Since I Can’t Turn to Liquor and Faith Has Failed Me, I Read Tarot Cards Instead…

It’s all about the patterns…

Here, lately, with all the topsy-turvy things going on, I regret that some pharmaceutical company hasn’t come up with an anti-nausea medication for your life events and subsequent emotions. Maybe they have, and I just haven’t been informed of what it is yet. Maybe it’s Thorazine and a rubber room? But this is why liquor was under my employ for so long. Nights after days like today, I would love nothing more than to down a fifth of vodka and club sodas, all fizzy and salty and tart with a twist a lime. And tomorrow morning, I would wake with a hammer keeping time on my eardrum and a long string of sick balled up in my stomach like twine, but at least the chalk would have been erased from the blackboard. Tomorrow morning, I will actually wake up with all the psychic weight I will carry to bed with me tonight.

And my thoughts on faith will have to come another day. In fact, my thoughts on faith could fill a book in three or four volumes.

So, I’ve returned to the Tarot because it knows more than I do. The Tarot just knows. It takes your energy and manifests it in a spread. I trust energy; it’s ubiquitous. I had the great pleasure to meet up with some friends from college on Sunday and was given a reading by K. K is incredibly perceptive and intuitive and an all-around smarter-than-your-honor-student girl. She used a deck and spread with which I was unfamiliar, but the sentiments were the same.

The Querent card is the first card in the spread and it represents you, the person asking the questions. I didn’t ask a specific question; I just wanted a general reading because it had been so long since I’d had one. My Querent card on Sunday was Oppression, which I feel is pretty self-explanatory. And afterward, some pretty deep and deeply personal discussions ensued between the three of us. It will not be the last time.

Later that night, I had a specific question, so I broke out my deck from its dark wood box, carefully pulled away its silk covering, and proceeded to shuffle and shuffle the deck. I focused only on this one question and repeated it aloud until the cards started to get warm. I spread out a Celtic cross, which is the spread of my particular liking.

People read in different ways, and some may say that you are supposed to hand-pick your Querent card, but I like the deck to tell me how I’m feeling because, sometimes, I lie to myself to make myself feel better—like picking the Queen of Pentacles when I’m really the Three of Swords.

In relation to my question, the Querent card was the Knight of Wands, Reversed. The Knight of Wands is the card of Growth and Enterprise. He is a free will, Minor Arcana card, which means the Querent has the power to turn it upright, should she choose to do so, of course. In His reversed state, the Knight of Wands feels powerless, awry, disorganized, chaotic. He lends himself to a journey, but is the journey postponed or even worth taking in the first place? Certainly the other cards in the spread further illuminate the path to the ultimate outcome, but I’ve begun to see a pattern develop in the Querent, a pattern in me.

Tonight, I had another question because this is all I seem to be right now—question bones and query skin—and the deck tells me that I’m feeling a little Eight of Pentacles, Reversed. Mind you, some cards reversed in the Tarot deck can be a positive thing. The majority of the time, however, reversed means trouble, difficulty, or delay. The Eight of Pentacles’ focus is on productivity, but in its reversed condition it implies that a slow-down or impediment is evident. A lack of tools is indicated, and the “work” environment is mediocre, at best. On a literal level, perhaps, it’s suggesting a different place of work or a whole different career direction should be sought. And I’m okay with this. This is what I’ve been trying to do for the last three months. But it’s what the Eight of Pentacles, Reversed, suggests on the figurative level and in relation to the actual question that leaves my lip quivering just a bit.

A pattern is developing in the Querent, and that pattern is me.