Birthday spread

My first experience with tarot was with a boxed set of my dad's, never used and gathering dust in our basement. It was a particularly ugly Picasso-themed deck, with black line drawings over lurid striped backgrounds. The booklet that came with it was unhelpful--interpretations focused on legal judgements and the stock market don't mean much to you when you're 11 or 12 years old. Every time I tried to use it I'd get fed up and put it away, and yet I couldn't help coming back to it again. A few months, or a few years, later, I'd be searching out that black box with the stained glass window on it again, thinking that this time, surely this time would be different.

(digression: while tooling around on the web to find examples or information on this deck, I found that while these particular cards seem to have faded into well-deserved obscurity, Picasso himself was apparently fascinated with Tarot and very conversant in its imagery. Who knew? Not me, anyway.)

As time passed, I read a few books from the library now and then, and occasionally thought about where I could get my own set of cards (this being both before I discovered the existence of metaphysical book stores and before the mainstreaming of tarot). I didn't take action, however, until my late teens, when I became friends with someone who also read tarot. She owned decks! As in more than one! And books! Tons of them! What a revelation. We spent hours together, both on campus and after school/work, sharing books, laying out spreads, playing with the cards, telling stories with them. I learned a lot from her, and even more with her. I have so many happy memories of meeting at local restaurants and taking over tables for hours, hauling in bags of books and 2 or 3 decks each and just settling in for the day. How we got away with it I'll never know, but I'm certainly grateful for the waitstaff who served us water and let us alone instead of kicking us out. We don't live in the same place anymore, and she seems to have lost her interest in the cards, and I still mourn that.

My first deck, and the one I still love the most, is the Thoth Tarot. People usually think I'm crazy when I say that, but that's the deck whose imagery first ignited my imagination and fulfilled my ideas of what tarot was really supposed to be. I still don't claim to understand it fully, and probably never will, but it's still the one deck I have to take with me wherever I move, and the one I use the most. I collect other desks, and use most of them (I won't buy a deck I wouldn't use), but Thoth is my old standby, the one I reach for first.

My practice level still swings up and down, but tarot has been one of the most consistent companions in my adult life. I love how you can never know it all and be done. There's still another level to explore, another way to approach your cards, a new thing to work on to make your readings better.

No matter what else is going on in my life, I always do a 12-card spread for my birthday. This month I will apparently be influenced by Fool energy. I'm not sure at this point if it means a successful fresh start or another Life Lesson About Being Naive.

I guess we'll see.