow beast monster is sitting at the decision making table trying to destroy, imprison, and control our earth body and the magical ones. It’s okay if we lose hope right now, because we are going to move beyond hope. We need more than hope. We need magic, we need all our senses, all our eyes, our plants, stones, songs, dances, poems, ancestral love, hexes, spells, chants- we need to reach deep into our baskets and purses and toolkits and pockets. Deeper than marching, deeper than making calls and writing letters, though those are part of our magic, we need more. We need to dream and vision and hold on to our visions of justice and liberation. We need to take the leap, beyond the structures that no longer serve us, and never did- the police, the government, all the architecture of patriarchy and white supremacy- what is on the other side? Mutual aid, plant medicine, networks of care, kinship, feeding each other, circles of people singing, learning how to prepare our bodies in death, remembering what we know in our bones, talking the way whales talk to each other, listening to what the earth and the ancestors have to say in this moment about how to stay alive, how to stay present, how to work like the tricksters we are. White people, now is the time to do some deep ancestral healing and connecting- get right with your bloodlines and make it right with both magic and real, concrete reparations- give money and put bodies on the line.

In the folktale, the hero/ine always has more than human allies and always outsmarts the asshole with humor, magic, trickery, dance, song, and ancient ways. Let’s remember ours.

Let’s stay together, let’s stay strong. Let us continue to envision what we want as we fight against what we don’t want. I feel surrounded by so many beautiful people with strong spines and open hearts, I feel that we’re beginning to find that within us which is indestructible.

The Question is Insight

NOTE: I mixed up the 7 and 8 of Cups in the Thoth tarot. That’s what I get for working with a trimmed deck!

I’m not sure that we give ourselves enough credit for asking the question.

What I mean by this is: in tarot, we generally see the question as a means to an end, and the question itself doesn’t matter so much as long as we get a good or meaningful answer. Of course good questions are important–I’m not saying that the tarot community doesn’t think that. Nowadays, any tarot reader worth their salt will have a whole page dedicated to guiding querents in phrasing the question. But.

We also allow other people to ask the question for us, or, more commonly, a series of questions. These are called spreads. I have several myself that I designed for personal use, and then made public for others to use. It’s deeply gratifying to find that some of them have been useful to others. But.

A few mornings ago I sat down with my notebook and cards and some questions came forth. The questions in themselves are nothing spectacular, but they are not the same questions that I would have asked even a month ago. I’ve done a lot of tarot-assisted hand-wringing about what I want to do with my life, what’s meaningful to me, and how I can get there. I have wanted the cards to give me answers about how I can change.

But the questions that came forward were actually the result of change that’s been happening subliminally, in my emotions and my body. The role of the cards wasn’t so much to point the way towards the future, but to show me what changes have taken place.

Where should I be focusing if I want to get more done this year? Three of Stones
Where am I resistant to change? Seven of Branches
What do I need to add to my life? Three of Vessels
What do I need to drop? The Storm
What do I look like when I’m the Boss? The World
What do I look like when I let others be the Boss? Eight of Vessels

This term “the Boss” comes from a sudden insight that I had over the Christmas holiday, in which I really realized that I need to “Boss it up” this year. In 2016, I was very reluctant to apply for jobs that I didn’t think were exactly what I wanted. Actually, at the beginning of the year, I was reluctant to apply for jobs at all. I had this idea that I should take a break (very true!) which then transmuted into an idea that I was going through so much personal growth that if I got a job I would be hampered in the new understandings that were unfolding in me (sounds good, but a complete line of bullshit.)

By being the Boss, I don’t mean a stance toward the world in which I want to control or dominate other people. Rather, it’s about not allowing myself to be limited by stories and concepts, and about taking responsibility for my own life, even in–especially in–situations where the outcome is beyond my control. Being the Boss means the buck stops here.

It was only after having this insight that it became possible for me to ask these questions. And I have to say–as a tarot spread on its own, this set of questions looks pretty lackluster! But for me, asking these questions was my way of admitting to myself that yes, things do need to change in some pretty specific ways.

