Tea-break Tarot School

We began this journey in January 2019. I was eight months into living with my folks and helping care for my mum, still caring for children and trying to manage some work on the side. Rather than the freedom I had hoped for once my children reached adulthood, I found the walls closing in again with renewed caring responsibilites. Oh woe and so forth.

I spent a while feeling sorry for myself and then decided I needed to do something about sorting that out.

I began working through the Artist’s Way. I was also coming up on three years of working with tarot, which had been an incredible support during significant health needs and big personal transitions.

At that time I was still deeply in the mindset that I couldn’t do things unless “an expert” showed me how, or I got a piece of paper which said I was “qualified”. I was also conscious that tarot could be an expensive interest. When I was a young mum in the late nineties there were times when we couldn’t afford food, and I knew that not everyone in the world had access to the resources to pay for classes and materials.

I imagined that younger version of me, toddler in the hallway, baby on hip, prepping pasta and canned tuna for dinner in a one bed flat. What would she need to learn tarot? She didn’t have much time, what with two children under two. She didn’t have much energy and she didn’t have much money. She would need small bite lessons, not more than ten minutes, she would need an encouraging voice, she would need something light and fun and inexpensive.

I decided to create a free tarot class, and a blog was the affordable way to do it. I also wanted to experiment and see if I could really “read” tarot from just the images on the cards…

I gathered the decks I had and began.

Now some two years later I’m gathering the blog posts together to publish them. They are still essentially blog posts, though I have rewritten them, and added material throughout. In some cases my views of the cards are different now, life has moved on and with it my understanding of spirituality and tarot, so the updates reflect this. I was a literature student at university. I learned that meaning doesn’t exist in the book itself, rather I make meaning as I read, I am a co-creator of meaning. With this in mind the writing is creative and reflective, hopefully to encourage folks to work with their own imaginative and creative selves as they engage with the cards. The intention is that readers will create their own meanings for cards which draws on their lived experiences. In this way we can add to the understanding of tarot as a book of wisdom for our post-modern mystical lives.

The book is structured as a “playbook” (I liked that better than “workbook”), with space for notes and comments, sketches and doodles. It won’t tell you what to think but I hope it will encourage you to explore further with tarot and play with your own emerging meanings.

I’m hoping to have it “out there” by the end of April 2021.