I've always been aware of the Tarot, of course, but I never really paid much attention to it. It seemed archaic, and therefore uninteresting, to me. Then, last spring, something happened. I wrote about it in my journal:

The most amazing thing happened last week. Of course, not everyone thought it was as amazing as I did, but I thought it was very cool and almost magical. On Wednesday or Thursday I was walking in to work, and I noticed a couple of brightly-colored pieces of paper on the ground. I thought they looked like some kind of stickers or cards or something, and almost picked one up, but decided not to.

Then on Friday, when I was walking in, I noticed the pieces of paper again, and actually stopped to look, and what I was looking at was a tarot card. "Cool!" I though, and picked it up. It was a card from the Dragon Tarot deck. I wish I had noticed which card it was when I picked it up, but I didn't. Because I started looking around, and the cards were everywhere!

I started walking around the parking lot, gathering them up. I didn't know how many cards were in a tarot deck, so I didn't know whether it was a whole deck or not. I picked up as many as I could see, then went on in to work and counted them. There were something like 52, which sounded like a full deck, but then I went online and saw that there should be 78.

So I went back down to the parking lot and started really looking, and found more--I believe I have 69 now--but I'm still missing a few. Oh, and I found the little paper descriptive book that comes with the deck, and the two title cards, one of which has "Page of Cups" written on it, and the other one has "Ace of Wands."

I wrote to Misty about the cards (she was the only person I told about them who got as excited about them as I did), and she looked up the meaning of the Page of Cups:

"Increased intuition. This card may represent a child or adolescent who is sensitive, loving and intuitive. Abstractly, it represents intuitive thinking and creativity coming to the fore in your life."

Cool, huh?

I also thought I should sit down and figure out which cards I have, and which ones are missing--maybe the missing ones are the important ones (in a "signs and portents" kind of way). There was also a tin in the parking lot--like a fruitcake tin--that I'm guessing originally held the cards, because it was pretty clean and not rusty like it would be if it had been lying out there for awhile.

Anyway, I thought it was very cool and magical, and I imagined a whole story around them, about someone who was reading the cards and got a really horrible reading, and then flung the cards out of the car window into the parking lot; but, oh! Maybe the cards that I don't have are the cards that were in the reading, and rather than flying out the window with the rest, they refused to go.

I'm sure it was something much more mundane, like leaving them on the roof of the car when they drove off, but I like imagining the more magical possibility.

After I found the cards, I started reading about Tarot. I bought a few books and a deck of cards and started learning how to do readings. Then I bought another deck, and another, and Bob bought me a new Dragon deck for Christmas this year, and a friend bought me the Tarot of Durer for my birthday, and I became more and more interested in it.

I kept feeling like I should take a class or something--it's hard to learn something like this on your own. Then I hit upon the idea of designing a deck of cards myself, which would more or less force me to learn the symbolism. This site is the outcome of that desire, obviously a work in progress, and also a labor of love.

The cards are (also obviously) non-traditional; the artwork is collage--I have a pretty good sense of design but no artistic talent whatsoever--and it pleases me a great deal. I'm also learning a lot, which was the whole purpose, after all.