By Sarah Taylor
In the aftermath of the Connecticut shooting, I had felt that I didn’t want to do a tarot reading. It didn’t feel like something that I could ignore or write around; it would have been the elephant in the living room. Definitely my living room, anyway. I cannot begin to imagine, or believe that I can relate to, being someone who has lost a son, or a daughter, or a mother, a sister, a cousin, a nephew or niece. But as the mother of a near-six-year-old, the grief cut deeper than usual.
It seemed wrong to pretend that what had happened, had not. I wrote to Eric letting him know that I didn’t feel up to writing today. Eric wrote back and suggested that not only do I write, but I write about the incident itself.
And so this is what I am going to do, bearing in mind that the only scant, painfully limited power I have is to reach my heart out to those I do not know. As woman, mother, human being, that is all I have. But I also work with the understanding that the tarot offers something more if we feel we want to accept it — something that is connected to a sense of depth and belonging that can lift us up and hold us in a way that nothing else can. And we need not choose to accept it. The choice is ours entirely; the cards are there if we need them.
Therefore, this weekend’s reading is going to be succinct. It will say as much as it needs to say, and I hope that my words can do it some justice.
I drew three cards: the current situation at centre; at left, what we bring into this; at right, what we take away from this. They were surprising to me in some respects — especially the card on the left — but I come away from the reading with a sense of wisdom that challenged what I thought would be the ‘right’ cards, what I had assumed would show me the path to justice. No. We are all in this together.