“Sold my soul to the calling
Sold my soul to the sweet melody
Now I’m gone, now I’m gone, now I’m gone”
– from Fire by Barnes Courtney

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is another installment in my lifelong divination saga that I’ve puckishly subtitled “I’m a student of human nature, so of course I’m a cynic.” Here I’m waxing philosophical with a tarot twist. (I was inspired in this effort by reading Paul Fenton-Smith’s description of the reversed Queen of Pentacles in Tarot Master-Class.)

I was recently eavesdropping on a movie my wife was watching in which a dying young man moaned pitifully to his friend “All I ever wanted was for my life to have meaning.” It’s a well-worn platitude that almost everyone hopes to find purpose in existence via any number of traditional avenues. (The rest of us are just “riding the wave.”)

One of the most common is creating a “legacy in the flesh” through progeny (children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and so on down the line). But there is no guarantee (in fact just the opposite) that once we loose them on the world, they will honor our expectations, instead finding their own sense of purpose and leaving us with an empty feeling of “Why did I bother trying so hard?”

Another ephemeral instance is the dubious longevity of career accomplishments. Once we retire with our figurative “gold watch in hand,” our contribution will fade in the memory of our erstwhile colleagues unless something we produced lives on in the annals of the company (in which case they might even display our portrait in the lobby) or remains visible in the world-at-large.

The third, and perhaps most personally insulting, of these scenarios is echoed in the fate of the reversed Queen of Pentacles, in which all the cherished “stuff” she worked so hard to obtain is blithely given away or sold at the first opportunity after her demise. Perhaps the best we can do is write a book to memorialize our presence, but unless we’re the next William Shakespeare or immortal Dr. Seuss, even that will gather dust over time.

In the realm of tarot reading, trying to establish a bulletproof reputation for excellence is like building a castle out of sand; we are only as good as our most recent attempt, and unless we develop a steady clientele, our sitters come and go like Omar Khayyam’s “Wind along the Waste,” willy-nilly flowing in all directions with little recollection of what we told them. To many if not most, a tarot reading is essentially a “disposable commodity” like toilet-paper: while there may be no substitute for it (at least in Western culture), there is also no illusion of sentimentality; we are just “a flush away” from total indifference.

For this reason, I’ve grown relatively dispassionate about anything I tell a client in the way of prediction. While I always give a reading my best effort, I recognize that I’m unlikely to hear any more about the outcome after the seeker walks out the door. So I take no special pride of ownership in my pronouncements, I don’t try too hard to leverage my proficiency in commercial ways, and I refuse to “beat the bushes” for new customers.

Instead I focus on writing about the experience I’ve gained during my lengthy involvement with divination, much of which I trust will resonate with modern practitioners. This goal of sharing my hard-earned knowledge is behind almost everything I post. (I won’t say “expertise” since that’s for my readers to decide.) Maybe it will even grant me a contingent of die-hard followers who will stick around at least until my inventory of ~2,500 essays is exhausted.

As Billy Idol observed with cynical precision in White Wedding (slightly redacted):

There is nothin’ fair in this world,
There is nothin’ safe in this world
And there’s nothin’ sure in this world
And there’s nothin’ pure in this world

But instead of closing with the exhortation to “Start again,” I think I would recommend adopting the gambler’s prerogative to “Let it ride.” After all, in the end even Richard Nixon’s checkered career was partially “rehabilitated” by history. Time may not cure all ills, but it can certainly paper over them, and the exigencies of life in general that might come up in a tarot reading are no exception. We can always have faith that an unblinking Universe will be “looking the other way” if we inadvertently or intentionally stick our neck out when we shouldn’t.