Image description: Six cards of varying sizes tacked up on a whiteboard. Each one holds a different drawing of The Fool card from a deck of illustrated Tarot cards. Each one shows a figure beginning a journey.
Context
I’ve felt drawn to the Tarot since I was small. I got my first deck some time in adolescence, on a family trip to The Cloisters. It was a reproduction of a medieval deck they had in their collection, I think. Always attracted to the witchy and the mystical, this is the one thing I most wanted from the gift shop. I didn’t understand how to use it at all, and I’m not sure it came with a guidebook. But I dutifully wrapped it in a sacred1 cloth and set it on an altar next to my Teen Witch2 book and my Chalice3. and it became a part of whatever fumbling ritual I was doing at the time, if only by osmosis.
I didn’t start reading the Tarot in earnest until young adulthood, when my mom got a deck and shortly after gifted a copy to me. This one had a guidebook, and we gave each other readings. I remember a trip with my mom, godmother, and that same family friend who gifted me my margarita chalice. It was the kind of intergenerational woman time that is remarkably precious in our world of fractured community, individialism, separateness. For that alone it would have been a magical trip. We sat on the beach, read quietly on the deck of the beach house, talked about aging bodies and what we knew now that we hadn’t before. But also, we gave each other tarot readings.
The energy about it could have easily been sleepover-oija-board-giggles, but it wasn’t. I remember feeling the sacredness settle over the practice, sanctified by our individual and collective decisions to believe that we could receive wisdom from what we were doing, transforming a weird vacation rental where there wasn’t any toilet paper provided into someplace still and cozy and somehow holy. Now, I’d say that I felt our attention and intention open a channel. I didn’t have that language then, or the comfort to use it. I only knew that I felt connected to the women in that circle, and that the gift of helping to bring them knowledge of themselves and their paths felt hallowed. I held it lightly, but took it seriously, if you know what I mean. I remember that each of us was moved.
Since, I have given many readings and I am regularly surprised by it. By the people who set their skepticism aside long enough to consider the offering of perspective that the deck makes, and by the push my own readings give me to see things differently. I often come to the deck with some kind of restlessness, a gnawing irritation or an aching grief that I don’t quite understand. As I pull cards, and their descriptions talk about profound loss, I am able to cry out that grief for the first time. Or they suggest that I am caught up in my own thoughts too much, that I should get over myself already, and I am able to let it go a little bit. Sometimes they help me find a bit of ritual to do, and that is what helps me do one of those things.
Despite all of this time and all of these readings, I haven’t memorized the cards. I’m always working from guidebooks. Labyrinthos is straightforward and right on my phone, Grace Duong’s card descriptions are irreverent and accessible, Cristy C. Road’s are political and mystical and obtuse, Michelle Tea’s are grounded and practical and real. Turning to each of them, and to several at once, feels like hearing different people say the word love—knowing that they all mean the same thing and also couldn’t possibly mean exactly the same thing, because the thing itself is so personal and so ineffable.
Still, I’ve always wanted to be the kind of person who can pull a card and already know instinctively what it means, or might mean. But I’ve never been a studier in the traditional sense. I can’t muster the diligence for memorization. I read a nonfiction book and am left with only impressions, details slipping away as through a sieve. I learn by making. My politics came not from reading about the right answer, but from organizing alongside people who knew more than I did, from building something with them. My spiritual practice came from practicing alongside loved ones in their traditions and feeling in my body and spirit what resonated for me. My graphic design skills came from needing posters for events I was hosting and teaching myself how to make ones I liked. You get the idea.
This idea for a way into studying the tarot came to me a few weeks ago. I honestly can’t remember the specific inspiration; I’d tell you about it if I could. All I know is it occurred to me that I could make my own tarot deck, and little blurry visions started sprouting in my head. A card as big as the distance from the heel of my palm to the topmost knuckle of my middle finger, soft but not smooth in my hand, covered in a delicate filigreed line drawing. On the way to the stationery store with a friend, I wondered if I could ask them for help finding the right paper (stiff enough to hold up with use, soft enough to be pleasant) for the project. Hearing folks on a meeting talk about their tarot practice I had the urge to say “I’m making my own deck!” as if the project were already under way.
