At last night's #Tarot zoom we had some time free. I proposed we do a reading on "Will the Georgia DA indict Trump?" since it was topical and breaks some rules. I tend not to do readings on topics that aren't focused and personal. But I think it is good to break your own tarot rules and see what happens. I thought I'd share it for others to respond to if they like.

We decided to use a five card "Short Answer, Long Answer, Commentary" spread that Ferol Humphrey taught me. I generally use #TarotLayouts where each position is specific and has context and symbolic intent, but I like this one because it isn't what I normally do. It allows a more free-form way of reading that is different from my usual approach and tends to surprise me.

Here is how this layout works. The cards are laid out left to right. The first card is the Short Answer and this is directly and briefly to the point of the question. The next three cards are the Long Answer and they provide detail and elaborate on the answer in interesting ways and often give background. Sometimes they show sequence or they show the way things mix. The last card on the right is the Spiritual Commentary card and I take it as if an angel were looking down on the human situation and giving a brief comment on the reading so far. I don't always think of it as spiritual, but it is meant to be higher level commentary on the Answer.

So, for this reading we got:

Short: XV The Devil.
Long: Ten of Wands, Eight of Swords, Five of Swords.
Commentary: Seven of Swords.

The first thing that strikes me, after seeing The Devil, is that I once wrote about picking the dozen most "negative" cards from the deck and doing readings only with them, and here are five of my picks! I take it as challenge to do the thing I suggest, read through what seems negative to get to a useful reading.

Well, The Devil is a good signifier as Trump is fully materialist, transactional, and has no bottom. He'll go straight to The Devil without hesitation. The DA might see him as The Devil personified, ravaging corruption willing to go to extremes. I don't think she can avoid an indictment if she wants justice. So, the Short Answer, to my mind, is that she either opposes him or ends up adopting those qualities by letting it pass. She, DA Fani Willis, doesn't strike me as someone who is going to fold or buckle under challenge or difficulty.

So, the Long Answer in this case seems to me to be telling a story in sequence. That Ten of Wands is a lot of work, and she is almost back home with it. It was quite a lot of work, but she did the long hard slog and is almost done. The Eight of Swords is the structure of stories she had to build, she went nearly all the way around her opponent and built a wall of facts from testimony. There is an echo of the symbol of Lady Justice here, and the bonds seem a bit light to me, so maybe there is some room for escape. And the Five of Swords shows that she has worked to disarm her opponent and seems to have done so. Some have opposed her but she still stands strong in a good position.

So, the two Answers seem to say yes to an indictment. I can see that I can read these cards from Trump's point of view, which hint at great efforts to stop justice and use trickery and cruelty, but the question isn't about him succeeding, but will the DA succeed. I choose to read it that way, and see these "negative" cards as telling us about her work. Here's hoping I am not fooling myself!

The last card is the Seven of Swords the Spiritual/Higher Commentary position. So, what is the angel telling us? Well, it might be that the DA's work is taking away many of his weapons, but not totally disarming him. In this card I also see some cleverness, stealth and trickery so maybe she has a lot secret information that will be a surprise. I can also see our angel suggesting that Trump sneaks away or gets away with something or hides something. But I see this question as the DA's intent and not his.

I think the angel might be suggeting that Trump isn't done fulfilling whatever purpose he is supposed have here in the world right now. I look at the whole reading and I immediately think that Trump is here to reveal all the ugly things that were just below the surface for so long, that he's shining a light on all those things we wish we could ignore and not have to deal with. All the bigotry and misogyny and racism and greed and lies and cruelty now rampant in the world cannot hide, he brings it all right up into the open.

We have to face it. This looks like it might be a rough time!

Feel free to suggest alternate readings or point out where you thing I'm off track. This reading breaks my personal rules, so it is intended to teach me something and show Ferol's useful layout. A topic like this, how this reading works and how it operates for the question are interesting and I'd like to hear other takes if you feel like commenting. Thanks for reading this looong post!

My #Tarot practice has improved greatly over the years by doing collaborative reading, pushing past the "rules" and by using a bunch of different layouts. Some of the most useful #TarotLayouts I now use were shared with me by others who worked with them long enough to find if they are worth passing around.

