“Will you bring your tarot deck?” asked my cousin via email about a week before our Reunion 2022 was to start. I startled and smiled. “Of course!” I wrote back immediately. “I have three decks that are lively for me, so you can choose…” I did remember to pack them, and when the family finally gathered for our “organizational planning” meeting that first morning, I got to experience an additional wry delight: announcing that I had brought tarot decks, so “if anyone would like a reading, let me know!” Saying this in broad daylight with my extended family of establishment Christian and secularist branches standing all around was a hoot.
A couple took me up on the offer! One seemed more MotherPeace oriented, the other clearly Gaian deck oriented. A third expressed interest but we never quite got it done before it was time to go. Either Zoom or November, we decided.
Tarot waxes and wanes for me, these last several years. I was introduced to the Motherpeace tarot deck in 2013, when I was preparing for my first Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy with Women Writing for (a) Change. I was installed as Moderator of the Presbytery of the Miami Valley—a leadership role in my local Presbyterian Church USA community—so chose that night to order my deck. All things in balance, I figured. I remember it feeling daring and risky at the time. Something to keep secret, hidden.
The cousin who asked for a reading also had that in the back of her awareness, I think, as she commented on it after we’d finished her 11-card pull. “I’d expected us to be in a back room somewhere, quiet, hidden…”she said. Made me smile, as I hadn’t realized just how very comfortable I’ve gotten with this imagistic, intuitive, inner-wisdom practice.
I did an 11-card pull for myself about two weeks ago, which I have done several times over the years amidst a transition, or at the felt-start of something new. The cards’ images and interpretations companion me over a period of weeks, months, inviting my own learning, receiving, wrestling.
My ‘significator’ card opens as the High Priestess. Immediate recognition for me, familiarity with the term priestess now more than pastor or preacher. I love that all the elements are well represented—swords (air/mental/cognitive), cups (water/emotional/psychological), wands (fire/vision/passion) and discs (earth/rootedness/grounding). The Two of Swords brings the infinity symbol that has been emerging in my life of late. There are solitary images, suggestive of solitude yet also ancestral connections. The “outcome” card—Death—follows the preliminary pull of the Ace and Ten of Discs—both earth cards. Death suggests significant change more than physical death. Earth suggests a groundedness that pleases me.
Not surprisingly, I see and feel all of my life right now in these images…because what is inside of me finds concrete form or suggestion when I look at archetypal images like these. I get access to a deeper inner wisdom than my mind often allows.
Tarot seems to be waxing!