YouandTheTarot

  Almost 40% of you will relocate when you retire. Given longevity, you might then  move multiple times , even every five years. As a tarot reader I hear all too often from disappointed retirees that what drives that second or third relocation is not a budget issue. No, it's soul-sickness. You are unable to break in socially.  So, I guide clients to explore before the move how resistant a community might be in allowing newcomers "in." By "in," I mean having a shot at close friendships. There is the familiar dynamic: So and so are friendly, polite. But those conversations in the grocery store or at the gym never lead to an invitation to have a drink or a cup of coffee.  That's usually because in that community what count are the bonds formed over the years. They begin in grade school. The groups have bulging collective memory banks. How to find out, before you move, the openness of the residents? Chat bots will be straight with you. Describe yourself. For ex...

  "So what does Penelope symbolize in 'The Odyssey.'"  That lesson in an infinite number of English courses was really about how, along the evolutionary path, the human species came to see the world through a prism of meaning. Entities and events weren't stand-alones. They represented an abstraction.  Philosopher Ernst Cassirer gave us an erudite summary of that transformational process. In "A Clue to the Nature of Man: the symbol," he explains: "No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe." And that seems to be the universe in which Luigi Mangione operated. The Wall Street Journal reports on the content of his notebooks: "One entry said 'the target is insurance' because it checks every box,' and another described an intent to 'wack' an insurance chief executive at the investor conference ..." Recently, as the world knows...

  "Those five months going to XYZ support group lifted my clinical depression." That's what a client for a tarot reading told me. The World Card had come up, considered by some to be the best card in the deck. But what drove that improvement was not what is usually given as a benefit of support groups. What the client got out of it was weekly evidence that they had a lot more going for them than most of the other members. For example, despite some reversals in their investments and the loss of a few accounts, they were not in debt. Or homeless. Or on the verge of losing their home. Obviously, what was going on was the adage: Count your blessings. Eventually the power of the attitude of gratitude also woke them up to the realization that they could be doing lots more with their time than "listening to all those sad stories." They quit the group.  Of course, this whole mindset has been kept under wraps. The code of the support group is peer interaction. We are all...

  "The whole first 35 minutes of my college reunion was visually and emotionally reaching back through the years. I was reconstructing how they used to look." They continued: "It took going to a bar afterward to settle down my head in the now. That's when the ROI kicked in for that expensive trip back to New Haven, Connecticut. We shared insights what we had learned about life since graduation." That's how a 50-something client for a tarot reading described their pain. The event had been three weeks ago. But the shock of coming close up to a group's aging remained traumatic. It was downright irrelevant to them how those aging classmates had fared professionally. In our reading, no surprise, the Wheel of Fortune card didn't come up. What did emerge was The Chariot card.  Its message is: Radical Acceptance. Obviously, aging is embedded in a life. The pain comes from not the reality per se. Its source is resistance to that reality. Gently I tutored the...

 The live mediums back in June 1953 were radio and television. Those announced on June 19th that 1) Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been executed and 2) Their young sons Robby and Michael were being taken care of.  That was the second time in our little lives that we, the oldest of the Boomers, were shaken to the core with fear: Would we too lose our parents? Would some dark-suited tall men come in the early morning and take our parents away? Who would comb my hair for school? The first time was around 1951. That's w hen we hid under our desks practicing safety for when the bad guys during the Cold War would bomb us. But the teachers never addressed our questions about would our parents also be safe at home when the bombs came. They had no desks to hide under.  Yet, those same mediums depicted us as Happy-Clappy, always smiling in our Cowgirl/Cowboy outfits. In tarot readings I hear a lot about the remaining undercurrent of Boomer angst, as well as rage. Our interior lives...

  Off to the slammer. That's where visionaries Elizabeth Holmes, who was going to upend healthcare, and Bernie Madoff, who heralded that for investing, wound up. They were false prophets whose fraud could have impinged on your retirement. And now after those disclosures, you might wonder if the bad guys you have to watch out for will include the front lines of AI. That's especially if the bots go rogue and plunder civilization as we know it. Good lawyers, as with the fatal contamination of peanut butter, can put business leaders in prison. What did they know and when did they know it? Lots to think about. But the current reality is that we have more to fear from how the world is changing on its own. Maybe mankind did get that started, as with urban density and fossil fuels. But the universe is running with the consequences of all that on its own. In the tarot that is symbolized by the Tower card. This has become a pressing issue for the aging like you. The majority of my tarot...