Excerpt

This is a public post. I’m putting this reading out there for all. If you are taking a look at one of my readings here on Patreon for the first time, this is a bit longer than most. It is the new year. 🙂 

One of the ways I like to work with the Tarot is narrative. They tell stories. This can be done alone, or with others and multiple decks, even oracles thrown in. In a circle this can be done together around a question, each card, rune or oracular device adding a piece of the grand tapestry of the reading. 

This is reflective of life as well. Not one of us is without a collection of stories that intersect the lives, bodies, and stories of others. We are walking, living, breathing libraries of generations, and millions of years of evolution; and our lives we are living in now. 

What I’m centering on in these 2019 readings is telling story, and using the Tarot as guides to that narrative. This engages some of the aspects of the readings and meditations in last year such as listening to what is coming in, what is being spoken to us outside of one’s mind, and the reflective oracle properties of inner visioning. 

I’ve worked with this method for decades, since I started my Tarot Journey in ernest, 1994. Which took me to strange places. I’m hoping that this style will serve us all, and intersect well with the daily journal prompts of Power and Love, which look like they will be delivered in a weekly format at the start of the week. The voting for that is still open. 

This Winter Solstice and Yule, amidst the loss of family and other emergencies, communicating with distant family and friends, and traveling I reflected a lot on narratives. The Linestrider Tarot really helps with that one. The author and creatrix of the deck really did put the love into the descriptions of the cards, creating strength in their reading through use of herbs, color, illustration and story. 

I really thought about inherited narratives from our families, how they serve to bring us together in loving ways, and sometimes how those stories alienate others. When someone falls outside of the family narrative, what is the dynamic? When we recognize some beautiful strangeness in ourselves such as queerness, or gender, or different spiritual calling, how it shifts the narrative; and how that pivot can result in an expanded family dynamic, or more often than not exclusion, othering, or shaming. 

Death can do this to us as well, as it is an inevitable that touches all of us, and we are seldom prepared for it culturally, or individually. This too was an intersection during our holidays. It brings up questions in all of us. 

What arose in my quiet observing of friends and activists, of family near and far…

Read the whole story and reading at: Patreon.com/ScottKSmith

Like the Tarot I use? It’s the Linestrider Tarot, click here to find it on Amazon. ————>

Thank you for reading,

Scott K Smith