Book+Key

I knew Saturday was an unusual day but I couldn't put my finger on it. It's like having an itch you can't quite get to or trying to remember who played the blacksmith in the old Gunsmoke TV series (it was Burt Reynolds--I can't let this become a mindworm for you). For one thing, there have been some unusual noises around the house.

My old dresser, a beautiful cherry piece with smooth lines from around 1840, has been making noises. Naturally, I don't notice them until I go to bed because I don't spend that much time in the bedroom (hold your guffaws, please). But on nights when I'm especially agitated, it seems to sound especially loud with creaks and pops as if it too is settling in for a snooze after a long day. I might think it was cooling but it's on the northeast side of the house which tends to be cool anyway and there's seldom a ray of sunshine that hits it.

Then one evening last week, I was pretty sure I heard a whistle in the hallway. It's a very small hallway, about the size of a disappointing closet and right outside the bedroom door. All noses were accounted for, especially those prone to whistling snores and this seemed to just come out of the air. Well, no worries.

Friday night--technically Saturday morning, everyone woke up yelling because somehow the television in the bedroom had come on at 1:32 AM and everyone had been nicely asleep, even Louie. Saturday morning at a reasonable hour I found the TV remote on the headboard above my head and was pleased to conclude I had flung my arm up and unconsciously turned everything on. That was something of a relief.

Creaks, pops and whistles I'm OK with. The occasional phantom cat seen in the living room does not bother me. I'm quite sure that the late Normie, from whose estate we purchased the house, is happy we're here because we were kind to him while he was alive. But the TV thing. That was going to be a little too much like a Ghost Hunters all-nighter. I prefer to find the mundane solution first and I'm confident I did this time.

Still, it left me with a feeling Saturday of not-quite-unease. It was more like expectation, like waiting for a spoon to be nudged off a counter. Nothing big, just...something.

I had a reading with a repeat client midday and hoped that what I said was something they could make good use of. I'd purchased a cup of coffee and drank perhaps a third of it, tossing it on the way to the fabric store to look for something. I wasn't sure what, inspiration maybe. I did find a lovely bargain that was just the thing I had been thinking of for a couple of weeks.

"Do you have your Hancocks card?" the tiny service clerk asked. No, alas, I had lost my keys more than a year ago that had my little shoppers card on it. I gave her my telephone number and returned home with my purchase.

I hung out online a while and was inspired to write something funny, about what an automated answering system would sound like if you called heaven (local call from Ireland, of course).

"Hello, you've reached Heaven. Our options have changed recently so please listen carefully and choose one of the following. For St Anthony Miracles or Lost and Found, please dial 1 and have your credit or debit card ready. For Parking or Barbecue with St Laurence, please dial 2. For hopeless cases and/or casino assistance with St Jude, please dial 3. Cats, dogs and other small animal issues with St Francis or St Martin de Porres, please dial 4. Travelers, please be advised that St Christopher is no longer taking referrals. Please dial 5 and a saint will help you. Wait times maybe up to 30 minutes, so reservations and donations are recommended. If you just need someone to talk to, St Joan of Arc and Mother Theresa have limited hours. For more information, please dial 6...just one 6, please. All other questions, please dial 0. Have a wonderful life."

A couple of chats and a quick reading for a friend later, and I was still trying to figure out what the unease was. I made dinner plans for Sunday night, checked messages in email and social media.

What?? What was it? Had I forgotten something? In Lenormand, the Book represents a secret or mystery if not a literal book. One end is closed and can't be opened. The other end might be opened but in Lenormand is usually closed because it represents information not yet available, something hidden. For me, I couldn't even tell what was hidden, let alone where it was.

I paused in my marathon of Midsomer Murders, sent a note to Mary K. Greer about an episode with a Tarot reading in it since Mary "collects" representations of Tarot in art, film, etc. At least it was a Swiss 1JJ deck in a Celtic Cross, even if (bring up strains of "Danse Macabre") the final outcome card was Death. I groaned at the cliche. It's a murder mystery, after all. And I decided to change into my "soft clothes" for the evening and went to the bedroom with the sometimes-noisy dresser to root for a t-shirt and sweats.

