Cards Are Paper. The Magic Is You.
In defense of magic.
In my eighth year, the other children were not kind.
They made fun of my height and my furry legs and the way my ears stuck out. They made fun of my outfits—my mother liked to dress me in white button-down shirts with huge, starched collars, like I was auditioning for a role in The Crucible. In lieu of the usual canvas backpack, I carried a leather briefcase. This definitely didn’t help.
That spring, the teacher decided to “mix things up” by shuffling our desks into two-person pods, creating forced intimacy between students who had not yet demonstrated friendship. I was seated next to one of the meanies, whose name was also Caroline.
Other Caroline was very dramatic about our pairing, rolling her eyes and crinkling her nose like she’d been parked next to a trash heap. Never one to back down from a challenge, I decided to win her over. I don’t remember exactly when it crystallized, nor how long it took, but after many passed notes and whispered asides, she was able to see past the size of my collar to the shape of my character.
One day during snack break, I knew I had won. “You guys,” I heard her whisper to her band of cohorts as they poked straws into tiny cartons of juice, “I actually like her.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as the same old feelings have started to pop up thirty years later. Occasionally, I feel like I am once again playing a role in The Crucible. Not because of the collar, but because of the cards.
I got my first tarot deck at age ten, fresh off the years of being teased. At the time, all I knew about the cards were the pervasive myths I’d heard, including that they possessed otherworldly powers. I frankly hoped this was the case. Maybe it would help afford me that ever-elusive popularity.
I regarded the cards with equal parts reverence, curiosity, and confusion, like one might a sacred book written in a long-forgotten language. I wrapped them in a silk scarf and slept with it under my pillow. I sometimes felt afraid to be alone with them.
As I type this, I am seated next to a shelf that houses a tarot collection slowly amassed over the decades since. I harbor no strange feelings toward this assortment of beautiful card stock.
What I wish I’d known when I was ten: The cards are paper. The magic is you.
More than a few people have communicated that they don’t subscribe to my newsletter because they don’t like, understand, or “believe in” tarot. That’s okay; not everything is for everyone.
But a lot of these same people profess to love literature and art and creative endeavors. (I know this because some of them are my friends.) They are interested in symbolism and journaling and drawing and psychology and writing. I suspect they might actually find value in some aspects of this publication…if they gave it a chance.
After a few of these reports, I considered whether the tarot piece might be too much of a barrier to entry. Maybe I should delete it, hide it, change the name.
But eventually I realized, I like it! Not only for the value it brings. It’s a litmus test for a certain degree of open-mindedness. Whether you are already familiar with tarot or it’s new to you, whether you are here for it or despite it, like Other Caroline before you, you have seen past my collar and my briefcase, so to speak, to what is actually on offer.
Speaking purely from my own experience, spiritual bookstores and metaphysical shops are often filled with the kindest people I’ve ever met. I make a point to seek them out wherever I go, and without fail, these spaces are filled with curious, empathetic, helpful souls—and always devoid of judgment.
When it comes to building a community, one could certainly do worse.
If you’ve been reading for a while, you may have noticed that I’m a big fan of establishing our own personal definitions of terms. Words like success, worth, love, and value can take so many forms, and shift along with experience and circumstance.
Magic has a lot of meanings. There is performative magic, the likes of David Blaine, smoke and mirrors, card tricks, and illusions. There is supernatural magic, that of summoning fantastical powers. There is practical magic, incorporating rituals to imbue life with meaning and intention. There is everyday magic, like pondering the source of our creative ideas or the effects of music or comedy on the soul.
Magic, like so many things, is what we make it.
When I think of magic, the first thing that comes to mind is Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor who first ordered doctors to wash their hands with chlorinated water after performing autopsies, after which the hospital’s mortality rate plummeted.
That’s not magic, you might think. That’s science. And you would be right.
But once upon a time, this seemed a lot like magic. So much so that Semmelweis’ colleagues ridiculed him, refusing to concede that the results were anything more than coincidence. He lost his job and spent the rest of his life fighting the medical community on the issue of sterilization.
To me, “magic” is merely the acknowledgment that there is much we don’t know. And much we may never know. That the world we inhabit is a fascinating place.
People love to bandy about the Roald Dahl quote “Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” Yet I’d like to think magic will find us all, though we may not call it by that name.
As for me, I do believe in magic. Not as a cure-all, a shortcut, a fantasy made manifest. But as a source of wonder, comfort, and enrichment. I believe in the delightful and unusual. I believe in the unknown. I believe in suspending my disbelief.
The air is hot, the sea churns, the future is ever unknown. I’ll do what I can. I’ll take my chances. I’ll chase what moves me. And oh, you better believe I’ll welcome all the magic I can.
If you enjoy this newsletter and want to make my day infinitely better, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll get 8(ish) newsletters for less than the price of 1 Venti. It’s basically magic.
