YouandTheTarot

  "If  'that' went on at my company, the CEO would be out." That's what a client for a tarot reading veered off on a tangent to say about the film released today "Baby Girl."  The plot focuses on a masochistic office romance between tech founder and CEO Romy and an intern Samuel who torments her. The cruelty extends to his bringing to her party a date from the office. Romy falls apart.  Many reviewers stick with the meme of the age difference. But the romance is simply a vehicle about what it is to be human.  Enter Sigmund Freud, whom few critics mention. It was Freud who made explicit the fundamental self-destructiveness of humans.  Romy represents just the tip of the iceberg. Samuel could have been murdered by the husband Jacob. He is playing with fire. The daughter Isabel risks her committed relationship with lover Mary by a kissy flirtation with another women. Esme, Romy's assistant, risks being offed by attempting to blackmail the boss, which h...

"All he wants to do is play soccer and hang out with his friends. He needs to get a better job."  Versions of that is what I am hearing more and more in tarot readings from one party in a relationship about the other. The "other" is usually a male. But they can be a female. In addition, I'm hearing this sort of thing from parents of teenage children who can't attach to goals such as succeeding in academics or music or sports.   None of these are even trying.  This week The Wall Street Journal refers to that as the inability to grow up. And it assesses it as a generational problem.  Young people aren't taking on the traditional responsibilities of adulthood: building a career, settling into a stable relationship, becoming a respected citizen in a community. Essentially they have big ideas about what the American Dream should be and they have little or no hope of reaching it. Specifically, notes WSJ: "A sizable share of this generation is worse-off t...

  "I have a job. But I am late on rent and credit cards payments." Usually that poignant tale is told to me during a tarot reading by a person over-50 who can't make ends meet. That's even though they're working full-time. Most have lived their lives in locations which have become HCOL (high cost of living). One day, they're making it. Then they're not. Their fear is this: becoming homeless. That's currently realistic. One in four of the homeless is age 55 or older.  In 2024, homelessness surged 18% . A radical solution but it is a solution is to pull up roots and relocate to a LCOL (low cost of living) area.  As I lay out in this article in "O'Dwyer's Public Relations," there is a broad range of LCOL options.  They range from Tucson, Arizona where a studio apartment runs about $800 to neighborhoods in Birmingham, Alabama where the monthly nut is only about $400. In Youngstown, Ohio a large one-bedroom could go for under $700. Abroa...

  The 2017 television series in Spain, "Money Heist" again triggers the age-old question: Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? In that saga of robbers who take hostages at the Royal Mint of Spain the Inspector Raquel Murillo handling the negotiations comes to ask that herself. Aren't those ex-cons really a kind of Robin Hood? A year after the successful caper Murillo goes join them in their lux hideaway.  That series is now streaming on Netflix as more and more designate alleged killer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson Luigi Mangione not only a kind of folk hero but a saint. In Americana it takes a high-profile event like that murder to change things. Maybe how health insurance companies process claims will now be more compassionate to those who could die or go bankrupt from unreimbursed medical bills.  In my tarot readings I am bearing witness to that same ambivalence about right and wrong. So many clients are confused and even confused by that confusi...

  So much of the suffering I bear witness to as a tarot reader is this: human beings' regrets about mistakes they have made, missed opportunities and hurting others. In the tarot that is symbolized by the Five of Cups, sometimes called the Spilled Milk card. The problem with that is not only the pain it involves. Those caught in that force field also can't see the possibilities in the future. In the card those are indicated by the structure in the distance, beyond the turbulent water. Water in the tarot represents emotion. That's why the example of Jimmy Carter in putting together a comeback through humanitarianism is so needed, especially today. During these chaotic times too many are tumbling into some kind of abyss. Maybe it is a layoff that was never expected. A divorce we should have expected since we really weren't there. Or all that money we wasted in our youth.  Carter showed that, yes, we can pick yourself up, no matter how great the loss and the humiliation. A...

Luigi Mangione is no pioneer. He isn't the first to navigate the issue of allegedly killing in the name of an abstract concept.  Student Rodion Raskolnikov also went about exploring what it would be like to end the life of what he assessed as a useless old woman. That is in the novel "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Of course, Harvard graduate Ted Kaczynski also had plenty of ideas about who should die to impede the spread of technology. As we know, he implemented them. But what Mangione has done is make this serious matter of taking a life a popular - and acceptable - topic of conversation. In my tarot readings clients have begun talking about their regret about not offing their parents when they were abused children. The musings even get granular as in: "I was a juvenile so what the hell, I would have done a few years and lived the rest of my life knowing I had done the right thing."  So much of this type of reflection has taken place in tarot sess...