Something fell on the floor with a crash. I looked down and saw keys. At first they didn't make sense to me. These weren't my everyday keys I use with a red and blue Snoopy-on-his-doghouse housekey and a couple of dangling plastic seashells, something big and obnoxious enough to find in the deep bucket of my purse. No, these were Other Keys. Those keys. I bent to pick them up, filled with curiosity and the culmination of the strangeness of the day.

These were my keys from a year and a half ago, finally slipped from the pocket of a blue denim jacket where they had slept all this time. I picked them up as if they were a baby bird. Were they even real? There was the Hancocks tag and a couple others, the leather tab with The Hanged Man tooled into it, the keys, the electronic fobs I was afraid were in someone else's hands or smashed in a landfill.

"My keys," I said stupidly. What was lost was found. Well, no need to call Heaven after all, I thought.

Book + Key is the Answered Question, the Solved Mystery, the Secret Revealed.

Now I have to figure out if they went through the wash and ruined the electronic fobs. I think in Lenormand as well as physics, everything has to be somewhere.

Best wishes.

Things to Do During Mercury Retrograde

I thought I would take a positive spin on the usually-tricky Mercury retrograde season. OK, for the people who think this is all bosh I must toss you a bone and say, no, no one really thinks planets move backwards. Really! You’d think we were talking about magic or miracles or something. No, retrograde just means the apparent backward movement of planets. It all has to do with relative movement and things you can look up in more authoritative sources than this. You aren’t coming to me for this kind of information, are you? OK, that’s settled.

Now, we’ve just entered a Mercury retrograde time, one of three times a year. It’s a time associated with computer malfunctions and communication errors. This sort of thing tends to make people addicted to Twitter and Facebook cringe since our current fashion is to communicate electronically, the faster the better. Shut that down and, golly, we’d have to go outside, read a book, do some gardening, clean house, all those thing we put off because we spend too much time with our computers. Think of the horror! What was life like before smart phones?

What’s that you say? You’ve lived through every one of these so far? Me, too. It’s the annoyance of the little things that go wrong that get you during these things. But there’s a something positive you can do when the electronics and communications planet goes into reflection mode. Maybe even more than one thing.

One of the recommendations during a Mercury retrograde period is to review things that have already happened instead of starting something new. That’s not such a bad thing, is it? It’s a “bloom where you’re planted,” “shop in your own closet,” and “read the books you’ve already bought” sort of message.

Unlike most of my buddies, I’ve never watched Game of Thrones. What a great time to catch up since the reruns are available On Demand. I know it isn’t the best exercise, but watching the politics of a fictional realm puts a softening aura around the politics of the real world. I started watching and realized I had seen at least parts of the first two episodes already, making it an even better Merc Rx deal; it’s about the do-overs. The Hubs points out that this is merely Dallas for the unelectrified.

While I’m writing this, I’m watching the first season episodes and thinking I had hoped to see more about the dire-wolves than I have so far. But so far I like all the animal references, like sending a raven instead of Potter’s owls and the horse culture who doesn’t believe in crossing water deeper than a horse. If only our own politics were as entertaining as George R. R. Martin’s mind.

Sean Bean as our hero has certainly a pleasant image as the voice of moral leadership on GoT. I remember Dawn French’s Vicar of Dibley had a crush on Sean Bean. That’s a series that’s swallow-your-gum funny if you haven’t seen it. Dawn French is one of my favorite funny actors.

Those who admire Diane Lane’s stunning performance in Unfaithful should also admire French’s Vicar, charged with the spiritual life of her village as one of the few female vicars and also charged with, um, admiration for Sean Bean. The play of conflict and desire is no less gripping than Lane’s Oscar performance and funny too. Such a human comedy is Dawn French. Sean still looks good to this old girl in GoT.

However, I read in the descriptions that the show purposefully portrays the actors somewhat in need of a bath. Watching sweaty barbarians who seldom change clothes, I am reminded that my mother’s vision of “smell-a-vision” as the next big thing and I am grateful technology went for color and high-definition instead.

“What’s that smell?” your friends would hop back in horror upon entering the TV room.

“Oh, we were just watching the Game of Thrones. Let me put the fan on and open a window.”

What might have been is not always a candidate for wistful longing. Just saying.

Besides going through cob-webby entertainment, there are other Merc Rx things to do. For instance, I have unfinished needlework projects I would like to resume. Much better to resume an old project than start a new one when Mr. Tricky is looking backwards.

