Feb 12 2009
About
When I was little, I often sat at the kitchen table while my grandmother shuffled a deck of playing cards and laid them out in patterns. I don’t recall her ever formally teaching me how to read cards, though I asked her often enough. Instead, she’d casually drop tidbits of information - cinque soldi meant keep your money in your pocket because there was a chance of losing money today. Nove cuori signaled a day with many blessings. La Reine delle Batons suggested that today was a good day to start something new and exciting.
Despite the fact that Nana read cards, I never heard the word Tarot until I was 11 years old, when I bought my first deck. It was a deck that is not available anywhere that I’ve been able to find - the Pop-Rock Tarot Calendar published by, of all places, Scholastic Books. It was a 12 month calendar that featured custom-drawn Tarot cards that punched out of a cardboard page.
Since then, I’ve owned many decks of Tarot cards. The artwork is an endless fascination, but nowhere near as fascinating as the various interpretations and theories of symbolism that lie behind the cards. I’ve been reading Tarot for well over 30 years now, and in that time, I’ve come to view the cards as a series of signposts on the road to enlightenment. I’ve studied many different systems of reading, designed my own decks, created my own spreads and read professionally for a time.
I’ve also found that the Tarot cards can be a powerful tool that helps clarify decisions, and bring to light your own hidden feelings and knowledge about various things that are happening in your life. I believe in using Tarot cards to help guide decisions - not to give you answers to your questions, but as a tool to help you get in touch with what you really feel and understand about the situations in your life.
But I also believe that the Tarot carries a deeper symbolism, that the cards tell a story - tell many stories. I believe that the Tarot can tap into some other realm of consciousness - awaken senses that we don’t usually use. Most of the time when I read for someone, I know exactly where my interpretations come from. Most of the time, there is nothing mystical about my readings, no matter how my client may marvel that I could possible “know” those things about them. Most of the time, the cards are merely a focus to help draw the client into conversation and help them get in touch with what they already know in their hearts. But there have been times when I’ve done readings for strangers that have astonished me - specific information that I could not have known but that presented itself in the cards unmistakably.
Everyday Tarot is my attempt to share the knowledge I’ve picked up over the course of nearly four decades of reading Tarot in the hope that others will find something of value in it.