All of the cards held a significant message, but I want to focus on just one, the Eight of Vessels, which I think will illustrate what I said earlier about being limited by stories and concepts.

eight of cups.jpg — Eight of Cups/Vessels in several different decks (clockwise from the left): The Wildwood Tarot, The Wild Unknown Tarot, the Smith-Waite Centennial Deck, the Slow Holler Tarot, ~~and the Thoth Tarot.~~

The Eight of Cups/Vessels has long been one of my favorite cards. When I began reading tarot back in January of 2015, I was still in grad school and gearing up to finish and defend my dissertation, having already decided to leave academia for something more closely aligned with my strengths and values. When I first took a good look at the Waite-Smith card and saw the red-cloaked figure walking away under the silent moon, it touched something inside me. Seeking rocky, high ground, moving into the unknown, moving away from what was logical or easy–I found myself in this place. Just look at the header of this blog–it features the Eight of Cups alongside the High Priestess (my birth card) and a statue of my favorite bodhisattva, Ji-jang Posal. There was an ascetic streak in me at that time, for sure.

More recently, when I saw the Eight of Vessels in the Slow Holler Tarot, I also fell in love with it–dark, moody, laden with sorrow and strange symbols, sadness and potential for rebirth (and amazing use of perspective.) But when it came up in this position in this reading, I got a very different message: I have been holding on to the energy of this card for too long, and it is time to move on.

Two years ago, the energy of the Eight of Cups was fresh and piercing; the card was a descriptor of what I was trying to do at that moment in my life. But now it’s stale. I am still in the posture of walking away rather than walking toward. But what is there that I still need to walk away from? Leaving academia behind, actually, turned out to be as easy as dropping a stone in water. Yet I am still allowing ideas about my personal growth in this period of transition get in the way of the one thing that I actually need right now: getting out in the world and doing things, even if it’s not my dream job. I will discover my dream job, my strengths and potential, through trial and error, not through sitting around and doing nothing.

Although I say I’ve always liked the Eight of Cups, it’s true that I’ve never liked the Thoth version–Debauch. Withered lilies dripping green slime, no thanks. But now I see that I’ve moved into that place, that what started out as the ascetic’s journey has ended with self-indulgence. [The Seven of Cups is actually pictured above, but here’s a picture of the actual Eight of Cups–Indolence, which, in retrospect, applies to what I’m saying even more.] But I never would have come upon this insight if I hadn’t first understood that I’m not being the boss of my life right now. That insight came first and pulling the Eight of Vessels refined and deepened it.

Gathering In 2017

As we move into 2017, I think the most thoughtful and pithy thing I’ve read about it is this XKCD comic. I hope you had as good a 2016 as possible, and that 2017 brings everything you need and desire in spite of the confusion and challenges that the world is moving into politically and environmentally.

Last year, I got really, really in to this whole New Year thing. I worked through Susannah Conway’s Unravelling the Year Ahead workbook (which I am now doing again for the 3rd year in a row), did a giant 36-card year-ahead reading, and invented a New Year spread. My word for the year was UNKNOWN, and my overall year theme cards were the Emperor and Failure. Yup. All told, the giant year-ahead spread didn’t amount to much, so I skipped this this year. But I did choose a new word for the year, AWAKENING (or rather, the Slow Holler Tarot chose this word for me) and drew the Traveler of Stones (Knight of Pentacles) and Illuminate for my year themes. I want to talk a little bit about how this year theme thing has worked out so far, and then jump into this year’s Gathering In spread.

In some ways, I’m glad that I had Failure on the table right from the very beginning, because that’s what this year felt like in a lot of ways. My failure to get a job in particular was something that I really wasn’t prepared for. I apparently wasn’t really prepared to search for a job, either, and I find myself at the end of this year reevaluating my strategies and priorities.

Looking back on my posts about themes for 2016, I’m struck about how I interpreted the Emperor, though. I located the Emperor outside of myself, seeing them as representing institutions and authority figures that I would be up against. Now that I look back on it, it was a strange way to approach the year, to assume that this year would be focused on petitioning large, authoritarian institutions. (Although the Emperor turned out to be a very fitting card for 2016 as an election year.) It wasn’t until a few days before Christmas that I remembered the Emperor card again and wondered–“What if I was supposed to be the Emperor?”

