About

My Tarot Story

When I was a teenager circa 1986, our local radio station, WMMR, hosted a somewhat annual parade, the Louie Louie parade.  It was just what it sounded like – folks marched down Broad Street singing Louie Louie, over and over again.  That was it.  So, a bunch of us took the train into town from the suburbs, Louie Louie’d our way down  Broad Street to South Street, land of record stores, bookstores, novelties and new age stores.  Very arty compared to the strip malls of the suburbs, and we felt super cool.  In one of the New Age stores, Garland of Letters, which is still there, my friends bought pretty jewelry, and I bought my first tarot deck, the yellow box Rider-Waite Smith with the blue plaid backs.  We would make other pilgrimages to South Street, and while I never actually learned to read tarot, that didn’t stop me from loving these boxes of what I felt were secrets – and I eventually ended up with three decks, the RWS, Morgan’s Tarot, and the Mythic Tarot.  These decks, which I would pull out, lay out in the Celtic Cross because that’s what’s in the Little White Book, and scratch my head looking at the images, what did it all mean?  There was no internet to help me out.  So, the decks came with me to college, to my various apartments, and eventually, were lost in the shuffle.

Fast forward to 2021.  We’re all sitting in our houses, twiddling our thumbs, waiting for the world to open up again.  Like most people, I found myself working from home, and leading a pretty solitary life, during the day at least (my husband is an essential worker, and continued to go to work throughout the pandemic).  I adopted companions along the way – through books, music, podcasts.  Sometime during that dark time, Patti Smith took me under her wing – I found myself listening to her memoir Year of the Monkey at the same time I was reading another of her books, M Train.  In her books, she describes her long time rituals – coffee, writing in cafes, visiting gravesites of famous authors, taking polaroids of meaningful objects, and pulling Tarot cards, sometimes before bed, always before a trip.  I wanted to be like Patti – she was like the too cool for school kid that you wanted to be just like, to me.  So, I tried reading Sylvia Plath (one of her gravesite pilgrimages), but that didn’t take.  I became intrigued with her pulling Tarot cards, and I bought myself a deck, a basic RWS deck.  I was hooked.  As a lawyer, being an advisor is a natural fit for me, and in particular, as a trial lawyer, I’m swept up in the storytelling of the cards.  It’s all about stories, to me, and tarot has become my passion.  I’ve amassed a ridiculous amount of decks, and recently, I’ve become obsessed with Tarot de Marseille.

How I Read Tarot

I read all Tarot the same, be it Tarot de Marseille, Rider Waite Smith, or any other art deck.  I am a Camelia Elias fan girl, and I try to Read Like the Devil, her commonsensical method of reading cards not by traditional, fixed meanings but rather allowing the question on the table drive the meaning of the cards based on their function, the images and cultural contexts.  So, I don’t read cards like this card means that, the Star means hope or the Hermit means solitude and the inner search for knowledge.  Rather, I look at the Star, a naked woman spilling water into a river, and think about what that means in the context of the question and the surrounding cards.  Simple.  I also embrace the work of Enrique Enriquez, and ask what do I see? and how does it make me feel? I read the pip cards the same as I read playing cards, and I basically follow this “cunning folk” system.