I hate being rushed, and I really hate being late. So, there I was, having sorted out all the things which came up at the last minute, rushing down to the hotel lobby to register and find the classroom for RuthAnn and Wald Amberstone‘s Advanced Birth Cards class with only 15 minutes to spare. I hopped into the elevator, and who is in it but the Amberstones themselves! Recognizing the pre-registration letter I held in my hand, they greeted me most warmly and we had a lovely conversation during the elevator ride. (This would be a common occurrence throughout the four days of the conference, giving me new respect for the concept of the Elevator Speech.)

In the lobby, I easily found the registration table – it’s very easy to recognize a Tarot crowd! I had a wonderful conversation with the women ahead of me in line, as we all waited patiently for our turn at registration. Conference schedule in hand, badge around my neck, I wandered into the classroom to find just the right spot. I saw a few empty places here and there, and chose a likely-looking table. I found myself seated next to Paul Nagy (whom I had just met that morning), and after more interesting conversation around the table, the class began!

If you haven’t worked with Birth Cards before, I highly recommend spending some time on the topic. As the Amberstones point out, if you know someone’s birth cards, you have a great deal of information available to you for their reading that you would not have otherwise. There are various ways to calculate Birth Cards, and, being as we were in the Amberstones’ class, we were using their method. This gives my Birth Cards as Moon and Hermit. The week before the conference, I actually used the Tarot School’s Birth Card Calculator to figure out Birth Cards for my husband, several friends, and most of my extended family. The Darling Husband is Devil/Lovers; mom was Star/Strength; dad was Tower/Chariot. For my grandparents, siblings, nieces, and nephew, almost every single one of them was Moon/Hermit or Tower/Chariot. What are the odds? The one exception was my paternal grandmother, who is a Sun/Wheel/Magician. Whee!

The Amberstones shared a Relationship Mandala spread using your Birth Cards and the Birth Cards of someone close to you. [Warning: this is about to become personal. If you want to skip the personal stuff, you can go ahead two paragraphs.] I chose to do a layout with my mom’s Birth Cards. The layout is:

                 1. Your Public Self

3. Other’s Public Self                 4. Other’s Private Self

                 2. Your Private Self

So I ended up with:

                 1. Hermit

3. Strength                 4. Star

                 2. Moon

What I realized, looking at the cards, was that my mother would have seen it this way:

                 1. Moon

3. Strength                 4. Star

                 2. Hermit

Since she could never recognize my Hermit qualities (studiousness, the ability to accomplish goals, disciplined effort) and only saw me as a temperamental, wild child Moon, she couldn’t see how much we had in common – both our public and private selves have many similar qualities – it was inevitable that we had many difficulties in our relationship.

I played around with this spread with my parents’ cards, and with various combinations of cards for various friends and family members – all quite fascinating. I think this would make an excellent meditation for Memorial Day, or any other personal day of remembrance.

Paul noticed me moving the various pairs of cards around, and commented that my Hermit seemed particularly outgoing!

We then took a break, and moved on to the Tarot Tree of Life associated with each Birth Card pair. RuthAnn had created a diagram for each set, which was amazing. We discussed the relationship between Tarot and Kabbalah, and the influences of each upon the other. I did a quick comparison of the various Trees for the pairs I’d worked with in the prior exercise – very interesting! (I did more work on this concept on the plane ride home – stay tuned!)

Then, suddenly, it was 9:30, the class was over, and the full weight of the week, the flight, and the lack of sleep hit me. Except that I was hungry. The Darling Husband had returned from Manhattan just as the class finished, so we met for a quick dinner, then returned to the room and passed out once again – after setting a very early wake up call to attend the Breakfast Round Table with Robert M. Place!

Having run off several promotional copies and packaged up and sent the master disk of the James Wanless video to the replicator’s on the way to the airport, I enjoyed a brief period of just sitting on the BART train to the airport, grateful not to be staring at a video monitor, contemplating the weekend to come at The Tarot School Readers Studio, presented by RuthAnn and Wald Amberstone.

After an uneventful overnight flight (unlike some of my companions!), the Darling Husband and I arrived at the hotel in Newark, New Jersey just before 7:00 am on Thursday. (For those of you who know what I’m like in the morning, you will find astonishing the simple fact that I was vertical and reasonably coherent. For the rest of you who’ve never had to deal with me in the early hours of the morning, you can take my word for it that this is astonishing.)

The front desk clerk said one of the nicest things a person can hear after an overnight flight: “Your room is ready.” We promptly deposited our bags in the room, made our way to the hotel restaurant, and devoured breakfast. On our way back to the room, I spied the hot tub and decided a soak would be the ideal thing to help me sleep. So off I went to the hot tub at 8:00 am – only to find that it was closed until 10:00 am. On my way back to the room, I met Paul Nagy in the elevator (nothing like meeting someone for the first time when one is jet lagged and clad in 1940s style swimwear!), and we had a pleasant conversation about the upcoming events. I went back to the room and consoled myself with a quick soak in a tub without jets, and passed out.

