Death and The Fool - more tarot fun!

There are a couple of cards that really sound as though they should be bad news when they turn up in a reading. As I lay the cards down in front of a client and either Death or The Fool comes up, I see most of them wince.

No! Don't look! Don't try to read the cards for me. Even if you do read yourself, every reader works sodifferently that you can't possibly know what my cards are telling me about your situation and trying to second-guess them will only block out the fresh perspective that you were looking for by coming to an outsider.

Most readers will agree with me that the Death card hardly ever means an actual physical death. There are very rare occasions when it might be a warning - but in general, the maxim holds that when your number's up, your number's up and my cards aren't going to tell me about something that will only distress you and which you can't do anything about anyhow.

In general, Death indicates a complete change in some area of your life  and the resulting sense of loss. Yes, it's true that you will rarely get out of a situation that's being symbolised by the Death card without a period of readjustment and readjustment is often painful. But then, of course, situations - jobs, relationships, belief systems - all die for a reason and that reason is generally that they have outlived their usefulness. When the situation has 'died', you are free to invest the energy you were wasting there into a brand new situation. It can be hard to do, I know, but really, the smartest reaction when you see the Death card in your reading is excitement; it means that there's still some life and adventure left in you yet.

Then there's The Fool.

I guess it's hard to imagine, when you come to a reader with the hope of gaining insight into whether the next big risk you're planning to take in your life is a smart one, how seeing The Fool turn up could possibly turn out to be a good omen.

But to me it almost invariably is. Of course, each card has many different interpretations depending on its context within the reading as a whole and very occasionally, when The Fool turns up, it is saying to you, 'STOP! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! WRONG WAY! GO BACK!'

But most of the time, The Fool is telling you to take that next leap, that risk. The only way any of us progress is by taking risks that others will see as foolishness. The only way humanity in general has ever progressed is by doing things that seemed crazy the first few times someone did them.

Now we all eat fungus to save us from germs (penicillin). We routinely get into vehicles far heavier than we are in order to travel miles above the ground when any fool knows that we ourselves are too heavy to fly. We communicate with each other across vast distances in ways that would have been called supernatural three hundred years ago.

There is no progress in life without someone taking the risk of failing and therefore looking foolish.

Both The Fool and the Death card herald new and exciting times in your life. Yes, in order to get to the new, you have to leave some of the old behind - but you may as well embrace that change; it will never stop happening for as long as you are alive.



Thanks for visiting! Please subscribe and hit the follow button to be kept up to date with what's happening, tarot-wise, in Townsville.

Where to keep tarot cards

I've always liked to have something special to carry my tarot cards in.

For years, it was a carved wooden box made of some lovely smelly wood that my sister in law gave me for Christmas. Whenever I'd take my cards out of the box, we'd get a puff of perfume to start the reading. Now my daughter has made me - with her own clever little hands - a fluffy royal blue knitted pouch for them so unfortunately, the box has now been retired.

A friend gave me a silk scarf many years ago and my cards are always wrapped in that before being put to bed. Wrapping tarot cards in silk is a fairly traditional way of keeping them - it's said that a natural fibre helps cleanse the cards of the energy of the last reading.

Meh. I don't know about that. I just like traditions for tradition's sake really - I keep my cards stored in the silk scarf mainly because my friend gave it to me and it's nice to have something that you always do with them when you finish a reading.

I admit to being quite territorial about my cards. I left them at work one day and someone used them without even asking!

:O

I was kind of put out about that. Not that I think it means my cards aren 't going to work anymore; it's just rude. Cards are, to most readers, like a favourite shirt. You buy them because you love the design. You know that one day they will wear out and you're sad when that day comes. You wouldn't borrow someone's favourite shirt without asking and I wouldn't pick up someone else's cards either.


Thanks for visiting! Please subscribe and hit the follow button to be kept up to date with what's happening, tarot-wise, in Townsville.

just the cards, ma'am...

When I do a tarot reading, the client will sometimes ask if I'm clairvoyant or if I 'just read the cards'.

Just read the the cards!?! Hmph! If I was a more sensitive soul, I might get a little put out by that!

No, I'm just kidding. But there's a lot of misunderstanding out there about exactly what tarot is and how it can help. I myself will often say to a client who seems to have very high expectations that I 'just read the cards' as opposed to famous people in related fields such as John Edward or Alison Du Bois who talk to dead people and appear to know everything about everyone they meet.

They don't - and if you read their own words, they don't claim to. Sure, television is necessarily edited in such a fashion to make readings appear easier than they really are; like any live TV show, they cut out the boring bits. Sceptics claim this as a great deception. 'It's all edited to make it look better,' some say, with a great sense of betrayal.

Oh, really? As opposed to all those TV shows that aren't edited to cut out the dull bits?

