Listen: Tarot at the After-Party
On Friday I left New York's endless whir and came into a blackout. In Boulder, where I am from, the wind has been so strong that the city turned off the electricity in the downtown neighborhoods for days. They are taking precautions to combat wildfire risk, which means the first things my father handed me when I came home were a long-stem candle lighter and an LED headlamp. I remember a time when we did not worry about fires in December, but now fire season, like fire, has no start or end. So on the night before the darkest night of the year, winter clouds blotted out the moon and stars, and I came home to a familiar house enveloped by the dark.
This kind of darkness is totalizing, with powers to warp space and time. On the drive back from the airport, our headlights revealed trees toppled over in the street, but only when we were driving a few feet in front of them. The hotels near the University were all shut down, the frat houses vacant. The streetlights and stoplights North of the central walking mall were defunct, and the windows of the houses we passed showed no life.
It was late when we arrived in town, and by then the wind had died down a bit. When we got out of the car we could hear it gusting in the distance more than we could feel it blowing where we stood. I hugged my mother hello in the dark embrace of the living room, lit only by a small strand of battery-operated lights draped around a houseplant. I ran my fingers through the needles of this year's Christmas tree.
The portal from my new home to my old home felt more pronounced than ever. The time on my electric watch was scrambled from jumping zones, landing on a number that belonged to nowhere. All our phones were dead. Before I went to bed, I lit a candle on the nightstand and stared for a long while at the flame. My mind was quieter than it had been in months. I fell asleep and woke into a sense of timelessness, which remained until the lights flipped on the next afternoon.
Our lights are on now, but the wind is still howling through the house as I write, the sound of air blown over the top of a glass bottle. Out the window strands of silvergrass are flying through the yard.
I am writing because "Voices in the River", a podcast about intuition hosted by a witch named Rebecca, is back today with new episodes. (The great Theo Balcomb produces the show; I'm on the team as story editor.) This season is a departure from what we've done in the past in that all of our interviews happened on the same night, at the after-party for the Resonate Podcast Festival that took place in Richmond, Virginia. As the audio makers were dancing in disco lights on the floor above and singing karaoke on the floor below, we set up tarot readings in a small recording studio and invited artists, journalists, and podcast people present to come have Rebecca read their cards.
Our first guest for the readings was Brendan Baker, a supremely talented sound designer and artist who kindly helped us set up the microphones. Rebecca lit a candle on the studio table, handed Brendan a blue speckled rock to keep, and then, as she would describe it, used the cards to take him on an "art walk" of his inner thoughts.
As someone who is generally skeptical of prescriptive or faux-prophetic New Age tendencies—especially these days, in our conspiratorial age—I deeply appreciate Rebecca's approach to tarot and to her other witchy work. She's not interested at all in the party trick of prediction, but rather in helping people locate their intuition in the present. She holds her magic lightly and with ethical care. Instead of spiritual bypassing, which would be using spirituality to obscure the truth and challenges of our moment, she gives her guests tools to live through light and darkness.
I think, especially in times of extreme darkness, our faith will wander until it finds a landing place. More than whatever you think when you hear "witch podcast," I understand this show as a positive landing place for belief, in that it seeks to instill power rather than take it away. Kindling this kind of magic in this moment feels important, at least for a moment of ritualized light.
At Resonate Rebecca read cards for hours with no breaks, shut inside the tiny soundproof room while Theo and I assembled guests outside. This meant that neither of us heard what was being recorded in the moment; we only had the feedback of the guests when they emerged. Many left the studio with their eyes a little shiny, touched by the synchronicity that had come through in the cards. They carried the blue stones given to them—representing the balance of truth and intuition—as they made their way back to the party above.
All to say, from team Voices in the River, happy Winter Solstice to all. Here's to all things getting lighter from here.