Given the theme of the Traveler of Stones and Illuminate for this year, it seems correct that I missed out on my chance to be the Emperor in 2016 and I’m now being sent back to the drawing board. I look at the equivalent of the Emperor in the Slow Holler Tarot–the Navigator–and wonder if I would have approached the year a bit differently if I had pulled that card instead. (Probably not–I think I needed the experience of this year to learn the lesson.) The Traveler of Stones tells me that I’m going to have to go back to basics, put my nose to the grindstone, and be prepared to sacrifice and let go of some things that I was clinging to in 2016. There are no guarantees of success, but Illuminate echoes the theme of awakening and suggests that this process will awaken me to new possibilities that I hadn’t considered before.

As for the Gathering In spread, last year’s was quite warm and fuzzy, but this year’s is more elusive and abrasive. And I think that’s a good thing.

1 Fire of this year: 2 of Knives. What is it that motivates me? What is it that I actually want to do with my life? The answer isn’t so clear. I want to work on tenderly exploring this impasse, rather than remaining defensive and stagnant. I have a lot of very specific ideas about what I want to do and the context in which I want to do it. I’ve got a long list of stuff that I don’t want to compromise, and I may just have to make some compromises.

2 Air of this year: Traveler of Vessels. Let’s let the intellect roam–a year of being a dilettante, not an expert. The question is: how do I bring this out as a strength? Because my lack of discipline means that I got almost nothing written in 2016, and therefore not even close to getting something published. I have so many ideas, but shoot them down before I get too far. The phrase in my head popped up this morning: “Write first, ask questions later.” Did I make that up?

3 Earth of this Year: Ace of Branches. HERE is my fire and inspiration! I may be more motivated this year by finances and the prospect of stability, rather than my ideals. This has been a source of tension for me lately–I could get a job doing something that I don’t want to do, but I’m having a hard time finding jobs for what I actually want to do. Do I change my ideals? Do I just take a “job job” and try to squeeze in other stuff around the edges?

4 Water of this Year: Four of Stones. Notice any tendencies to close off or isolate myself from others, or, conversely, to rely too much on others. How do I preserve emotional boundaries without making them into a prison?

5 Spirit of this Year: Six of Stones. Operating from a place of scarcity isn’t going to cut it. I really need to open my spiritual practice up. This year began to shift my understanding that my spiritual practice isn’t about me, but it’s about all beings, myself included. My head is beginning to make that shift, but my practice is not there yet. I need to come out of that defended, self-centered place and be more generous and giving (which translates to: practice more and take it more seriously.)

6 My Guiding Light: The Devil. Well, this is one to think about! It’s probably prodding me toward a more, well, devil-may-care attitude toward things, being less cautious and less picky. This Devil card is so abrasive and unsettling, but for that reason I kind of love it. (Also: body hair and uneven boobs: yes!)

7 My Personal Power: Student of Branches. Remembering that I’ve got a lot to learn and a lot to build. I’ve been getting a lot of the Student and Traveler cards lately, a reminder that I’m not in a place of mastery. I’m entering a new discipline via work and I am also entering a new world with a radically altered political landscape. Learning and hard work are the main modes that I need to move into. I’m not going to beat myself up about slacking this year, since I did just finish a DOCTORATE, you know. But time to get back to work.

8 How to respond to what I can’t control: Architect of Vessels. And yet the one thing that I can achieve a sort of mastery over is my relationship to my emotions and how I respond to other people. When shit happens, taking care of my emotions, watching my emotions, and watching how I relate to other people’s emotions, will be key.

9 How to take care of myself: 10 of Vessels. I got the 3 of Cups (Vessels) last year, so this is a progression in a theme. Do not isolate! Seek friends and lovers for comfort. Cultivate gratitude and awareness of others’ gifts.

10 What is AWAKENING? 5 of Knives. I really love this card–which is strange, since 5 of Swords isn’t a card that has ever really attracted me. When I saw 5 of Knives come up here, I went “ouch,” but in a good way. Awakening is about understanding hurt: the ways I hurt myself and others, and the ways that I am hurt by things outside my control. It’s time to take a good, long look at this stuff, whether it be understanding my privilege or exploring how I’m carrying old wounds into the present and doing little things that hurt others. I love this interpretation of the card because it’s about the skeletons in the closet–time to get them out, to take out those old knives and put them to work in the kitchen.

