Here, I share with you how I choose to use and read tarot cards.
It’s taken time, and careful contemplation, to build a framework in which I weave tarot tapestries in a way that aligns with my values. The opinions I express are subjective and informed by my experiences, personality, understanding, and preferences.
The following scene is not the kind of info one receives from a tarot reading – it simply illustrates what I will, and will not, do with my cards.
The elevator ride
You have an appointment on the 14th floor of a tall building. You take the elevator. There are a lot of people in the lift. It’s crammed.
Someone farts, and breathing feels fatal. If you weren’t stuck at the back, you’d consider getting out on the 4th floor and waiting for the next elevator going up.
You went to a tarot reader a few weeks ago. The cards showed her you’d be taking a lift to the top floor of a tall building to keep an appointment with your dentist. The cards also revealed that this trip to the dentist would bring you romance. What the Universe chose not to divulge is the stench inflicted on you, and many others, by someone else. Why?
The Universe knows you will likely respond to the tip-off by standing back and declining to enter the elevator with that person, thus altering the course of your life in a way you would not appreciate. How?
Well, if you were told a teenage boy wearing an aquamarine hoodie, bright red sneakers, and holding a white smartphone in his left hand, is going to create a stink in the lift, you’d wait for the next elevator…
If you wait for the next elevator, you’ll miss the joke a man in a tweed jacket cracks, you’ll miss laughing so hard your eyes water, and you’ll miss meeting the man you’re going to have a long-term relationship with…
Tweed Man has to be in this elevator at this time because, not only will he meet you, he’ll meet another person who’ll change the course of his life – his future boss will enter the elevator on the 6th floor…
The teenage boy has to be in this elevator, despite his unpleasant digestive system, because he is Tweed Man’s son and must serve as a catalyst (he eats enough dodgy food to do his job admirably).
If you press the tarot for more and more details (depicted here as the teenage boy), asking questions that ignore people’s right to privacy, wires get crossed and cosmic plans go up in smoke.
Not taking the noxious elevator ride would mean that, after your visit to the dentist, you’ll be furious and puzzled by the absence, for the next ten years, of a decent man in your life; it’ll take that long for the Universe to get another Tweed Man, or the same Tweed Man, within arm’s reach again.
You were told your visit to the dentist would bring you the man of your dreams. You’ll keep asking yourself why, why, why he hasn’t come along. You might blame yourself, think you did something wrong, failed somewhere along the way. You may struggle to make choices, distrust your intuition, or become a bystander in your own life, waiting for predicted outcomes.
The tarot didn’t lie. You will find romance after your visit to the dentist, only now it’ll be ten years after the appointment because you (or your reader) unwittingly stuck a nose where it didn’t belong, disrupting the course of events.
This also illustrates that the unfolding of life does not revolve around one individual’s demands and desires. We’re faced with the undeniable fact that we’re all in this together. We are not the center of the universe.
Defying the common sense truth that the only person we can control and change is ourselves is foolish. That’s why trying to know too much about other people is often a fruitless and frustrating exercise. We’re wasting our energy and resources. Bring it back home, to you. What can I do to help myself, change this, ensure the best outcome for all involved?
If the tarot wants you to know more than that (and surprisingly, when we demonstrate principled restraint, it often does) you’ll get it without having to pry into other people’s lives, or…
surrender control of your life to outside forces. Which is where we’re going now…
in The Outsize Pram.
🖤
MantisWheel 