Where to start? I have a fabulous purse I was mid-stitch from a stunning Celtic knot pattern in blues and turquoises which has sat for a while. If I finish it, and I really should, it will be breath-taking with the jacket I started earlier this year. I have everything I need to make it so resuming that project seems like the obvious choice. And there are some ornaments that the Hubs stitched that I have meant to finish. I could do that in time for Christmas and they wouldn’t take long. There’s at least one ornament of mine to finish too. Hmm, there’s a theme here. And there’s a tea cozy I started. Oh, and a case for a deck of tarot cards. This stack is taller than I thought at first glance.

The thing not to do while pawing through my “UFO” or unfinished objects pile is to start yet another new project. This might be a great time to research and plan for the next project, though. The fine line between planning and actually starting it up, like listing supplies needed as opposed to actually obtaining those supplies, can be the tricky part.

Have you ever cleaned out a closet and gotten distracted by the “lost” treasures you unearth? It’s something like having a pity party only a lot more cheerful. The result is the same though. You didn’t really get anywhere with the project. You were distracted by your old stuff, whether it was a box of fragrant soaps you had forgotten or a hasty choice you regret. A retrospective should have a useful outcome even if it’s just to remind you that you don’t need to buy soap because you have some or that sometimes, hanging around like the Hanged Man, it’s better to rest your usual nature and just reflect. Inaction is a choice too.

Well, heck, there goes Sean Bean. OK, no more spoilers. I’ll be hanging with the reruns.

Best wishes.

Tarot of Da Feet

I love getting together with folks who love tarot or with people who have similar interest of any kind. It’s probably the extravert thing about me but how fun when we already have a topic of conversation, especially one as varied, controversial and dynamic as tarot. It gets even the introverts talking and you should know nothing pleases me more than to know what’s on an introvert’s mind. For instance, that’s why there’s a comment section at the bottom of each blog; you email people will just have to click on the link to the blog to see what I mean.

When I was in my 20’s it became apparent that the art of conversation was not something one learned in high school or at the parents’ knee. I realized that reading up to 4 books a day during my summers and watching entirely too many black and white movies gave me a skewed perspective of human interaction. They call those old movies “talkies” because they figured out how to add the sound of human speech to otherwise “silent films.” But I think today the common view is that those movies were “hyper-talkies” and our current films are something more like either “moodies” or “special-FX-ies.”

“Nobody talks like that!” people complain about those old talkies. Ha-rumph, she thinks, well, I do! So while all the girls were falling for the strong silent types in the more modern movies made while I was growing up, I had crushes on James Stewart and Humphrey Bogart. My father was particularly horrified to find this out.

“They’re MY age!” he sputtered. Well, that’s something that can’t really be helped. Love transcends time, especially movie-star love. It’s not to say that I didn’t swoon over Clint Eastwood chomping on a cigar in the sweaty west or rolling his eyes at administrivia in police work. I did. But my true loves were the guys who talked to me.

Now I’d love to give advice to the love-bound male to assure them that girls like it when they talk to them about anything, but, alas, it’s not true. Those same dull thuds who tried to convince me that no one talks “like that” were the ones who could drool on endlessly for hours with pithy statements like, “Oh, wow, stereos, man.”

Yes, these timeless words were often enhanced by natural chemical substances which are only recently available to those with a prescription in some states. Weed tended to slow down any conversation and limited the topics to the aforementioned stereos, whether Layla was the greatest song ever but still heard too often on the radio, the quality and availability of rolling papers and other paraphernalia and who had been busted recently doing something really stupid (as opposed to sitting for hours in a filthy living room talking about these timeless things).

Inevitably the conversation got around to food, usually brownies with herbal additives. Apparently the goal among those eligible males I knew at the time was to “astro-plane.” I think that meant losing some control over much if not most of your sensory capabilities, something ultimately all my friends would turn to me while discussing and say, “Yeah, but we don’t recommend it for you, Marcia.” I had to agree.

Seriously, purposefully lowering my IQ and that of my compadres does not seem like fun to me. I like to remember the concerts I attend. I like sparkling conversation. I liked dates who did not fall asleep midway during a romantic moment. And then, plush as I am, I’m also curious as to why people think the reasons for obesity in the US are such a mystery. “Man, I have got, like [giggle, snort, cough and spit all at once], the munchies, man.” The Big Lebowski is delicious fun as movie; in real life, I think I’d rather count paperclips than live that.