Rather than looking at this spread as being predictive, I’m looking at where I am now and what it illuminates as I move forward. This spread isn’t what the year will be, it’s what I need to do.

I hope you move into the New Year with grace and power. Please let me know if you use the Gathering In spread, if you’ve got a word for this year, or if the cards have given you some good insights about the year ahead!

Slow Holler, for healing and waking up

I’ve been messing around with various potential posts for this blog because there are so many things happening inside me that are not getting written down anywhere. My tarot slump has continued, but two things happened yesterday that have rekindled my faith that tarot can help me with the changes that we are facing on Earth right now.

Yesterday morning, I found this post by Siobhan Rene on Little Red Tarot: Face Up Judgement: Trumpets, Grief, and Getting Woke. Siobhan drops some serious wisdom about the Judgement card and its relationship to waking up.

The Judgement card heralds a cycle of sleeping consciousness, its awakening, and resistance to the revelation. Nothing is static. No one arrives and stays woke forever to all things. No one sleeps forever. At least not without a ton of grief. We regularly face opportunities to awaken or resist reality again and again. The direction we move in the cycle depends on our willingness to wake up or our commitment to bury our heads in the sand.

Please go read this beautiful post. It puts so much stuff that I’ve been thinking and feeling lately into an entirely new context. I’m a proponent of the work of Joanna Macy, who points out that the grief we feel for the world–which others may try to privatize and pathologize as personal neurosis–is actually proof that we are inseparable from the world. When we hear the trumpet calling us to awaken from the sleep of distraction and separation, we actually awaken to several things all at once: our love and gratitude for the world, our grief at its destruction, the interconnection of all beings and things, and the need to take action.

As Siobhan points out, we go through cycles of sleep and awakening–it’s not true that we sleep forever or wake up once and for all. Instead, waking up is something that we choose over and over, whether it’s a self-prompted awakening from within, or a trumpet call from without. (And yes, I am deliberately playing on the fact that trump is embedded in trumpet.) In either case, we have a choice to either move toward waking up or to fall back asleep. I’ll also add here that what is usually translated as “enlightenment” or “awakening” in Buddhism is in many schools not seen as a permanent state. Zen in particular, which I study, talks about awakening as a series of experiences both sudden and gradual.

Anyway, I was pondering all of this when a package arrived at my house well after dark. Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, the Slow Holler deck!

In some ways, it’s hard to even believe that I now hold this deck in my hands. I wrote my first blog post about it back in March of 2015–over a year and a half ago. The creators ran a great Kickstarter campaign, keeping us all apprised of updates as the deck has progressed, and shipping it out on schedule.

Already, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this deck, but I think it will be a while before I write a review. Let’s just say that, in working with the Slow Holler Tarot, I have felt more supported and healed by the tarot than I have in months. I knew the deck was going to arrive soon and kind of wistfully thought that it might pull me out of my tarot slump, but I did not anticipate that it would be this powerful. The deck is true to its promise of diversity of all kinds, but I think what is making the biggest impression on me now is its orientation toward the collective. The messages behind the Slow Holler Tarot are about sustaining yourself by sustaining others, and vice versa. It’s clearly a deck that has been created by people who know the challenges and rewards of collective action.

It’s time for me to wake up and lean in–to keep waking up and leaning in–and the Slow Holler Tarot has offered itself as a compass.

Quiet friend, who has come so far

It’s been a long, long time, my dears. I did not intend to abandon this blog for four months, but looking at the last post I can see how grief and pain have been catching up with me–as well as alternating feelings of overwhelm and idleness/worthlessness. I’m humbled by the steady stream of people who continue to find their way here, most of them looking for information on the Wooden Tarot. I’m very aware that my Wooden Tarot meanings series stalled out right before I got to the Major Arcana and I still don’t quite know if I’m ready to take it on.