My point, however, got a little lost there! Just read the cards?

Yes, I just read the cards. There are 78 of them and each one has myriad meanings depending on which cards it is surrounded by and what area of the client's life it refers to; the six of pentancles will have a different meaning in a question about money than it does in one about relationships or work and there is a lot of intuition involved in discovering which meaning is right in the present reading.

You need to be able to focus on both the many meanings of each card and the process of listening to your gut instinct at the same time. It's kind of like patting your head and rubbing you tummy; it takes skill but you can look a bit silly while you're doing it.

I've been to readers who close their eyes or stare up at the ceiling or nod as though they are listening to someone who is not with us in body. I am definitely not knocking them; everyone has their own process and if it works, excellent! But I try not to do any of that stuff - it makes most people uncomfortable and therefore creates a barrier between the reader and the readee. More than anything, I believe that at its best, tarot reading is an exchange between two people. It is not a situation where one person tells another what will happen to them; it's a little circle of two into which you invite a third Mysterious Other (intuition, gods, dead people - I don't know) and from where you can uncover the information you need to best travel forward in life.


Thanks for visiting! Please subscribe and hit the follow button to be kept up to date with what's happening, tarot-wise, in Townsville.

what tarot reading MIGHT be...

Last entry, I told you some of the things I think tarot isn't.

So I'm sure you've been waiting ever since with bated breath for me to come back and tell you exactly what it is. No? Well, okay - I'll tell you anyway.

Tarot is a guide on how to best proceed in your life from your present position to get to where you need to be in order to discover or fulfil your life's purpose. Tarot, at its best and most useful, is a tool for revealing the things you need to know about yourself and your situation to make the right decisions for your future.

This is not to say a tarot reading doesn't come up with some pretty amazingly accurate predictions of the future. It does. It can also be very good at identifying what's going on now in your life - but your future is much less clear. I can tell you what the cards say you should do in any given circumstances - but you can walk out the door of my salon and do whatever you like, no matter what advice the cards may have given you. The future is not written in stone. You hold the power to make the best or the worst of any situation in your own hands. Don't try to give it away to me - I don't want it!

Many times, people will come to a tarot reader hoping for confirmation of an opinion they already hold. For instance, a woman once asked me whether she should begin an affair with a man she worked with. She was married and she loved her husband but the chemistry with her workmate was so strong, she didn't know how she could stand it if they didn't consummate their relationship.

I told her that I wasn't there to tell her what she should or shouldn't do and that she would have to make her own decisions based on her own ethics. But I was able to offer her some advice from the tarot; it was clear - the cards I laid down after shuffling were among the worst in the pack. An affair would be a disaster that would adversely affect her work and her marriage, quite possibly to the point of losing both. But her position was that she loved this man and still felt that she had to find out if her happiness lay with him.

Well, whoopsie! Her happiness, your happiness, my happiness, the milkman's happiness lies within that individual's own self and it can't be found by chasing stuff outside of that self. I don't doubt the woman might have had great sex with her colleague but great sex is not happiness; it's great sex and that's all it is. Fleeting and often very very messy in more than one sense of the word and rarely worth what it would have cost her in the long run.

I don't know exactly what happened in this particular case but the client returned to see me a couple of years later and she was no longer married nor was she with her work colleague. I didn't pry. I just laid out the cards again for her and read what was in them.


Thanks for visiting! Please subscribe and hit the follow button to be kept up to date with what's happening, tarot-wise, in Townsville.

the mystery of tarot...

I've been reading tarot for thirty years now and it's an activity that I come to love more and more as time goes by.

To me, a tarot reading is a process that takes place between two people, a deck of cards and some mysterious Other. Some readers call it God. Some call it Angels. Some call it Guides. There are as many explanations as there are readers.

So, what do I think that Other is?

Well. Hmmm. Um.

I'm sorry to disappoint you but I have no idea! Oh, I suppose that's not strictly true. Of course after all this time, I have some ideas about what happens during the profoundly mysterious process of a successful tarot reading but I will never know for sure whether I'm right or not until after I go to The Big Reading Room in the sky.

All I really know is that a person, often a stranger, comes to me and we take a small amount of time to tune into each other by each shuffling the cards in silence. I do have a couple of mental rituals that I go through while I shuffle but these rituals are not noticeable to the person I'm reading for and are much closer to meditation than they are to magic. I simply try to clear my mind to allow whatever intuition is released by the spread of the cards to come through more clearly.

I've spent thirty years learning the meanings of the cards, how they relate to each other and how to hear the story they tell me - which is, of course, the life story of the person I'm reading for.


Thanks for visiting! You can join me on Facebook at That Tarot Lady and also on Twitter. Please subscribe to this site and hit the follow button to be kept up to date with what's happening, tarot-wise, in Townsville.