Today I offer a second post I just felt compelled to share. What I love so much about this medium is there is so flexibility. I’ll be back on Wednesday with the second installment of The Cards We Fear.
I credit my mother for initially exposing me to the tarot. She had a traditional Rider Waite Smith deck which sat in a wooden box in the living room, and would be brought out at dinner parties and other small gatherings. I wouldn’t say she was deeply serious about the tarot, but as a visual person, she understood images and symbols and using the cards came naturally to her.
My mother Joan was unique in so many ways. She took mothering seriously but was also deeply depressed and left it untreated for her entire life. She had an incredible expansiveness, was a risk taker like me, and when the risk didn’t pan out, would unfortunately fall into despair. Dyslexia, generational trauma from the Holocaust and living in London during the bombings in World War II, as well as a long, bitter divorce would drag her down deep into a place I couldn’t access. Ultimately a move to Jamaica, where she lived for seven years, and a return to New York City, having given up her rent control apartment in Murray Hill, found she didn’t have enough money to live as she had before, and this changed her deeply. Her life was much smaller toward the end, when she died at sixty-seven from lung cancer.
When she was dying but before she was bedridden, I would fly into the city for the weekend from Seattle, and would take her, slowly with her walker, to the nail place across the street, for pedicures. We went every weekend until she couldn’t walk any more, and after she was gone, I went into the nail place by myself. The nail ladies could tell what had happened and enveloped me in big hugs. I didn’t know their names, but their empathy touched me perhaps more than any other support I got during that time.
Why am I writing this now? What does this have to do with tarot?
Tarot is about intuition and empathy. Tarot can connect people who would normally not come upon one another. Tarot has the power to heal. This I believe—tarot is a tool, a beautiful tool, which comes in so many forms of decks and spreads. But I’m not sure tarot means much without the people holding the cards, the reader and the querent.
Tarot helps us make sense of the world, it is a meaning making discipline. It shores us up and illuminates the shadows. With tarot there is no pressure to rush. We see what we see when we are ready to see it. In that way it does have a similarity to therapy, though it most certainly is not clinical. For me, it is a kind of mothering.
Feel free to share.