Rather than hurt any of my stoned friends’ feelings, I tended to wander off and do things like teach adult education courses in antiques at the local junior college, learn Gregg shorthand for fun and profit, dabble in geology to explore caves in Southern Illinois despite my claustrophobia. Oh, wow, man, like, salamanders!

Only much later did it occur to me that while I was at the same time trying to stifle my negativity about the Doper lifestyle and amuse myself with something I was truly interested in, I and my smokeless life were being “dissed” as “narc” behavior. Well, the stuff does make people paranoid too, I guess. The upshot was that while I liked most of those folks aside from their hazy moments, they for the most part did not like me. What’s not to like? Well, everything, I suppose.

Most folks just know to hang around people who have things in common with them. My own skin-crawling craving for novelty, diversity, change, new ideas, new experiences, the restaurant I’ve never been to before, the next moment because it’s never been here, etc., also leads me to think that because I like all kinds of different people, they will also like me. Well, how rude to assume! Nothing like a rejected thrill-seeker who is easily thrilled, I say. In a way, my acceptance, nay, embrace of whatever is different from me is also a bit of my blind spot.

This week I’ve had the chance to get together with a few different bunches of people and worked on applying one of my old saws about how to tell if some human interaction (it’s hard to call all human encounters relationships) is working: Do you like yourself when you are with them?

I dated a guy for a really long time, years, in Illinois. He was cute.  He was smart. He would talk about ideas. He was collaborative. He could laugh at his dyslexia and work through it. There were a lot of pluses. There were significant detriments too. And the worst of these was that I did not like who I was when I was with him. So I broke it off. In the lonely days after the break up, I realized time and again that I had made the right decision. I needed to be a more positive person than I ever could be when I was around him. It was necessary for my survival. It took me a while to put it together, but finally I realized that I needed to surround myself with positive people and step away from negative ones. I tended to take on the characteristics of my surroundings.

So, Tuesday, I dragged my friends Becca and Andrew to a San Francisco Meetup called Tarot Café. You’ve heard about Andrew a bit before. He’s 24 and a tarot reader and enthusiast. Enthusiast doesn’t quite cover it. He will tell just about anyone his favorite deck is the Robin Wood although he does have a dragon thing going too. Becca is a professional illustrator who has worked for some Big Names and on some Famous Projects that you’ve probably heard of but to keep her out of trouble we will leave it at that and say she is some kind of artist. She’s been coming to my Backyard Tarot classes and is the first to tell anyone that she is not a tarot reader. I’m hoping we can do a deck together, but don’t get too excited, kiddies. It’s going to take a while.

There we were with our café drinks at Borderlands Café, sitting around the tables with our decks, talking with Anastasia Haysler of Tarot Media Company about balance and the equinox. In the midst of Becca’s dawning horror about the possibility of reading tarot for the fun exercise and another meetup member’s eagerness to get on with the reading part, the balance of opposites there across the table from each other, I realized I was happy there. I liked being with people who like what I like, even if they like it for vastly different reasons, lengths of time, images and symbols or uses for tarot.


Art Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord


Yes, it’s different. Tarot is different. When people find out I read, write, talk, joke and create tarot, sometimes they have to step away because, well, because that’s just too different for them. But like Becca’s draft drawing of the Hanged Man (no previews yet), I’m happy in my difference even though I know it isn’t for everyone and that I might get shunned, “dissed,” made fun of, looked at with disbelief or actively disliked. The Hanged Man and I are like this, after all.

So at the Tarot Café when the regular part of the meeting was over, I was sitting next to RoseRed Robinson also of Tarot Media Company, who we have both determined is one of my cousins and not all that distant. She had an assortment of Tarot Bath Salt Sachets to choose from for the door prize people of which I happened to be one.

I asked, "Oh, do you have a Hanged Man?"

"I don't think so," she said, looking at the bunch. "What would Hanged Man sachet smell like?"

I thought for a minute.

"Feet?"

I settled for the Empress, roses and jasmine. Love that Tarot Cafe!

Best wishes!

