Scary Tarot
Scary Tarot: The Card That Roots Us
The Five of Pentacles calls us back to our community
Beneath a crystalline night sky, two figures huddle together for comfort against the cool flakes surrounding them. They are need without fulfillment, souls seeking solace, impoverished and alone.
Those of us who craft and practice can, nearly always, feel backward into the roots of ourselves, finding the spell-casters and soothsayers; the dowsers and scryers; all of the trusted, knowing hearts who beat out the minutes and moments before us.
I am not the first witch in my family; my lineage errs toward the oracular. My bisnonna read tea leaves, while my Nana had prophetic premonitions. My mother is an intuitive who has never taken us to dim sum without upturning our tea at the end of the meal to see what might be hidden within, and it was with her Tarot deck I first learned to read.
These women, these witches who came before, are the roots to my practice, my subtle self, their buried limbs yawning far and deep. I can feel them, there — just out of reach — each time I sit in quiet meditation. Or as my feet sink into damp grass, while I breathe in the quick sharpness of winter morning. And then, again, each time the strength of my own whooping sneeze beats back upon my eardrums…
