Kaostic Tarot 015
still shining...
Hello Darlings,
My kid was telling me about a reading she’d done one morning. Nothing clicked. Each card was confounding, unstabilizing, weird. The deck refused to give her a clean answer about anything she’d asked. Flustered she walked away, told her mom, and then went to work.
By the end of that day, every card made a terrible kind of sense. Each thing she’d found confusing in the morning had contextualized itself by sunset. The cards hadn’t been wrong. They’d been early.
Now, the adult human I grew in my womb so long ago may just be a naturally gifted reader with an unearthly connection to the cards I gave her. It’s totes possible. She may be able to divine the future. If she can, it isn’t a gift she got from me.
But what she did get from me, and what I use more than anything else in my tarot practice, is a gift for contextualizing. That’s what most tarot is, for me. Not prediction. Not foretelling. A guideline for finding understanding of what is.
And I bring this up now because... it’s not always something I knew. Not because I don’t know things, but because I find it takes a lot of patience to understand everything and everyone you know. And for most of my life I feel like I’ve been a very impatient person. And occasionally still am. I mean... What I mean is that when you’re moving forward, contextualizing doesn’t work without patience. When I was young I thought some people were patient and some were not. And I was not very patient. But I wanted to be. I tried to be. I failed to be. Most of all I failed to be patient with myself. I’m still working on that.
The Reading…
So instead of a spread, we’re doing a practice this week...
Pull a card in the morning. Or three. Read them. It’s natural to try to figure out what they mean, so do that. Take whatever lands. Sometimes the morning’s reading won’t make much sense in the morning. But it could mean everything soon.
Then when your day winds down, look back. At the conversations. The small frustrations. The glimmers of something beautiful. The moments that surprised you. The thing your body did. The thought you couldn’t shake. See where your cards showed up and think on them.
The Context…
The other day a dear friend and follower of this newsletter texted me a photo of a tarot deck he and his partner had seen at one of the game trade nights they attend.
This is fantastic to me on so many levels. The first being that there is someone out there who knows to send me photos of any unusual or uncommon tarot deck he sees. That’s a goal I didn’t know I had. To be the kind of person whose friends send her pictures of cool tarot decks. Achievement unlocked.
Anyway. Achievement unlocked aside, it was also a really cool deck. A tarot deck made for kids. I knew someone had to have done one, but how did it play out? Was it like baby goth dripping in black velvet and shaking silver spikes on little rattles? Was it Noah’s Ark themed? Was it Muppet Babies?
Muppet Babies. That’s traumatizing. But loved.
Making stuff for kids can be fucked up. No one knows that better than Gen X, I think. The stuff made for us as kids… well. There’s a reason so many of us can be so very dark.
But this deck didn’t seem to be made to prey on the pocketbooks of parents whose kids have a case of bright shiny gimme-itis. It looked soft. The kind of soft that holds strength and space for those who need to heal.
So I thanked him and put it on the short list of decks I would like to acquire. Because if I went out and bought every single deck I saw and thought “oooh I would love to have that,” I would spend a lot more money on decks than I already do. And since they’re not paying for themselves at this time, I’ll have to continue to be responsible.
Usually I don’t find my being responsible to make for very good story telling though, so thankfully someone intervened…
And wouldn’t you know it, last week, as I lay crashed out on the couch after getting some blood drawn, my partner brought me a package. A mystery package. I very very much like a mystery package (as long as I know it came from someone lovely). A mystery package on a really bad health day? That’s the height of joy.
I tore it open.
And you know what was in that mystery package?
The Deck…
Tarot for Kids.
The deck. From the dear friend who’d texted me the photo, Kevin and his partner Julie. They hadn’t just sent me a picture of the deck, they bundled that sucker up and sent it to me and it arrived at the perfect moment…
Tarot for Kids by Theresa Reed, illustrated by Kailey Whitman. Published by Sounds True in 2021. 78 cards, RWS-based. 96-page guidebook. Recommended for ages 8+.
The illustrations were everything the photo had promised. Soft palette. Gentle expressions. Warm interiors. Nothing in this deck was trying to scare anyone.
Theresa Reed calls it a deck for kids, and I trust her framing. But it isn’t the only framing I’ll give it. It feels right for anyone seeking a gentle tarot experience. Not everyone loves horror and sex, and traditionally tarot has quite a bit of both of those.
Not here. The creators’ softness is IMMACULATE and amazing. This deck would be wonderful for trauma survivors, anyone in a fragile state, anyone seeking to avoid triggers and threats. And you know. Kids.
This is a softer tarot. And there is a real audience for that. But of course, you know there have to be modifications.
Seven of the major arcana have been renamed:
The High Priestess → The Moon Queen
The Hierophant → The Rules
The Lovers → The Best Friends
The Hanged Man → Patience
Death → Change
Temperance → Balance
The Devil → The Bully
These are smart. They’re the kind of careful translation work that makes a deck approachable without flattening it. More accessible. More grounded. Easier.
Two modifications stand out to me in the most powerful way and I’m going to note them here before I run off and try to start an essay series about all the tarot modifications I obsess over.
As a lifelong agnostic, I’ve always held a grudge against the Hierophant. Its religious rigidity tainted it for me. And I know that its religious rigidity is the point. But I’m stubborn and unreasonable sometimes. The Rules is the same card without the traumatizing dogma sold as fact. I love it. It’s my favorite replacement for the Hierophant ever.
But the one that will change the way I see a single tarot card forever is transforming the Hanged Man into Patience. I really dislike the Hanged Man for so many reasons you could easily guess and a few weird ones you hopefully couldn’t. I have always felt like, for a card with a beautiful message, its name and image cause hurt. In theory there’s an essay coming with my thoughts and feels on this one. But I’ll tell you now that I’ve been dreaming of making a deck for a long time (I mean another deck, I once made a whole major arcana but that’s a story for another day).
Always patience.
The Garden…
I went to sit in the garden to pull my card this morning. But it was pretty late morning, so the sun was already beating down. My body doesn’t love that kind of light and heat. I was reminded of why the garden with a tarot reading spot is still purely aspirational.
The vision is mostly at night. String lights. A place to read tarot under the stars. None of that exists yet.
Though I did move the table and get out a lot of empty pots that I had to work around.
I’ll continue to share my lack of perfection and tiny moments of progress.
That’s it…
Be patient with what hasn’t arrived.
Some things take time.
Love love love,
Cami