What a Fool believes
I inherited my first tarot deck - unofficially - from my mother, who had picked it up on a whim when I was twenty three. What exactly, has tarot been able to teach me over these years?
Why tarot?
The moment I mention that I read tarot cards, I can almost see the atmosphere shift. Where there was once open engagement and a sense of mutual respect for my contributions, a subtle transformation ripples through the conversation. This isn’t an isolated occurrence - it happens time and again. I’ve witnessed expressions morph from genuine curiosity to polite bewilderment, and sometimes outright skepticism. It’s as if people silently wonder: How could someone seemingly rational and intelligent be drawn to something as famously “woo” and “pseudo-scientific” as tarot?
To be candid, I wrestle with that question myself. I consider myself a logical thinker, someone who values evidence and reasoned argument. And yet, tarot and its mystical kin, like crystals and pendulums, has provided me with a kind of evidence that is deeply personal and impossible to dismiss. Personal knowledge, after all, is notoriously difficult to replicate or quantify. Yet my subjective experience, my intuitive insights, have consistently satisfied the demands of my otherwise analytical mind and justified my continued engagement with these tools of divination.
There’s a word - divination. A word that tends to unsettle both the devoutly religious and the staunchly scientific. But what if personal experience can be rational, even if it defies replication? Is it truly irrational if there is a discernible cause and effect, even if only I can perceive it? I find it hard to believe it’s mere coincidence that, time after time, when I read for myself or others, there is an uncanny resonance, an invisible thread, connecting me to something greater - a universal intelligence that reveals itself only in those moments.
Intuition, in my view, is a tragically undervalued form of knowing so often dismissed or derided, much to our collective loss. For me, following the quiet guidance of my intuition has led me through a tapestry of experiences that have shaped me, layer by layer, into who I am today. Sometimes these insights arrive as fleeting whispers; other times, as deliberate, insistent nudges. Yet my choices have so often been guided by an inner certainty - unreasonable, unprovable, and utterly unscientific.
I knew, long before it happened, that I would one day marry my husband. I knew, with a clarity that defied logic, that I would have two daughters. I sensed, deep within, that my life’s path would carry me across the globe, traveling for work in ways I could not yet imagine. And perhaps that is the heart of it: some forms of knowledge are not meant to be dissected or measured, but lived and trusted. For me, tarot is not a rejection of reason, but an embrace of a broader, more mysterious way of knowing - a way that has never led me astray.
Stumbling on my first deck
I stumbled on my first tarot deck by accident. My mother, always an inquisitive and curious woman, had bought a deck coupled with the accompanying book which outlined the key meanings of the cards. Having gotten bored with it all after a very brief encounter, the deck and the book were left on the bookshelf - until I ventured over to open the deck myself. Living at home at the time, I didn’t see any issue with appropriating what wasn’t being used by others.
I distinctly remember the deck - the colours, the shapes, the symbolism so deeply entrenched in the craftsmanship. The deck was the Connolly Tarot Deck created by Margaret Connolly - a deck reminiscent of medieval stained glass associated with majestic cathedrals. I remember being entranced by the colourful images displayed on each card’s glossy texture.
A timely burglary
It wasn’t long after I’d acquired my mother’s cards, that I began to take my spreads seriously. I wrapped the deck in a cloth as was conventional practice, and placed them into an old wooden jewellery box - yet another item I’d appropriated from my mother. One day after returning home from work, I found my room had been ransacked. My mattress overturned, my sheets missing, my television and computer gone. The burglars had broken in through the window having wedged open the smallest of gaps to get through. At that moment, I sat devastated on my mattress wondering what on earth had just happened in the middle of the day. My mother had asked me to log all that had been taken - I dutifully complied. What I hadn’t realised at the time and not noticed until later that evening, was what was missing from my bookshelf - my wooden jewellery box.
I was devastated. I had lost my bed sheets, computer and television, but what pierced me beyond words was the loss of my cards. I had invested so much time and energy, soul energy, into those cards. They were beautiful and connected me to my own spiritual growth and development - and they were gone. Taken by thieves who simply were after jewellery for cash without the slightest interest in their true value. I imagined the shock and horror on their faces upon opening the box only to discover the inside contents - a bunch of cards.
I was so angry that, regrettably, I recall trying to hex them - wishing all the bad luck in the world would befall them for stealing my precious cards.
The theft of my cards on that fateful day, pushed me onto a path that might never had happened were it not for that event. I was convinced that the burglary was a sign - symbolic of erasing the past and starting anew. The cards in fact, were not mine. They weren’t purchased by me and were not gifted to me - I had in fact, stolen them from my mother. Was this the universe’s peculiar way to teach me a karmic lesson?
Perhaps.