Hangin’ With the Empress

One of the fun questions at the recent Reader’s Studio 2010 in New York was, “Do you know your birth cards?” Somewhere in my tarot travels I had run across this, calculated it and determined myself to be Hanged Man/Empress or, as one RS10 attendee corrected me, that’s Empress/ Hanged Man, thank you! Empresses are like that. You understand.

I was actually initially uncomfortable with the idea of birth cards or even a significator card at all. It’s a kind of “don’t fence me in” thing for me. Some readers will select one of the cards from the deck to represent the sitter. I don’t. It’s a matter of personal choice. When I first started reading tarot in high school, I identified with the High Priestess. I mentioned before I like the HP because she’s the library lady/nerd of the tarot, the guardian of mysteries. When you’re in high school reading tarot, you probably think of yourself as guarding mysteries. Now that I’m older, I’m glad to find a mystery with both hands. I think I do find them more often now but I’m a lot more comfortable with them than I was when I was in high school. I think that’s the process of unfolding knowledge anyway. There are some advantages to being older. But it’s interesting to me that the next card after the High Priestess in the tarot is the Empress, my birth card. My assignment as the High Priestess apparently was a temporary position on my way to my real job.

This works for me. I’ve always been interested in the creative urge in arts, writing, needlework, landscape, even computer programming. And I always wanted to foster creativity in others rather than guarding it from the everyday world like the HP. Fostering creativity is a very “Empress” thing to do.

Not to badmouth the glorious corn and soybean fields of central Illinois, but when I lived there years ago, I craved any shift in the landscape. I stalked creativity with all the ardor of a hunter after its quarry, a cat after a spider. I found it too. There was a terrific dinner theatre in the biggest barn I’d ever been in, good food and good fun. I bought cheap season tickets to the theatre at the private college near my house. I chased the small town festivals in the summer and found my favorite local artist, Gerry Erley. With my usual lack of self-restraint, I bought many of his pastels, telling him, “Gerry, you make Illinois look like someplace someone would want to live!” This, of course, says more about me than about Illinois, since there are plenty of reasons to want to live there. But his landscapes are transformational, evocative. One of my favorites is a view of a pond and a barn that has a sort of aura about it. Gerry patiently explained to me that pastels often have this quality and this was actually a view from his friend’s backyard one morning when he had a tremendous hangover. What ended up in the picture was so much more ethereal than an aspirin or hair of the dog. Gerry used to list me as having a “major collection” of his works. I was a patroness of the arts.

When I learned my birth cards, though, I was a little surprised to find I had two. Besides the Empress, there is also the Hanged Man. I loved Rachel Pollack’s discussion of the Hanged Man at BATS 2009. She talked about the choice the Hanged Man makes. When the card is right side up, the Hanged Man has consciously chosen to follow his own path, even if it separates him from society; upside down and he’s given up his own path to conform to society.

It was during that discussion that I realized that the bird that I use as my icon is a representation of both the Empress and the Hanged Man. The bird is the female of her species and she is hanging upside down, looking at the world her way. And I recognized that that’s the difference I see in myself, something I like about me, something about the creative, intuitive and actually, in the truest sense of the word, synthetic way that I approach just about everything. The Empress/Hanged Man has grown comfortable in her own upside-down skin.

This evidences itself in so many things I do. Today, I noticed it when I was cooking.

So first off, I didn’t really mean to cook today. I thought my husband was going to do that. He likes to cook and we talked about recipes and ideas the night before. I thought I was fostering the creative process. I found out this morning that I was actually doing the creating. He had invited a friend of ours over to pick up baseball tickets and actually had something of a tea party brunch in mind. One thing that happens when two extraverts marry is that they make the often erroneous assumption that the other person has expressed themselves fully. We then are confused to find out that a detail or two might have been omitted. For instance, the detail today was that I was doing the cooking. After we got that figured out, I sent him off to the market and stood looking at the open recipe book. And the Empress/Hanged Man took over.

I like recipe books. I think of them as interesting suggestions on what to cook. They are just a little too linear for me to feel comfortable actually following the directions in a recipe, especially when I’m doing this on a Saturday morning as an unexpected activity. And just about anyone who knows me will tell you I’m a lot better at following suggestions than directions. A fine point, I admit.