My personal inclination is to make small layouts built around engaging themes that are mostly focused for a specific use. Of course I sometimes make larger layouts that are less constrained, or let the cards do what they want, but I love learning about layouts I've never seen or used. In our small tarot group we find it useful when reading to work with a situation by talking and deciding which layout(s) would be most useful. It is a lot of fun and I thought people here might be interested in trying it out, if they don't do this already.

If there is any interest here, I'd like to see if we can do some sharing and collaboration. We could collaborate by coming up with a unique hashtag to make it easy to find or filter. We could then take turns presenting a layout and follow it up with a reading or two that shows how it works. We could then try it out on some specific situation or question. If you're interested but don't have a layout, no problem, I've got a bunch in my back pocket and I'm sure we can find some good candidates to work with on the web.

Anyone interested?

#Introduction

Hi All, my name is Fran and Spirit Bear Dreaming is the label I use for teaching dreamwork and doing things like writing about the things that interest me and which keep me going.

My earliest memory was of picking a tomato from a huge sunny garden with my mother and her mother. We washed it and I bit into in the summer sunshine food, surrounded by loving ancestors. That's my foundation memory.

I grew up in a little village in the laps of the Italian side of the family in the Pennsylvania foothills. I thought their church was goofy from an early age and I looked for more. In my early teens I discovered the I Ching and was blown away by the fact that divination still worked. Later, I had a transformative initiation experience with a tarot reader and then entered into a world of meaning and a living universe, and I've read tarot ever since. Very poorly at first and for years after that, but I've improved a lot over the decades!

I started out working as an artist and ended up doing art production to make a living. As more tech came into the art world I did more tech work and eventually became a developer. A marriage, a family, a home, I hit midlife and realized the trip was half over and that I better get to those things I'd been putting off! A deep dive followed into dreamwork, qigong/tai chi, and then shamanism and now I do a broad mix of those every day.

I read tarot in a small non-public situation and occasionally teach. I've been involved in tarot publishing, including my own intermediate level book on layouts and things. Dreamwork is an lifetime long, ongoing work of imagination in the greater sense. For nearly two decades I've led dream groups and taught dreamwork with a focus on the shamanic Active Dreaming developed by Robert Moss. For a decade I was part of a local shamanic circle build on our leader's Celtic traditions. We worked with spirits, local and otherwise, traversed a lot of interesting realms and did a lot of psychopomp work and clearing, clearing, clearning!

My second Saturn return of a few years ago was very rough, but I survived it. It clearly informed me that I'm in the last few chapters now and that I need to clear up any remaining messes and see if I have anything good to leave for others. I'm learning about that now and frankly, climbing down off the wheel isn't too bad. Lately I have been mostly writing and studying, figuring out what to let go of or get rid of, and finding little tasks to help pay the bills.

The social media scene has been a bit toxic or boring for a while, but as I checked out Mastodon, this site seemed to be full of people interested in many of the same topics as me. So, I did a tarot reading on joining and it told me this would be a good place, if a bit challenging at times. Last night I got a reading that reminded me that I need to get myself out there beyond the gravity of my default introvert self. So I signed in and here I am.

My main topics of interest are:

#Divination in general, including astrology, which I think I will never master, but it pulls at me. Sun in Aries, Moon in Taurus, Sagittarius rising.

#Tarot and especially #TarotLayouts and interesting technical issues in using and reading tarot. I love shared readings where we collaborate and everyone brings things to it.

#Shamanism of the modern kind, using sonic drivers or the like. My teachers all trace back to the Harner efforts to build a system that modern Westerners can use to get back to the foundations of being human after being long separated from their shamanic ancestors. I don't really know much about traditional people's works and I try not to interfere or appropriate things I should avoid.

#BodyEnergetics since that seems to be a requirement for any spiritual efforts. I've worked a lot with QiGong and Tai Chi, but I am always open to learning more.

#Dreaming and #Dreamwork especially using the techniques developed to get more help from dreaming and finding more practical ways to use it in waking life. #ActiveDreaming is very powerful.

I appreciate you reading this whole thing! Cheers!

I didn't come here to promote stuff, but I should share this in case people are interested in #TarotLayouts

During lockdown I was recovering from major health issues and internally I was in sparse silent place. I wrote a book on #Tarot that heavily focused on ten simple layouts and some ideas about Tarot that I had been working with for a long time.

I didn't have the energy to shop it around so I self-published it for Kindle. Search my name there and you'll find it. Thanks!

#TarotSpread