more like dancing than like math

an invitation

You are a creature of imagination. The worlds that swirl in your dreams, both sleeping and waking, hold the keys to workings of the cosmos—the one outside us and the one within.

Inside you is an endless well of invention, feral philosophies, dazzling possibilities. And there are a thousand ways to dip into that well, to bring to the surface and our conscious ways of knowing all the genius that lurks and swims and breeds and rejoices below.

Tarot is one such method, if we treat it as a mode of stimulating and freeing the imagination. If we enter into a relationship with it that is more like dancing than like math. More like watercolor than connect-the-dots.

What tarot is: The tamped-down grass that indicates a path through the woods. A call from a friend at precisely the moment you most need to hear their voice. A tree with branches low and strong enough to climb. A sound from the sky that causes you to look up and see the storm on the horizon. A dot indicating “you are here.” A permission slip. An invitation in a language you invented and then forgot.

What tarot is not: Diagnosis and prescription. An encyclopedia. A map with the one way there marked heavily in red. The beeping sound a truck makes, backing up. A genie to grant you three wishes. The answer key. A game with only one winner.

If tarot—and all divination for that matter—is not a practice of liberation, then it is iterating and reinforcing oppression, limitation, the smallness we’re aiming to crawl or waltz our way out of.

Let’s not do that.

Let’s gift ourselves new paths, even when it means making them by foot through the woods.

Let’s light the bonfires in our bellies and use those flames to keep each other warm.

Let’s become enormous so those who would seek to shrink or disappear us can’t begin to wrap their arms or lies around us.

This October, in my beloved Driftless region of Wisconsin, in the deeply restorative environs of Red Clover Ranch, a group of us will come together to do just that.

Chef Dani will make us incredible, locally sourced meals and we will relish every bite.

I’ll lead us through discussions and practices based on my extensively nerdy reading of tarot texts old and new, using the Triangle Method of information, inquiry, and intuition.

Will you join me? It’s going to be — magic.