The Darling Husband had business in Manhattan, and to my amazement (and perhaps his own) managed to pull himself out of bed and into publicly presentable form in the early afternoon. At 2:00 pm, I finally managed to crawl from the bed to the desk to plug in my laptop and check on things at the day job, with clients, and with the video. Everything seemed to be fine, so I managed to get through something like my usual grooming routine and assemble myself into a (mostly) functional person. One last email check (always a mistake!) before heading downstairs to register – then, 45 minutes later, I grabbed my bag of cards and notebook and raced to the lobby to pick up my badge and attend the evening session.

Podcast 17 is hosted by Anastasia, enjoying a fabulous conversation with San Francisco author Susan Levitt, discussing Tarot, Astrology, and Feng Shui. Susan is the author of several books on all three topics, and generously shares her wisdom with us. Click here to listen!

I’m sure you’ve checked out Mary Greer‘s excellent blog by now.  (Of course you have!)  She has a great post about her “Hidden Influences” spread that I highly recommend!

I have a wonderful friend who, although she lives here in San Francisco, we somehow manage not to see each other more than every three months or so because we both have very busy, very complicated lives. She offered the visual of “the long list of irritants currently whirling around like Dorothy in the tornado”, which I loved, because that’s a reasonably accurate description of both of our lives of late.

As any philosophy book, or self-help book, or therapist will tell you, your experience of life depends a huge amount on how you view life. When something is not as you wish it to be, if you view it as a problem, you set yourself up for difficulty and struggle. As a techie friend of mine would say, this approach is “highly non-optimal.” Life can be complicated all on its own – we don’t need to do anything to make it more so.

When I was growing up, my mother used to reply – regardless of what I was dealing with – “It builds character.” To which I’d reply, “I have enough character, Mother, I just want things to go my way.” (The joys of being an Aquarius with a Virgo mother.)

If you take the new age approach of viewing it as a challenge or opportunity, then you may or may not be taking a positive attitude, depending on how you feel about challenges and opportunities – and what potential upside you are able to convince yourself to see in the particular challenge or opportunity. Convincing yourself that having to clean up cat barf (or the philosophical equivalent that has just landed on your desk, in your email box, or wherever) is an opportunity for self-improvement requires more mental energy than I’m willing to expend.

For me, “challenge” and “opportunity” are code words used by my day job coworkers to say “hey, there’s a big fat messy situation heading for your desk, and I’m outta here!” Cleaning up messes is one of the things I’m paid to do (my primary job is to work with people so that messes do not happen; but, if messes do happen, my job is to clean them up), so I’m not going to complain about it. Nonetheless, I have a somewhat negative reaction to the “opportunities and challenges” viewpoint, because to me it allows someone to skirt around having to deal with what the real situation is, and quite often results in a lot of wasted energy and time trying to find the silver lining of opportunity. Sometimes there isn’t one – sometimes, things just suck.

Also, just because something is a character developing challenge and/or an opportunity to develop new skills, abilities, and coping mechanisms, doesn’t mean I have to be excited about it. I don’t have to like it, I just have to accept it – because until I accept it, I can’t do anything with/to/about it.

They’re not problems, or challenges, or anything else fancy, complicated, or ominous. They’re simply items on my To Do list, some of which I have chosen consciously, some of which I’ve chosen unconsciously, and some which have just been handed to me. I try to remember that I always have a choice about whether I deal with them. (Or whether I say screw it and go to bed – or change my hair color – or make a major life change.)

I don’t allow myself to trip about something being a problem, or a challenge, or whatever. No matter how complicated, messy, or downright awful it is, it’s simply an item on my To Do list, and my job is to figure out what to do with it, and the most efficient, effective way to do it and move on to the next item on the To Do list. Whether that To Do item is to prepare a Compensation Adjustment Form to give an employee a merit raise, or to prepare a Notice of Termination for unprofessional conduct, it’s not good, it’s not bad, it just *is*, and my job is to do it as well as I possibly can. Instead of stressing or worrying or dreading what I have to do, I just think about how to do it to the best of my ability.

Next time you find yourself fretting/stressing/dreading something – stop, breathe, and think of it simply an item on your To Do list – and see if that helps at all. I’d be interested to hear your comments!

Leisa Refalo sent an email today that the companion book to Ellen Lorenzi-Prince‘s fabulous Tarot of the Crone will be available in mid-March!  Hurrah! Check out Leisa’s web store at the Tarot Connection Shop to order!

I’ve received a report of listeners having trouble accessing a few of the earlier podcasts (#4, #5, and #6), and someone else reported a problem with the most recent one.  Rest assured we are working with our hosting service to resolve the issues so you can enjoy the podcasts whenever and wherever you choose!

Monday morning, I awoke to find that the cold had settled in my throat, giving me a voice that more than one person told me sounded like Tallulah Bankhead’s. This is not an entirely bad thing – if one is making movies – but wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for teaching.

