Grand Changes
This was going to be a deck interview with the Green Glyphs Lenormand, but it took a turn as I thought about my last Grand Tableau reading with the deck. You’ll find the deck interview in my next post. Here, you’ll read about some changes from this past week. Here’s the TL;DR, brought to you by some of the Big Bads of Lenormand.
Clouds: Being open to uncertainty and changing course when needed
Coffin: How clearing physical space can open up more than your floorspace, such as a new video / live recording series on my Instagram channel, Not-Such-A-Hermit Talks, where I talk with other folks who work with tarot, crystals, mediumship, and other forms of woo
Mountain: Changes to the third-party payments processing system I use in my shop that have prompted me to re-evaluate and re-commit to the greatest services I can provide, such as personal coaching and tarot lessons
I love the Green Glyphs Lenormand, but it challenges me. Or it might be more accurate to say, “I love this deck, and it challenges me.” It’s not my first Lenormand deck, but it is the first deck that I used to try to read a Grand Tableau. That was almost a year ago, and I use Lenormand decks frequently, but I still feel uncomfortable reading the Grand Tableau. It’s not because it doesn’t make sense or there are too many cards or I can’t do it. I just don’t do it enough. It took me a long time to read tarot well for the same reason. I didn’t like failing to see the message. To be fair, I also think that I didn’t much like succeeding either, and I’m finding that again with the Grand Tableau.
Part of it is ego. I feel as if I can read the individual cards well and I know that I can read a tarot spread well. My Tarot Tableau system was developed out of respect and love for, as well as some slight fear of, the Lenormand Grand Tableau. Why can’t I just read the Hell out of it? This past week has helped me see that I might not be misreading it after all. I think that I just get hung up on seeing all the “bad” cards in the deck. In my case, it’s not been fun to keep seeing the Gentleman next to the Clouds, time after time. It’s easy to shut down. Imagine seeing the Devil and the Tower in every tarot spread you tried as you were learning. Who wants to read that? And, when you do, who wants to see how that trajectory plays out? It seems better to change course if you can than run your ship headlong into the fog of uncertainty. Perhaps it’s a problem with my implied definition of “better.” What I really mean, Taurus that I am, is “safer.”
The last time I read my Grand Tableau, a week or two ago, the Gentleman was running up against the Clouds, as well as the Mountain and Coffin, and not in a way where I could read them as counteracting each other. I wanted to change course, but you can’t just bank around a mountain or wait for the weather to change. Mountains don’t move. If you want to go anywhere in that general direction, you have to prepare to climb.
A lot has changed in this past week as I’ve been on “vacation” (at home, naturally). Some of it is thanks to my own willingness to see how things play out and go with the flow, and some of it is my tunnel vision when things get in my way. I am a generally clean person, but like just about everybody, I can become blind to minor obstacles with which I’ve grown comfortable. It’s normal, but it frustrates me. I know the effects of space on people. Still, it always catches me off-guard how I can suddenly just wake up to realize that I’ve been putting up with nonsense, and I just suddenly can’t function without changing it.
I posted to Instagram about how I had certain plans for this week of vacation: work on some art; get back to deck creation; write creatively; work on my book of minor arcana spreads; finish my fifth video for the Tarot Tableau video teaching series. Instead, I cleaned out and thoroughly rearranged my closet / sacred space. It completely changed my plans for the week. It’s amazing how simple something like a relatively easy physical shift can ripple through us. Whether it’s a shift in energy à la feng shui or just catharsis, I appreciate it.
That opened up something new for me: my Not-Such-a-Hermit Live Chats on Instagram with other readers and spiritual workers, which I’ll be holding almost daily for the next month. (If you miss them, you can always find them later in my IGTV feed. You can find my first conversation with the Queerophant on IGTV here.) I would like to keep the conversations going after this first month because I love the energy exchange, and I know that I can learn a lot about different aspects of this work that I would never take the time to learn about otherwise, but it might not be daily. There is such a thing as information overload. We’ll see where things go.
That was perhaps the spiralic pattern of the Clouds and possibly the Coffin, which can be associated with closets, both physical and metaphorical. With the Clouds cleared, I discovered the Mountain.
Hopefully you’ve seen my announcement bar that I won’t be accepting credit cards at my shop any more. It’s not because of some ethical repulsion to systems of credit; it’s because Stripe—the only credit card processing company used by SquareSpace—is no longer working with tarot readers. I’ve appealed their assessment, and I've been denied, so my shop can’t accept credit cards any more. It’s pretty simple. I could change to a different website host, but I won’t, at least not this year. PayPal can still be used in the shop, and In this new era of virtual everything, it’s not too much to expect that most people have such an account. But if you don’t, we can always work something out over email, using the Cash app or Google Wallet or some other payment platform.
