Why I’m making this
On picking and choosing, and creating a balanced system.
Surprisingly, it’s from the Mormon side of my family that my first Tarot cards were passed down, when I was 11. Growing up in Utah in the 80s, Mormons were the predominant culture. Yet my nuclear family was not Mormon, which meant from a young age I knew both that I was somewhat set apart from the collective, and could choose what to take or leave.
My mother ran on a Puritan work ethic, and for a while we dabbled in a Missouri Synod Lutheran church that wanted absolutism. When I struggled with that absolutism, my mom told me to just pick and choose what I wanted. That was not what the bearded white pastor was telling me. It’s what she was telling me, and she was always the stealthily smartest person I knew. The permission to take what serves you and leave the rest didn’t come from rebellion. It came from my mother, quietly, while a man with a beard was telling me to swallow the whole thing.
I spent my twenties ambitious for success. Successful at what, by whose measure, I never quite answered. I still have a day job, and on the good days I believe in its mission. That’s real too. They’re both mine.
An astrologer once told me my sun and moon sit opposite each other in my chart, a permanent pull between structure and the unstructured by design. My daily life runs on logic, the masculine, the yang. Tarot has always been the pull back to yin. It was never just the party trick I sometimes pretended it was. It was the way into a real conversation, the way a new friend tells you their hopes or fears before they’d normally say them out loud, the way every card turns out to have a silver lining if you sit with it.
The Almanac is the place those two halves stopped taking turns. The math is mathing: systems thinking, deterministic, checkable. But it’s also all of that meeting you and who you are today, your intuition, that first reaction you have to a card before you read its “actual” meaning.
I don’t know if I believe in fate. I do think we get a choice, every day, about what we do with what we’re handed.
The card doesn’t change. I do.
With more curiosity than certainty,
Tali