I grew up in a house where, when I was little, we went to Catholic Church, but we also had a lot of books on the shelves, and a lot of those books explored other ideas. We had books about reincarnation, UFOs, human health, novels, history books, social issues, and I was allowed to read whatever I wanted. I'm so glad I was able to grow up in a family where people weren't afraid of ideas, and where learning new things was a part of my environment. We also talked about a lot of different topics, and it was always interesting.
The use of cards, for divination, was just another thing I experienced at home, along with learning about religion (I loved Bible stories), meditation, self-hypnosis, progressive relaxation, and many other interesting perspectives on how to navigate being human.
The cards arrived with a family friend, when I was about 14. She was going through a divorce, and lived with us while she did. She had a deck of oracle cards, and we would take out the cards, and ask questions, and pulls cards, and talk about the meanings of the cards, the whole family, at the dining room table, and it was fun. It wasn't scary, it wasn't ominous. It was a deck of animal cards.
Not too long after that, I got my very first tarot decks and the first one that I remember came from a second hand store. It had a very intense FEELING to it, and frankly, at the time, it made me uncomfortable. What's funny, is that my sister still has it, and when I touch it now? I can feel that the energy of it feels intense, but very, very good. Intense isn't always bad, but it took me a while to understand that.
I didn't have any real mentorship, for spirit work, when I was a kid, so I didn't have the chance to learn to understand my intuitive skills well. Of course it was scary.
Over the many years after that, my relationship with tarot came and went. But I always came back to it. It was always there, it was me who needed to choose the relationship, and choose to stick around.
Eventually, I fell hard down the tarot rabbit hole. It was at a time in my life where I really did need help understanding a lot of big things that were happening in my life, and learning tarot was like learning a whole second language for that. For me, tarot really is like having a close friend, close by. I find the cards comforting, and familiar. We have a common language.
Tarot is really my first true love, as far as magical things go. And in a world like the one I was raised in, I had a lot of options, a lot of ideas to choose from. I chose my relationship with tarot, I chose