Is that right?

Michelle Lyn King on the narratives that structure our lives.

This post is part of the Summer of Bibliomancy, an editorial collaboration with Moonlight. As part of the Summer of Bibliomancy, we’ll also be launching an interactive Dirt x Moonlight tarot deck, coming soon.

I asked the universe a question and braced myself for its answer. How do I let go of all that I once was and all that my life once contained?

It was May. I was living alone, in a sublet with no natural light and a single window that looked out onto a brick wall. These are not ideal living circumstances for anyone but they are especially not ideal for someone who is depressed and recently called off their engagement, and in doing so, left behind an entire life in exchange for the great unknown only to find that the great unknown is not an especially pleasant place to explore.

I found my question humiliatingly sentimental and waited a few days before sending it off to the universe (the universe, in this instance, had taken the form of an online tarot platform). I kept hoping for some other, less mawkish question to arrive at my doorstep. I went on walks. I stared at the brick wall. I wrote in my journal. But no, as it turned out, this was the only question that was of any interest to me. And so I threw it out like a boomerang.

I did not used to be a person who asked the universe questions. I used to be a person who lived in a large and light-filled apartment. That person was very certain that what she saw was, for the most part, what she got. Back then, I didn’t believe in mystical design or preordained plans from the cosmos. I didn’t even know what time I was born, nor was I particularly curious to learn.

That person, the one I used to be, had a sense of the world governed by reason and logic. Other people believed in the magic of the stars. I did not. Whenever someone brought up astrology, I joked that I only knew details pertaining to the signs of my exes and myself. This was something else I used to do—tell the same joke over and over and over again. I don’t even know my own mom’s astrological sign! That’s another line I used to repeat often. I was like a pull-string doll with hundreds of catchphrases on rotation.

It would be a lie to say that I am now a person who believes in tarot, astrology, crystals. “All that stuff.” What’s true is that I now understand the world to be more mysterious than I once did, my own self more mutable.

If I want to be really honest, I can admit that I don’t think I’ve ever quite trusted what a person like me would do if they let themselves indulge in any sort of mysticism. What might I be able to justify to myself if I believed the universe had some grand plan for me and was laying out divine signs just for me to find?

You exist almost entirely in fantasy, a college boyfriend once told me. At the time, I defended myself, but I knew he was right. Yes, I was a person who existed almost entirely in fantasy. Given the opportunity, I would luxuriate in daydreams forever. I had to be diligent not to prioritize emotion over reason. And, for many years, I was.

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IN COLLABORATION WITH MOONLIGHT

Tarot is a 400+ year old esoteric practice that recently exploded into a popular therapeutic ritual for millions worldwide. Enter Moonlight: a fresh platform that evolves with tarot’s needs.

Moonlight hosts unique tools for doing tarot online, including: multiplayer rooms, easy booking for personalized readings and lessons, a sandbox for creating your own rituals, and more! Sessions happen in 'tarot rooms'—a unique interface that blends live video and draggable cards for a truly collaborative experience. 

From tarot-curious beginners to seasoned enthusiasts, Moonlight offers empowering and fun tools to deepen your journey and help you figure shit out.

Moonlight also hosts a variety of digital decks for on-the-go learning. A limited edition of the Dirt x Moonlight: Summer of Bibliomancy interactive deck is coming soon.

The first time I saw a tarot reader I was seventeen. It was a few weeks before I left my hometown for college, something I’d been desperate to do for as long as I could remember and now that the time had finally come, I found myself feeling ill-prepared. When a family friend gifted me a tarot reading for graduation, I thought, Why not?

The first thing the tarot reader said to me when I walked through her doorway was How’s your grandmother? Even at seventeen, I was able to register this as a pretty safe bet for an opening line and I resented how tractable this person seemed to think I was. Still, the question had a beguiling effect. Did she know something about my grandmother? Was my dead grandmother communicating to this woman from the great beyond? No, of course not. But maybe?

As the session went on, she shared with me a variety of vague platitudes and almost certainly inaccurate predictions for my future.

You’ll live on a farm one day, she said. You’re going to do something with nature.

I shook my head. I knew as surely as I’d ever know anything that I would never live on a farm one day.

No, I said. I don’t think that’s right.

Her eyes narrowed or I remember her eyes narrowing. In the version I tell as an anecdote, she looked at me like a shopping mall Santa Claus might look at someone who stands next to the queue of children, pointing and shouting, “You’re not real! None of this is real!” But I admit it’s possible that she didn’t look at me that way at all.

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