Tag: practical tarot

Empress is About Bounty Today

Empress
The Empress from the Practical Tarot by IzoldaT

Today’s Practical Tarot card is the Empress. Think abundance, bounty, fertile creativity, and joy. You can choose your perspective towards those today.

Here’s an example from my own life. Rich and I are moving to a new neighborhood at the end of May. The day we’re supposed to move is either Memorial Day or the day after memorial day. If we can’t get into our new apartment until June 1, everything gets kerfuffled because will have nowhere to take our stuff for that weird 24-hour period.

So, I’m choosing to remain in that hopeful, abundant, bountiful place. We will move correctly and properly into our new place and will be easy, simple, and full of bounty and goodness. It will slide into us living in a lush, lovely, and fab new place where we can make our home for the next few years.

That’s how the Empress works. And that’s how storytelling in tarot works too. You intuit the story of your life and make it so.

It still boggles me that I created this deck. I have 35+ years professional reading experience, and over the years I’ve realized the tarot is the perfect storytelling tool. You have 78 possible stories. Each them is a universal life lesson. When you read the cards, you tell those stories. And I love hearing from people who’ve gotten their own copies who say they can see the stories in the deck as well.

The Practical Tarot – The Moon

If you want to be happy, get OK with uncertainty. The things you can control, you will control. The things you can’t control, you don’t have any say over. And sometimes the things you think you can control end up spinning way out of control anyway. It’s not about removing stress because there will always be stress. It’s about responding to it in a way that keeps you peaceful in the moonlight.

The Surprising Truth About Inclusion in Tarot Decks

One of the things I really wanted to do as I was creating this deck is to make it inclusive. Tarot decks are usually not inclusive. Some of the more modern or specialty decks have embraced inclusion, but many more traditional decks don’t default to male-oriented, heterosexual imagery and white skin.

I wanted to do something different. Many of the cards in my new deck, the Practical Tarot, lend themselves to reimagining. This is one of them. For example, the Sun usually has a little blonde-haired blue eyed child riding a horse. One, I didn’t want anyone to be riding a horse. And two, I wanted to be sure that we had children who weren’t just little tiny blonde babies on the card. That’s the cool thing about being the artist. You get to do what you think is right.

The Pages in the deck gave me another opportunity to be inclusive. A lot of other decks give you court cards of white people with different-colored hair.
The Practical Tarot takes many other types of people into account and includes them.

First, usually, there is only one person on the Page card. Granted, the person looks a bit androgynous in some decks. But often you can ascribe male as the identifier.

So, I added two people in each card. They can be male (or male-identifying) or female (or female-identifying). I couldn’t figure out how to insert gender-fluid or non-binary folks because I couldn’t find depictions that would convey those notions in addition to the people already on those cards.
But I could have additional hues of skin, and I did.

It’s so fascinating to me now to see the difference between my old deck and its default to white skin and my deck with its rainbow.

I hope that more people will be able to see themselves reflected in the cards. As a good friend of mine put it to me recently when we were talking about why she moved to Philly from a less diverse place. “It was really great to walk around and see people who looked like me.”

And that’s what I was going for with this deck. I hope you’ll be with it and see people who are like you.