The reason for their stoppage of service is that I was determined to be in violation of their terms as a high-risk business conducting “fortune telling or related services,” which actually isn’t even on their list of high-risk businesses: only “psychic services” comes close. Since I don’t claim to use psychic powers while conducting readings and actually stress that I am not fortune telling or psychic in my Terms & Conditions, About page, and FAQs, I thought I had a shot with my appeal. But I doubt they even read it. I was mad about it, but that won’t change how they operate. (They have another payments processing system that deals with “high-risk businesses” that no doubt also charges more for each transaction. Even if I were inclined to use it, it doesn’t automatically link well with SquareSpace.)
The point of all this is not to vent about a credit card processor’s lust for more coin—hello, they are paid to help people get money—but it made me rethink some things. And paired with the conversations that I’ve already been having with folks through the Live Chats, it made me realize that I want to change some of the things that I’ve been doing. I want to focus more on the conversation of tarot and spirit work and connect with people in real time because that’s where some of the real magic happens. So I’ve opened up two new services under a new section of my shop labeled Coaching: personal coaching through tarot and private tarot lessons.
At the beginning of the year, I announced a pilot program for personal coaching through tarot. I’m opening that up finally to be a service that anyone can purchase one month at a time. There are some minor tweaks, which you can see in the product description, but it’s the same idea as what I originally proposed back in January, so I won’t repeat it here.
What’s new and exciting is private tarot lessons!
You should know by now that I love talking about tarot and teaching tarot. It’s how I connect to the Hermit archetype since I’m not a true introvert. I want to help you learn to read the tarot in new and better ways that suit you. Why? It’s an incredibly powerful tool, and if I can help you learn how to read it for yourself in ways that really open it up to examination, then you don’t need to turn to anyone else to help solve your problems. True, there are times when you need or just want an outside source of insight—I get full tarot readings every few months, and I receive personal insights from tarot readers I support on Patreon—but most of the time, you have all the information you need if you just know how to interpret it.
Of course, I have my free Tarot Tableau video series, and I also have a dozen videos on IGTV that demonstrate one-card readings along with an explanation of how I got to that reading (the first video in the series is available through this IGTV link). I call them tips and tricks, but they’re part of a mental catalogue of strategies from which my intuition can pull when I’m doing a reading, so you should definitely check those out if you’re just dipping your toes into the water.
But if you want to explore tarot with me (outside the context of a reading) and want some personalized time, I’m available to help you learn more about the tarot, transform your practice, and fine-tune your skills. The lessons are informal in that there isn’t a curriculum or a set number of sessions; they’re based in conversation and discussion, not lecture. We’ll be talking about tarot and how to read the cards in a way that suits you and your personal beliefs, including creating your own tarot spreads.
For those who want more of a lecture format or strict structure, I can certainly provide that in our sessions. I might offer up a lower-cost alternative next year with a series of prerecorded videos covering expected topics, but that’s not as interesting to me. That method doesn’t allow for the same personalization that most tarot readers probably need. And if you’ve been through the basics or been reading for many years, then that kind of one-size-fits-all approach isn’t likely to help you take your readings to another level.
And related to cleaning up my space, I’ve further streamlined my reading offerings on the site.
Most of my General readings are now just one product with different ways to look at it, including Reader’s Choice for those who don’t know or care. I love that the Golden Dawn provides different insights from a Horseshoe, but many new clients can find it confusing. I’ll be keeping my Tarot Tableau readings separate because some folks may want to use a reading for themselves as a way to learn the method.
Short & sweet readings are now one flat rate regardless of the number of cards (and I stuck to the low end of the possible flat rates). The point of Short & sweet readings is to be short and sweet, so even if there are many cards, I won’t be writing a novel about them. I expect that they’ll just be 250–500 words, even if someone asks for a short and sweet Golden Dawn.
Similarly, I’m trimming down the length of my Deep readings. Frankly, there’s more information in there than some people can handle in a single sitting, and they take an inordinately long time to write and edit. I love writing, so I’m willing to be paid less for each hour’s work than an employee at a fast food chain if that work helps fundamentally shift something for someone who needs it, but the length and over-writing can distract from the main messages.
I’m still offering the choice between video recordings and PDF reports for my Deep Readings, but I’m going to try keeping them a little shorter than I used to, typically consolidating video messages to 20–30 minutes and PDF reports to a little over 1,000–1,500 words. (By contrast, some of my sample readings are 4,000 words long.)
And speaking of long, this is ~2,100 words, so I’ll stop it there.