Two recent books in this genre highlight the importance of drawing connections between commonalities
How can tarot help us connect with our spirituality? A reading
Ever wish you could tap into something spiritual? Try a tarot reading.
Tarot helps us connect with our spirituality – and there’s plenty to learn Read more
New York City-based Amy Avon recently wrote a piece for Time’s Relish blog. In the article, Avon, a paralegal by day, connects with her feelings of joy through a tarot reading.
“I think a lot of times we feel a lot of pressure to fit into a binary: one way, one way, one way,” Avon said. “I want to find a way for myself to live in all the different types of ways that exist in all the different lives.”
I prefer to fill in the blank with an answer that’s meant to be a hopeful statement about how I plan to connect with my spirituality, though this might sound clumsy or retrograde.
After spending part of my childhood reading tarot and opening myself up to the idea of the “parallel universe” that lies between reality and our spiritual selves, I see plenty of simple, intuitive truth behind the idea that there are many different ways to connect to the divine, which is why spirituality is so frequently confused with religion. As Avon points out, it’s not something we must fall into one or the other: “Most people have some kind of spiritual disposition.”
We are a collective of divinities, separate and non-specificly religious but mysterious, and especially present in the arts. Now more than ever, it’s important to have these ideas in the center of our understanding of the world around us.
Last year, New York novelist Darcy Eberle began a long list of tarot readings in an essay for the London Review of Books, based on the notion that people can learn “something positive from the occult in the present milieu of social media; the anthropologically enabled media feed our desire for any kind of pseudo-advice,” Eberle writes.
“Writing requires further readings, obviously, but should we be able to turn to the occult for cues on the right form of empathy or self-knowledge to lean into,” Eberle asks. “Who knows.”
And this month’s award-winning novel, God’s Unfinished Business by Blake Goetzman, opens with a reading: “I believe that when you open yourself up to the gifts, things happen,” a woman tells Goetzman. “Sometimes, things happen unexpectedly. It’s never too late.”
“All humans are inherently spiritual,” Goetzman told me earlier this year. “In the wake of Katrina, I realized it could be seen as a poem of loss. When we open ourselves up to God’s gift, the gods come along.”
Who would you like to see participate in a tarot reading?
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