Well, now it actually is.
I’m going to4 take each of the 78 cards of the tarot deck one by one, read about them in all of my guidebooks, look at the imagery in each of my decks, and listen for what stands out to me, what I think it means. Then I’m going to draw the card for myself. The hope is that by having my own imagery at hand, I’ll be able to remember more readily what the card is about, what I understand it to be.
To start I’ve been working on understanding The Fool, the first card of the Major Arcana. In most decks, this card has an image of a person going somewhere. They’ve got a bundle tied to a stick slung over their shoulder. They’ve got one foot raised like they’re walking. They’re on the subway platform. Sometimes, they look like they’re about to walk off a cliff. Sometimes they’re whistling a merry tune. Sometimes both the cliff and the tune simultaneously. Or if there’s no cliff, a monster nips at their heels.
Here’s what I’ve learned about The Fool: this card is about innocence and new beginnings. It’s about leaping into something, blissfully ignorant of the dangers ahead. But it’s not a warning card. It’s not telling us to be cautious. Just the opposite, it’s saying that this moment holds tremendous potential. That you are new at something, just beginning, and it guarantees that there will be both burdens and delights along the way, all in due time, as with anything. It says that while it may be wise to consider the pains possible, we shouldn’t let that consideration stop us from walking a path that lights us up. The fool reminds us that sometimes when you don’t know the limitations of a thing, they don’t actually limit you.
It’s in that spirit that I’m making my own tarot deck. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. I don’t know what the end result will be. I am embracing the spirit of kind-of-dumb-kind-of-brilliant, the magic potion of naive enthusiasm and gut instinct. Beginner’s mind and beginner’s luck.
Here is my Fool card. It’s a picture I drew of a tiny plant bud breaking through a crack in concrete.
By all the ways we know and expect, something as fragile as a new flower should not be able to crack through concrete. A bud could be snapped in half by the soft pads of our fingers! Crushed underfoot! It is so tender and delicate! And yet. The plant doesn’t know it can’t, and so it does. Using the new cell growth at the tips of its roots, it finds5 the microscopic cracks in the concrete that we can’t see, and holds on. Slowly, over time, the plant’s steady growth on the path it has chosen can buckle a whole paving slab.
Here’s to being a fool, to doing an amazing thing simply because we didn’t know we couldn’t.
Stuff
I do very recommend Michelle Tea’s book Modern Tarot, especially because it offers little rituals to do for each card you pull, which I find to be so sweet.
I love this little shop, “here to celebrate and promote LGBTQ+ and BIPOC creators who are self-publishing tarot decks, books and other spiritual tools.” I can’t look at their online store too closely or I will own a 7th deck, which is wholly unnecessary.
We will touch on tarot a little in the fall spiritual practice course, and there will be space to work with your deck if that’s your jam.
This song has been on repeat today. “Everyday I’m moving on upwards/ But there’s still so much ground I’ve not covered/ I can’t see the top from here/ But I know that I can't stop before I make there/ And I’m gonna make it there”
P.S. Today is my birthday! As a birthday gift to me, you could share your favorite essay from this here substack with someone you know who might like it. It’d make my day.
Sacred in the sense that it meant something to me. That I found it beautiful and special. Sometimes that is enough for sacred.
The cover art of this book alone makes me giggle in a mix of nostalgic delight and embarrassment. Don’t buy it from Amazon if you can help it, but do look at this cover art.
I grew up Unitarian Universalist. A flaming chalice is a symbol of the tradition and a regular part of UU worship. I got one as a gift from a family friend when I did my Coming of Age ceremony and only later learned it was a margarita glass with a candle stuck in it. I’ll leave the potential symbolisms of that right here.
I both can’t wait to hold my own deck in my hands, can picture how it feels and what it will be like to read from it, and I am Extremely Nervous that I’ll never finish. There are 78 cards, for fuck’s sake. Even if I did one a week, it’d take more than a year! Trying not to think about it, or to promise (to you or to me) that I’ll ever complete it. However much I make will mean something, of that I’m sure.
Roots out, if you will.