Earlier this week, I had a guest essay appear on one of my favorite newsletters, Beyond by the wonderful
. I shared ten tips for personal writing, although as I always say, writing advice and life advice are often the same. Here are two favorite bits:You do not need to be an outlier.
When I sit down to write, I am often plagued by that old question: “Why me?” But then I remind myself of all the words that made a difference in my life—on love and grief and fear and triumph—and how they were all penned by people. You have a story to share, and you needn’t have experienced an alien abduction or won Olympic gold or scaled Kilimanjaro to be worthy of telling it. You are a human appealing to humans. That is more than enough.
Everything is a conversation.
A personal essay is a conversation between the person you are when you begin it and the person you become by the end. You don’t need to know all the answers at the outset; your future self will lead the way. Likewise, some of the best personal writing feels like a conversation with a friend. The reader is invited to witness this shift, coming on a guided tour of your discovery. By the end, they too are changed, though their destination may be quite different.
If you’d like to read the rest, you can find the full thing here:
Card of the Week
Here is this week’s card for the collective, as well as some thoughts to carry into the days ahead. As most modern readers will tell you, the tarot is not about fortunetelling, nor is it about neat, definitive answers. The cards are simply one path to reflection, a way of better knowing ourselves and others through universal themes. If this reading resonates with you, great! And if not, no worries. Take whatever may be helpful and leave the rest.
I remember being a kid and thinking “investment” was the least fun word I could imagine. (Probably the fault of some Schwab commercial.) If I’m being honest, I still sort of feel this way. Investment, by its very definition, means the payoff, the reward, the FUN is not happening now. It’s off in the future somewhere…if it even works out.
The Seven of Pentacles bears a message about investing. By this logic, this isn’t a particularly fun card. But it is positive in its own ways. Plus, it’s something we can all relate to, as the feeling it conjures is something we experience all. The. Time.
The character on the card is surveying the fruits of their efforts and looks some mixture of satisfied, pensive, tired, or dismayed.
From the outside, it appears that their plant friend is doing well. It’s leafy and robust and almost as tall as they are. But hey, perhaps they expected more.
Perhaps they paid their entire life savings for this thing, and it hasn’t yielded a single piece of fruit.
Perhaps they just planted it yesterday and are being ridiculously impatient.
Perhaps the plant exceeded their wildest expectations…but then they looked at social media and saw their colleague’s plant is thrice the size and now they feel dejected.
We all do this. We plant things—sow ideas and dreams and expectations. Sometimes, they work out exactly as we wish. But more often, life laughs in our faces and hands us something else.
The Seven of Pentacles would like us all to stop comparing our harvest to anyone else’s—including our past selves, who may have had a different outlook, not to mention a different idea of reality. That’s mean! You don’t deserve that. And neither does this lovely thing you’ve worked to produce.
Whatever you’ve done, and whatever the outcome, this card would like you to know that you’re doing a great job. (If this message feels vaguely familiar, yes, we did see this card back in July. But apparently, we still have some work to do here.)
The real urging of the Seven of Pentacles is—ugh—to invest.
Whether you are investing time, effort, money, or other resources, the Seven wants you to know that your efforts are not a waste. Good things take time. (Not to mention work, patience, and a healthy dose of faith.) Growth and progress are happening, even if you can’t see them yet. Above all else, this card urges us to keep going, meditating on what we’ve done—and are currently doing—well.
As we covered the last time this card appeared, it also encourages us to consider our notion of enough:
It’s an interesting word, enough. Like so many terms, it arrives without scientific precision nor mathematical certainty. How much is enough? That will depend on who you’re talking to.
Society may find countless ways to insist there is always more, greater, newer, better. And if you look hard enough, so can you. But all of these words invite comparison. None of them can exist without context. And not one can actually describe the situation at hand.
In what ways do we have enough?
(Rumi once said: “Anything which is more than our necessity is poison.”)In what ways do we give/do/contribute enough?
(In the words of Prentis Hemphill, “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”)In what ways are we already enough?
(Trick question. You are always, inherently enough.)
Love your definition of magic. Recently my daughter asked me if I believed magic was real and I said absolutely yes, but that it didn't look like what you see in movies — no electric sparks coming out of my fingers. I told her I believed in the kind of magic that lives inside us, the magic that makes us spin around a star, that made life form on planet earth. The magic that gives us the ability to love even when we feel despair, even when there is evil, even when unspeakable tragedies strike. There is always love, and that is proof enough for me 🤍
I wasn’t expecting the card readings when I signed up, but I’ve come to look forward to them. I grew up in a conservative Christian household where card readings were seen negatively. It has been fascinating to see how your readings related to what’s currently happening with me or on my mind. Even the fact that this was the same pull as July is pertinent. So let it rip! I’m here for it!