Tarot, the Tree of Life, and the parts of ourselves we would rather avoid

I use tarot and the Tree of Life to look more honestly at what is happening, not to pretend I can predict the future or hand you a neat answer when life is being anything but neat.

Some cards feel generous. Some feel like they have arrived specifically to point out the thing I have been avoiding for three weeks. I have misread cards before, sometimes because I wanted them to say something kinder than they were saying. That is part of the work too.

Start with tarot

Each card has more than one way of speaking. I look at the upright meaning, the reversed meaning, and what the card actually looks like in ordinary life, where people are tired, defensive, hopeful, broke, in love, or doing all of those things at once.

Hard cards are hard. I will not turn them into cheerful little guarantees. Good cards are not guarantees either. They can show an opening, a choice, a pattern, or a possibility, but what happens next still involves you.

Explore the Tree of Life

I start with the plain version because symbolism is not improved by making it impossible to understand. The Tree of Life can be read as a map of qualities, tensions, stages, and relationships within human experience.

After that, I go deeper into the symbolism, the Sephiroth, the paths, and the correspondences that connect the system to tarot. Different traditions do not always agree about those correspondences, and I will say so instead of pretending there is one uncontested answer.

A place to think clearly

This is not fortune telling. I am not here to tell you that a card has locked your future into place. I am here to ask what the image brings up, what it makes harder to ignore, and what you might understand if you stopped trying to make the answer prettier.

So anyways, start wherever you are. Bring the question you keep circling. Bring the card you dislike. It may have something useful to say, which is annoying, but occasionally true.