Digging around in my traveling medical kit, I found some cold medicine from my last trip to the UK, and washed it down with coffee at breakfast. Mistake! About five minutes later, I felt kind of funny. Checking the package after I returned to the room, I (re)discovered that the cold medicine contains caffeine, which I’d managed to forget in the intervening months. I did some deep breathing and had managed to regain some equilibrium by the time I reached the room to teach my class.

I was delighted to have a good crowd of people show up while I was still setting up. We chatted and had a good time. My podcast co-hosts – Rosered, Artemis, and Andrew – arrived, wearing polo shirts embroidered with the Tarot-To-Go logo, just like the one they’d given me on Saturday! What a wonderful surprise!

In spite of the excess caffeine and the Tallulah Bankhead voice, I managed to make a coherent and fun presentation on the topic of “Tarot by the Numbers”. We talked about the meaning of numbers in the Tarot in our familiar western European system, and also compared meanings across a variety of philosophical/cultural orientations. The time flew by, people asked great questions, and suddenly the room monitor was popping in to give me a five minute warning! People came up afterward and continued to ask questions, and we talked as I packed up. I felt quite good about the workshop, and am planning to present it again (in a somewhat expanded version) in April in San Francisco – I just have to confirm the venue, and then I’ll announce it here. Stay tuned for details!

Sunday morning I woke up with the cold I was hoping to avoid. The 11:00 am session I was planning to attend was cancelled, so I allowed myself to relax and rest up for the afternoon.

The first afternoon session was the ever-popular Divination Panel hosted by Thalassa. Joining Thalassa was Lon Milo DuQuette, Calyxa Omphalos, and Naija. Mary Greer was down with the cold that had become the unofficial theme of the event, and so we were denied the pleasure of her presence on the panel. Thalassa gave each of the presenters an oracle they had never seen before, and turned them loose to do readings for members of the audience. As always, it was entertaining, fascinating, and fun.

I then missed all of the fabulous 3:30 sessions because my cold bonked me over the head and demanded I sleep. I managed to wake up in time to go to the 9:00 pm concert with Caitlin Matthews and R.J. Stewart, joined by the wonderful Ruth Barrett and Holly Tannen for a few numbers. What a great opportunity to enjoy music and song from some incredibly talented people!

I had been looking forward to Holly Tannen‘s workshop on the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud since it appeared on the schedule. Hearing Holly recite Rimbaud’s work is a true delight, and I was thrilled at the opportunity to hear her.  As it was an 11:00 pm workshop on Sunday, I was happily surprised to find it well-attended by several fans of Holly and Rimbaud.  I reveled in Holly’s interpretations of the poems, and joined in with the other attendees in taking turns reading his works.  So much fun!  Then, about 11:45, I hit a wall (energetically speaking) – wham! – and suddenly felt like I was going to pass out. I thanked Holly for the experience, made my apologies, and wobbled up to my room, wondering how in the world I was going to get through the class I was supposed to teach on Monday.

Ah, PantheaCon! So many choices each session, and I can be at only one workshop!

Friday night I arrived too late to do anything more than check in, eat dinner, and pass out. Saturday morning, I faced my first round of choices – never easy!

I started the day with Mary Greer’s workshop on “Life As A Dream”. Mary did a short presentation on her theory and her experience teaching this workshop in other settings. The idea is to relate a life event as if one is retelling a dream, and interpret the event as one would interpret a dream. After Mary explained the theory, we paired off and took turns going through the process. My partner was great to work with, and we learned a lot about each other and ourselves.

The next session was a fun workshop with Lon Milo DuQuette presenting “Ask Baba-LON”. Lon shared excerpts from his upcoming book, and took some great questions from the audience. Lon also treated us to a few songs, which are available on his CD from his website.

After a break for lunch, I attended David Skibbins‘ presentation, bearing the intriguing title of “Saving the World, One Murder at a Time.” David is the author of the Warren Ritter mystery series, which is the only murder mystery series to feature a Tarot reader as the mystery solver. David spoke on finding ways to share your passion in the world and transforming it into your livelihood, which was inspiring and motivating.

Then it was time for nap – the late night on Friday (arriving after a long day at the day job) caught up with me, and despite the interesting workshops on offer, a nap was essential to ensure I would be able to attend the evening sessions.

I woke up in time to meet Rosered, Andrew, Artemis, and his wife for dinner.  They presented me with a wonderful gift – a pale blue polo shirt with the Tarot-To-Go logo embroidered on it!  They found a place to do the custom embroidery, and had it done as a surprise for me.  I was quite touched – such a nice gesture!  We ate and talked about Tarot and the workshops we’d been to that day – with so much variety, we’d all managed to attend entirely different sessions!

After dinner, I thought I’d catch another quick nap to rest up before the evening sessions.  The quick nap turned into 12 hours of sleep!  Turns out I was (unsuccessfully) fighting off a cold. I missed all kinds of wonderful things, but getting 12 hours of sleep made it possible for me to make it to some workshops on Sunday.