Happy New Year. 2018 is here, after another year that went by in a blur. I can’t believe 2017 went so fast.

Last year I put a lot into many things, especially tarot. I spent the whole year studying the cards: meanings, techniques, spreads, even techniques that connect numbers, elements and astrology. It made me feel that tarot has so much to study that sometimes I could hardly tell which part connected to which, or once I’d finished studying something, I didn’t know what I needed to learn next.

But after studying so much, an old question I’d asked myself long ago came back: which method works best, which one is the most accurate? When I tried using what I’d studied and stuck strictly to the rules, the results weren’t very good. Sometimes it made me so attached to the rules that I couldn’t read the cards at all. So do these extra methods I’ve studied really work?

Then I thought back to my first days of reading the cards, the days when I had no rules at all, and yet my readings flowed without getting stuck. Maybe it’s better not to hold on to anything?

If I compare myself to the 22 Major Arcana cards, I think right now I’m at The World. I’ve hit a dead end, boxed in by a frame. I know there are so many beautiful, tempting techniques all around me, but how do I use them without letting them squeeze me so tight that they get in the way of my reading?

Looking at the card and thinking further, I think I read somewhere that The World is the end of what we’re doing. It isn’t really an end. It’s a destination, ready for the start of another path to join on so we can keep walking. Like the last day of the year: it doesn’t end and make time disappear. It’s a day ready for the first day of the next year to join on, so we can carry on with our lives.

Maybe last year was the end of studying all those techniques, so that this year I can go back to being The Fool. Start my own way, without overthinking, without being strict, and let intuition pull those techniques out on its own.

All right. Let’s try again. Let’s step out of The World’s beautiful frame and travel like The Fool again.

With nothing at all…

Back when I was little, I was just an ordinary nerdy kid who liked reading books, doing science experiments and playing games, the way kids do. Back then I didn’t even believe in ghosts or magic.

Then one day my uncle took me to the planetarium, and I saw the stars in a planetarium for the first time and learned about the solar system. It made me wonder what all these things were, and why there had to be nine of them (not counting Earth). All kinds of questions popped up and filled my head.

And there happened to be a bookshop nearby. I already loved reading, so I went in to look for books about the stars and space, that kind of thing. I expected to come out with a book about the stars, but somehow I came out with a book about astrology too (I meant to take a photo of it to show you, but I have no idea where it’s gone now). That’s how I found out that besides the planets we see in the solar system, there are 12 more groups of stars, and each group has meanings for predicting things and reading people’s character too.

That was the first time I came across predictions based on the zodiac signs. I was still a kid, so I didn’t pay much attention to the details, but I could recite the names of all the planets, their symbols and all the signs, and write them too.

Then in middle school I learned more about magic through the Harry Potter books. I also met friends who liked it as much as I did, so I learned about rituals, spells and all kinds of divination (we were only kids, but we took it very seriously, hahaha).

Since then I’ve always liked divination. The first tool I bought was a book, “The Book of Answers”.

It’s a book that gives broad answers. Put simply, it’s a bit like fortune sticks, but the messages are much shorter. You can use it when you want some advice, or to confirm an answer.

The second one, which came right after, was an RWS tarot deck that came with a Thai teacher’s tarot book, the expanded 2000 edition. I don’t know where the book went, but I’ve still kept the cards. They’re very thick and quite tough, and I still use them today (hard to believe it’s been 17 years, hahaha).

But once I got to high school, I didn’t touch any of this again until I started working. That’s almost 10 years in all (oh my goodness). What brought me back to it was probably getting a reading with a friend. What I got from it was something like: I might end up as the head of a spiritual school, or a spirit medium, that kind of thing. So I thought, could that be about readings? But I still wasn’t very sure.

When I got home, I thought I’d have a look, in case I hadn’t thrown them away. I walked over to the storage cupboard (old, and not opened for a very long time). The moment I opened it, there they were. What I felt then was, “Hmmm, I guess this is it.” It was a really quick welcome back.

After that I started studying the cards seriously (very seriously). I already loved reading books (though I didn’t actually read the cards much, hahaha), so I learned a lot about the cards, both about divination and about things that have nothing to do with it. Some of it really stunned me: things I used to believe turned out not to be true at all.

So, now that I’ve gone on for so long with this mini history of how I got into this world, from here on I may start writing about the cards the way I see them. Sometimes it may not match the (Thai) books, or maybe it won’t match anyone’s at all. Personally, I think the cards don’t have just one meaning, and there’s a great deal more behind them that I need to dig out and study. I hope I can cover every card (and maybe every deck, if I have the energy, hahaha).

P.S. If you’ve come here to read this, thank you so much for reading this far. From now on it won’t be about me any more, it’ll be about the cards. If you’re interested in this kind of writing, please follow along 🙂