7 Minute Read

It’s hard to introduce Spring Tide Tarot without first introducing myself.
I grew up a collector. I learned this from my mother. Our house was always filled with little, odd things—furniture from the side of a road, a forgotten list in a shopping cart, old bottles found in family attics. In the house we lived in when I was a teenager, there was a dirt road just beyond the back yard fence, and on the other side of that dirt road was a huge field surrounding a cement manufacturer. I’d get off the bus after school before my mom and stepdad got home from work and go straight to the field, where there were rows of cement cylinders that were almost big enough for me to stand in. Sometimes I’d bring my best friend, who other times would get off on the next bus stop. Or sometimes I’d bring my boyfriend, who also rode the bus with us, but who especially was not allowed to hang out with me before my parents got home (sorry, Mom. you probably knew anyway!).

You could call me a liar, but I wasn’t a bad kid—out there in the field, and in a time before touch screen cellphones, we mostly just talked, walked around, and looked at the things that other people left behind.

Because of course we were not the only ones who would go and hang out in these cylinders. Not in a rural town with one bar you couldn’t get into a fake with (not that I ever tried. I’d heard stories. I was too anxious and rule-abiding for that. Not a bad kid!). We never did run into anyone there, but there were clearly people who would come at night and leave their forty bottles, their empty cigarette boxes, their clothes or shoes (more often than you’d think).

You know that feeling when you’re in a store and you see the perfect something-or-other you didn’t know you were wanting and that you quite literally can not leave without? That’s what those little, odd things in the field were to me. My room (the FROG of the house, huge and away from everyone else—perfect for a teenager of recently divorced parents) began to accumulate things: those empty forty bottles, road line reflectors, rusted cogs, bottle caps (so many bottle caps), playing cards, feathers, bracelets. Which is to say—and what I didn’t quite realize at the time—my room accumulated stories.

I had assembled—curated—a narrative of objects. Drunken nights and missed opportunities, recklessness and confidence. I photographed these objects constantly, playing with the frame and the perspective, finding other ways to let the story out.

That’s what tarot is. You’re playing with perspective, finding ways to let your story out.

My mother has practiced tarot for herself at least since I was a teenager, though this wasn’t something we shared often together when I was growing up. I enjoyed it, respected it, but I was heavily involved in my writing and photography (and let’s be honest, probably not trying to hang out with my mom more than I had to). (Sorry again, Mom. But you probably also knew that, too!)

One of the first times I had my cards read in was the night my husband and I got engaged. We were in Ireland staying with one of our best friends, whose roommate had grown up with a mom who also practiced tarot, but for a living. She’d been asking to read for us the whole trip, and when we came back that night engaged, of course we said yes.

I wish I remembered the specific cards we pulled. I do have photos that were taken of us during the reading, but the cards are too blurry to see. But what I do remember is hope—the feeling of possibility. Sure I was riding the high of getting engaged, but I remember that feeling from the reading cementing inside me, something to stay. I bought my first deck not long after that trip.

Then COVID-19 happened (said every essay written post-2020). The object of my personal pandemic obsession was tarot. It seems that as the pandemic has spiraled, our fixations have too—on both a personal and a global scale, for better or worse. Tarot is the fixation that gets me the through the worse.

Tarot is a practice of mindfulness, of self-discovery, of self-forgiveness. I suppose there are tarot readers who consider themselves fortune tellers. And I guess it is a telling of possible fortunes. But the operative word here is possible. The absoluteness that popular culture would have you believe—that a reading can be as specific as telling you when you’re going to meet your soulmate and what they will look like, or when you will die, for example—is something I think any tarot reader would agree is not the intention of the cards themselves.

The entire point of tarot is that you have choices. That you can change your trajectory—take off your blindfold, swing yourself upright, tame the lion. I believe there are readers who might be accurate with such specific fortune tellings, but more often than not these types of readers are mostly trying to scam you out of your money. What you can actually find instead in the imagery of tarot cards is your own narrative—the story you’re telling yourself, the story you think others see, the one you wish you were living.

In truth, there’s very little for me to do in a tarot reading. It all comes down to you—what you see in the cards, what feelings, memories, and motifs you see. There are “rules” of tarot, but as I said, tarot is all about choices. Those rules are flexible, in that they’re entirely dependent primarily on the querent’s own interpretation. If the major arcana (The Lovers, The Empress, The Fool, etc.) are trumps to the minor arcana (The Three of Cups, The Nine of Swords, etc.), then your intuition trumps all.

As I started to get my footing within my own practice, and especially as I started reading for other people, in the words of Taylor Swift, “I saw something they can’t take away.” (IYKYK.)

It’s hard to trust yourself with your intuition, much less another person. But for those who trust me with their queries, who let me help them pull back the veil into their own intuition, I see the impact it has on them, because it has an equal impact on me. Perhaps the only way I can describe the feeling I have after doing a tarot reading is to liken it to the feeling I had after seeing Taylor live at the Eras Tour in 2023 for the first time (and if you know you anything about me, that was a big deal. I’ve been a fan since 2006). And genuinely, every time I have the honor to read cards for someone, it is a big deal to me. I like for us to have fun while we look at the cards together, but I never take the trust lightly.

It was in 2021 that I first started thinking of formally offering tarot readings. At the end of 2022, I decided that in the new year I was going to figure out some way, any way, to involve tarot more in my life. Then when 2023 rolled around, I didn’t do much about it. (Shoutout to my lifelong friends anxiety and depression.) I tucked my decks away and didn’t use them for months. But there was a day in late August when it was starting to get cool again, when the wind started to pick up, and the mornings in particular required layers.

When I first returned to the office after the initial pandemic lockdown, it was also August, and I commuted down to the peninsula two hours earlier than I needed to be at work so I could sit at a favorite coffee shop right when they opened and have a latte by myself and pull a card or two. As the same chilled wind of the present-day August clipped my face on my walk into the office, it was like I could taste the latte and feel the grain of the wooden table as I flipped a card over. It felt like I was being reminded of something.

I went home after work that day and pulled just one card from a favorite oracle deck that, again, I hadn’t touched in months. I never wrote down which card it was, because I was running late to a weekly meet up with some friends (okay yes it was for D&D). One of whom, later that night, said she had someone who needed a tarot reader for an upcoming event, and would I be interested? I probably said yes before she even finished her sentence.

What I remember feeling from that card that night in August was a glimmer—an inkling that I’d soon have an opportunity to build on my story more. I probably thought the reading was about work, to be honest. But then within hours I was signed up to do tarot readings at an event (!), and I couldn’t deny that perhaps the card had actually been cluing me into this instead.

I needed a name for the event poster, and I needed to come up with one in 24 hours.

Introducing, Spring Tide Tarot.

In my next post, I’ll talk more about how the name Spring Tide Tarot came to be, and what it means to me. If you’ve read this far, thank you. Follow me on Instagram, and hit me up whenever you’re ready to do a reading yourself. Grateful to have you on this fool’s journey with me.