Truthfully: I’ve been in a tarot slump for the past few months. I think a large part of it is that knitting has largely taken the place of tarot as the dominant hobby/daily practice in my life. It used to be that I’d bring my tarot cards down to the breakfast table with me so I could do a daily draw. Now I bring my knitting down to the breakfast table with me and try to get a few rows in first thing. Another reason for my tarot slump is probably that I’ve disengaged from tarot social media in large part because I (finally) quit obsessing about which deck to buy next. I enjoy the tarot social media community, but it really was getting to be too much for me. I became too focused on owning and displaying decks (and looking at other people’s decks) rather than my own practice.

But I think most of all, I’ve really had to pause and assess–given the pain in the world, does it really make a difference if I pull out some cards with pictures on them? Over the past couple of months, although I continue to practice with tarot and oracle cards every few weeks, I’ve at times had a sense of embarrassment over the idea that I own about a dozen tarot and oracle decks and really think they could help out in the face of all the things that are wrong in this world.

Even though I haven’t done a whole lot of direct action either, I’ve been resistant to turning inward in response to the pain of the world. I think that part of this is that a slow, dry, low-key depression has been creeping up on me due to the fact that I still don’t have a job. I really, really don’t want to turn inward because it kind of seems like it’s dying, and the parts that aren’t dead are in a lot of pain. I don’t want to look at that, to sit with that. It’s true that I have come a hell of a long way since my depression four years ago, but I still find myself here: distracted and fidgety, overreacting to every thing I do wrong, wanting someone to give me a job so I can just have something to DO, but utterly resistant to doing a job that I think is boring or meaningless.

Despite talking a good game about meditation and spirituality, I still find myself indulging in distractions, avoiding the present moment, and being harshly self-critical. It’s taken me a long time to own up to this fact.

And then…this. Yesterday was a week since the election, and I am really sick of the word election. Already in my town, which is as blue as Babe the ox, a man threatened to set a woman on fire if she did not remove her hijab, gay and interracial couples have found swastikas scrawled on their doors, and a rock that university students regularly paint had “Kill them all” spray-painted on it. Not that any of this shit is new, it’s just been happening with greater frequency and visibility over the past several months, and even more so since the election.

It’s been fairly difficult for me to function, honestly. And I feel so vulnerable in this pain. Fortunately, I have close friends who are feeling the same way that I do so I’m not completely alone. But it feels so overwhelming at times–not only what is happening to human rights in the United States, but the fact that resisting the fossil fuel industry here has become so, so much harder.

And I just don’t know. I realize that the majority of my fellow white people voted for Trump from a place of privilege. Some (seems like a greater number than the media wants us to think) really were just voting for him because he is a bigot who is going to put white nationalists and ultra-conservatives in power. More, however, were so sick of Hilary Clinton and the Democratic party (I don’t blame them) that they were willing to throw pretty much every marginalized and vulnerable group of people under the bus. They might not have voted out of overt racism, but it’s clear that they cared more about their personal finances than justice or human rights.

But–I can’t say I’m much better. I voted for human and Earth rights in this country, all while throwing people in Syria and elsewhere under the bus, so I can’t speak from a position of moral authority here. I did not want another neoliberal war-hawk Democrat in the White House, so I did nothing about the election aside from voting, not a single Facebook post. I didn’t even do anything for Bernie Sanders because, although he and I agree on most issues, I thought he was too far left to have a chance against Trump. Now I see that he was maybe our only chance against Trump.

Over the past week, my feelings have yo-yo-ed quite a bit, from grief and despair, to determination and even gratitude. I am grateful for this wake-up call from complacency, for the shadow of my country being brought to light. I’m grateful that the depression I was feeling about my personal problems seems to have evaporated for now (although the prospect of facing them still seems exhausting.) I’m grateful that in these times I have really found my people. I find myself reaching for connection, rather than retreating into isolation (which is my usual tendency when feeling pain.)

I don’t have any real tarot wisdom except this: We say that the Star follows the Tower as if they were two distinct developmental stages. But I say that the Star is in the Tower, and the Tower is in the Star. They continually make and re-make each other. In disaster we are called to great things.

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself into wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Tag Archives: tarot