A new beginning with Rider Waite
I made it my mission to buy a new deck - this time the Rider Waite deck which is so well known - and press on full steam ahead with my tarot divination. What I hadn’t realised however, was that the images I had learned prior had imbibed a certain narrative - the Connolly cards had graphically ensconced entire stories into my psyche. Facing the Rider Waite deck now, I felt alienated and disconnected from the images. They weren’t ‘mine’. I didn’t understand them. I didn’t understand the story these foreign images were telling.
After many months, and sheer perseverance, I began to intuitively read again. As I delved into mastering the Celtic Cross, that cornerstone of tarot’s symbolic language, I came to a revelation - the rigid placements of the ten cards mattered far less than the story they whispered in unison. Each position, though steeped in tradition, began to feel like a type of arbitrary scaffolding. When I first read for others, I clung to the prescribed meanings, reciting interpretations like a hesitant student translating a foreign text. The result felt fragmented and mechanical as though I were assembling puzzle pieces without seeing the whole image. It was only when I surrendered to intuition that the spread truly spoke to me. The cards ceased to be isolated symbols and became a living mosaic, a vibe, for lack of a more refined word. This energy, raw and unpolished, conjured mental snapshots, phrases, and a voice that seemed to bypass my conscious mind entirely.
In those moments, logic dissolved, and I became a conduit for something beyond myself - a part of the divine collective unconscious.
The reactions of those I read for became my compass. Their widened eyes, their breath catching mid-sentence, their quiet “How did you know that?” - these were not affirmations of faith, but evidence. Tangible, undeniable proof that the words flowing through me carried weight. This trust I cultivated wasn’t born of dogma or blind devotion but of cause and effect. My accuracy reflected back a truth I could no longer ignore - that there exists a language older than reason, a knowing that defies explanation but not validation.
Tarot as a guidance tool
As I began to master reading the cards, I began to use them on myself more and more. Job interview coming up? Do a spread. Someone behaving strangely towards me? Do a spread. It wasn’t long before I was doing complete spreads daily searching for guidance and meaning. Some cards made repeated entrances into my spreads: the Wheel of Fortune, the World and the Fool.
When one door closes, another creaks open, though not always in the way we expect. The Wheel of Fortune has often spun into my readings, its cyclical wisdom whispering that life’s rhythms are neither static nor cruel, but alive with motion. It taught me that stagnation is a choice, not a fate. For years, I felt trapped in the grind; a mundane job, dreams of distant shores deferred, endless commutes through snarled traffic, and a teaching salary that barely stretched. Yet the Wheel’s presence would arc across my spreads cutting through the fog of despair with its quiet assurance - This too shall pass. And so I embraced the unexpected, to trust that even the most suffocating seasons carry the seeds of their own undoing.
The World, would come to remind me that chapters end, stories conclude and that versions of ourselves also come to their full completion and end. The World would present itself many a time, particularly after I became a parent as a constant reminder that the old me - the one prior to having children - had concluded her story and that a new story, a new version of myself was being born. The World didn’t mourn what was lost; it celebrated the metamorphosis, urging me to honour the alchemy of reinvention.
Perhaps nothing screamed this analogy more than when I made the decision to relocate abroad, taking my husband and children to far off lands - permanently. Who was this new ‘me’? It was foreigner me; expat me; pioneer me. And which card was the one that guided me through these changes? The Fool. A reminder that when one version of ourselves completes their story, another story emerges. Here was a card that didn’t just tolerate the unknown; it reveled in it. Through its lens, my terror of becoming “foreigner me,” “expat me,” “pioneer me” softened into curiosity. The Fool’s gift wasn’t courage, but a quieter magic; the realisation that every ending is a prologue we’re too afraid to read aloud. The Fool would remind me that it was time for a new life, a new adventure, a new experience - a new story. This card gave me comfort I cannot express in words with a quiet knowing that I was on an unknown path but consciously writing my own narrative as I went.
I’ve been an expat now for twelve years having lived in Dubai, Germany, Malaysia, Jamaica and Korea. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that this was the Fool’s journey the universe had intended for me. Was it challenging? Of course. Were there moments of sheer desperation and tears? Of course. Packing up and relocating to not just a new address, but to entire new countries - three countries between 2020 - 2024, isn’t easy. Amid the labyrinth of language barriers, the Kafkaesque tangle of bureaucracies, the unfamiliar etiquette, the white-knuckled navigation of foreign roads, the clinical disorientation of medical care, and even the quiet humiliations of deciphering supermarket aisles, I am anchored by the Fool’s quiet wisdom. To embrace risk is to glide into the unknown, one intuitive step at a time. The Fool whispers that true navigation requires faith in the soul’s compass. Each stumble over dialects, each clash with red tape, each fumbled cultural exchange becomes another brick on the road to growth. This is not folly; it’s a conscious choice to transmute fear into curiosity, to let the uncharted terrain sculpt the next undulating iteration of ‘me.’ The path ahead is not linear, rather, it’s curved spiraling back to a return to the self, but deeper, wilder, and rewritten.
What fascinating and resonating reading. If only you were here, I would love to have you teach me more about it! J x