About Me

 

My journey began when someone gifted me a book about how to use playing cards for fortune-telling for my 14th birthday. I was excited to dive into learning what I’d assumed was going to be a cool party trick, but soon found that the really interesting insights came from within, not from keywords on a page. 

Cartomancy eventually faded into the background as I went to college, got married, and became a parent. It was only a matter of time before I found my way back to using cards as a tool to look at questions and problems in a new way. This time, though, it was a Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck that ignited my interest. The idea of having to memorize endless lists of keywords and meanings for 78 cards was overwhelming at first, but once I had raided the tarot section of my neighborhood library it became clear that there were as many different perspectives and approaches as there are tarot practitioners. I had to figure out how the cards and their overarching system connected and made sense to ME. My day job was teaching, so once I started thinking in terms of how humans learn and make meaning things began to fall into place.

When I finally worked up the courage to admit to my Catholic mother what I was doing in my spare time, her reaction surprised me. My mom always “had a friend in college” whose life was irreparably ruined by whatever naughty thing us kids got up to and, as she sternly had explained back in 1997 when she busted me and my friends playing “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board” during a slumber party (I guess she could smell us burning incense), one of those things was apparently “witchcraft.”  She evidently softened her stance on this now that I’d safely reached adulthood and achieved gainful employment, though, because she told me about how my great-grandmother Cecelia had used playing cards to tell fortunes, even achieving a bit of notoriety for her accurate readings in her German-American community in Wisconsin. “I believe your Aunt Sarah also once had a deck of tarot cards confiscated by our mom,” she added, and we both laughed at the horror we could imagine on my grandmother’s face.

When I later saw my Aunt Sarah during a holiday gathering and playfully asked about her adventures with tarot, she looked puzzled. “Actually, I’m pretty it was your mom who was the one who got caught with the tarot deck.” 

Neither myself nor my mother were a “seventh daughter of a seventh daughter” like Great-Grandma Sizzle was, but it didn’t stop either of us. Anyone can learn to read Tarot if they find the right entry point… curiosity about the cards might be a tradition in my family, but I promise that there isn’t a “gift” that is only accessible to a few people who are born with it.

Tarot is a fascinating intersection of symbolic thinking, intuitive understanding, and personal growth. Today, I help others discover how these centuries-old images can spark modern insights and meaningful self-reflection. Here’s what makes my style distinct:

• Interpretations informed by psychology and human cognition that focus on practical applications 
• An emphasis on the personal agency that allows each of us to create our own destiny
• Inclusive language and concepts accessible to people of all backgrounds and beliefs 
• Inviting clients to involve their own intuition in interpretations while in a safe space for exploration without judgment or fear