The menu had solidified itself enough in my mind last night that I had slept well. We had determined that my favorite salad (mixed greens heavy on the arugula, onions, sliced red pears, walnuts and bleu cheese with a vinaigrette dressing), plus some egg frittata-cheesy-thinger, plus, the “snails” we jokingly promised our friend, which turned out to be the forbidden fruit of Pillsbury’s orange rolls would be just enough. If you put those orange rolls on a pan and turn the outside tail out, you get a roughly snail-shaped roll covered in that yummy orange frosting that cannot be good for your blood sugar. But now I was faced with that egg thingamajig.

So, in true Bippety Boppety Boo Empress/Hanged Man fashion, I made up a recipe and, if I must be forced to brag about my own cooking, it was really good! I wanted quiche but I didn’t have time to make a crust, and felt a little guilty about a crusted item when I was already planning for the all-too-sinful “snail” rolls. So I improvised. If you try it, let me know if you like it! Also, I’m pretty sure you can make this in a much more healthy version than I did with Egg Beaters, turkey bacon, lowfat Swiss cheese, and skim milk.

Marcia’s Crustless Quiche

8 eggs

8 slices of bacon

½ cup of diced green onion

¼ cup of chopped fresh parsley

6 oz. shredded Swiss cheese

3 cups of half and half

½ tsp. salt

1 tsp. black pepper

¼ tsp of nutmeg



Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray glass 8”x8” baking dish with release agent (e.g., Pam). Cook bacon until crispy; blot and crumble. Line bottom of baking dish with crumbled bacon so that entire bottom of dish is covered. Cover the bacon with 6 oz. shredded Swiss cheese. Using a wire whisk, beat eggs just until mixed. Add half and half and beat until well mixed. Stir in salt, pepper, nutmeg, parsley and onions. Pour egg mixture over bacon and cheese. Cook at 350 degrees for 1 hour until top is puffy and slightly browned. Remove from oven and let sit for 15 minutes.

Serve with salad and sweet rolls for and elegant easy brunch. Also serve with Brook Bond tea with cream and sugar. Add friend and her fascinating stories about her recent trip to Viet Nam. It is a recipe for delight!

**

Want to know how to find out your tarot birth cards? Here’s a site that will calculate yours for you at The Tarot School. Thanks, as always, to Ruth Ann and Wald Amberstone and their always fascinating insights to Tarot! http://www.tarotschool.com/Calculator.html

Best wishes!

Hello and welcome!

When you were a kid, did you ever hang by your toes from the jungle gym just to see what the world looks like from that point of view? (Children, do NOT try this at home or anywhere else! And adults, well, I hope you have good sense and better medical coverage.) Well, I was that kid. Despite all warnings, I figured out how to hang by the tops of my feet.

Initially, I thought I was preparing for my career as a circus acrobat, one that didn't pan out. But once I got there, it was the view that held me.

It may have seemed like dare-devil foolishness, but for me it was just a means to an end. I wanted to see things a different way for the experience and understanding. It was the learning that fascinated me, the way that different view made things clearer in some ways. The different point of view removed the template of habit and expectations and allowed me to study the flight of a bird, the curve of the cat's tail, the feel of the breeze. Oh, and I studied the sound of my mother's voice at high pitch and volume telling me to get down before I hurt myself. But I persisted and hung upside down by my feet whenever possible. I was lucky and strong and, for a child, careful, so I never fell.

I told my mother I was practicing to be an acrobat but secretly I just liked the refuge that looking at things a different way provided me. In the hubbub of childhood, it was a kind of separate peace, a spiritual "bubble bath" that I now recognize was part of my training as a Tarot reader.

Rachel Pollack recently spoke at the 2009 BATS in San Francisco about the nature of The Hanged Man, the guy who in our modern Tarot decks hangs upside down, often with a glow around his head as in RWS and most often with a sense of peace. How can he be at peace when he's hanging from his foot and upside down? Yet Rachel told us that he is the person who recognizes and embraces his differences and similarities, who resists the kindly urges of others to put him "back on his feet" to a mode of conventional thinking. He values both his own point of view and others.

That's the way I think of my reading. I am an otherwise ordinary person who embraces my and others' differences and seeks to look at the universe from more than one point of view. And, because ultimately I was a good, if exasperating, child, I have the urge to share.

Best wishes!