Offering: April 2023

An off-the-cuff Fool's Day note & an 'Offerings' origin story

Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, The Fool by Niki de Saint Phalle from Il Giardino Dei Tarocchi. In the image a character made of blue, red, yellow and black lines is walking with a dog made of black lines at the heel. They have a walking stick and a small sack over their shoulder held by a rod. the background there is a window, a wood floor and a plant at the top left corner. The person holding the card’s legs are visible; they’re wearing light blue jeans with hols in the knees.

To listen to me read this Offering aloud click here.

Hi Everyone, 

If you’re receiving this email, you’re on the list to receive the free monthly Offerings, formerly known as Tarot Offerings. I started making Tarot Offerings in 2016 after leaving my full time job in publishing where I was an outreach editor at a self-help and psychology book publisher called New Harbinger Publications in Oakland, California.

I started writing a newsletter because my sister, who was working in social media marketing at the time, said I shouldn’t rely too much on social platforms for my business, which didn’t really exist yet but I had a feeling was on the way. The newsletter began as a piece called Tarot Tuesday, which was a piece of writing about three Tarot cards that went out to a hundred or so people. Not long after I expanded to six cards and renamed it Tarot Offerings. 

I started out doing more forecast-y, collective readings of the cards. That was what I and a lot of us inherited around what was possible for writing about something like Tarot, and for a while I enjoyed doing that. Though I’d left my full-time job I was still very much entrenched in psychology publishing working as a freelance writer and editor and so I was incorporating ideas from different therapeutic modalities into my writing and found a niche there, especially with the daily cards on Twitter which in turn supported the growth of the newsletter. 

I’m telling you all this because it’s spring. It’s Aries season, fool season, resurrection season and it also happens to be my birthday season. In other words, it feels like a good time for telling origin stories. Of course there’s much more to my personal origin story, but what I’m telling you here is the origin story of Offerings.

The newsletter was tough to keep up with during graduate school (between the years of 2017-2019) but those were also the years I was first hearing that people liked the newsletter and looked forward to receiving it. In 2020, when I started to tap out from writing the daily cards on Twitter, I decided to shift my focus to the newsletter and in 2021 began writing them weekly and gave them a simpler name, Offerings.  

There are quite a few of you who’ve been here since the Tarot Tuesday collective forecast days, through the all-I-knew-was-ACT-and-DBT days, the Berkeley treehouse days, the almost exclusively reading James Hillman and criticizing psychotherapy days, the divinity school hopeful days, and more recently the return to clinical work and the zealous newcomer to narrative therapy days. 

I’ve written some bizarre stuff over the years, unintelligible stuff, problematic stuff and stuff I’d have strong words about were I to read it from where I sit today on this cold late March morning. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve done low quality, phoned-in work. I’ve grasped for connections where there were none, and I’ve written on things I didn’t understand yet and honestly, all of that is what constitutes Offerings. 

I do anticipate some changes this year, as I prepare to take on more hours as a therapist. If you’ve been reading the Offerings, or even the book, you know this has been a long and winding journey for me with a lot of judgment and criticism and fear about the field and I’ll be honest I didn’t expect to love doing therapy as much I do. During the years of writing Tarot for Change I thought for sure I’d prefer to be primarily a writer and researcher, but I’ve found that lifestyle to be a bit too isolating even for me. The things I read, think and write about—at least at this stage—need a foot in the world to keep them honest.  

Narrative therapy is truly my jam right now—and if I’ve learned nothing else writing a newsletter for seven years, it’s that all jams are tentative—but it feels good to have a jam again and this particular jam is giving structure to a lot of other things in my life as well, like interpreting Tarot cards and stories and it’s just the best feeling. 

I took an almost yearlong hiatus from teaching to figure out what it is that I really feel good about offering in that format. For several years I was doing Tarot classes, but Tarot isn’t and never really has been my expertise. What I’ve always sought to get at in the classes I’ve offered around Tarot has been more to do with a way of making meaning—either in a personal practice or in dialogue with others—than with Tarot specifically. And it’s taken me a while to figure that out.  

Because I really like teaching, I’ve spent a lot of time this past year asking myself two things: what am I knowledgable in and practiced enough at to comfortably teach, and what might actually be of use to people. And I’ve finally come up with a couple of live, real-time event offerings that I’m feeling excited about. And I’m sharing them with you not because I want you to sign up but because they’re part of the Offerings story; the concepts are flowering directly from the process that is making these essays every week. Essays which have become just as much about processes of making meaning as they are about the many possible meanings of stories, or Tarot cards or ideas about human experience. 

So one of the events is a workshop, which I’ve tentatively named Deconstructing the Tarot and this will happen on Earth Day in Berkeley. Deconstructing the Tarot is a culmination of the last two years studying what I’d consider to be liberatory theologies and also narrative therapy. 

What both of these ares have in common is that they bloom from the understanding that as seekers of truth, our interpretations are the very best we have to work with. In other words, there is no one objective Truth to be told or known, and this is exciting because it means that there are limits to the meanings we’ve inherited, and to the meanings we’ve made throughout our individual lives and generations.

And if we're curious, we can locate those limits and find openings that might help us develop more multivalent stories that support the construction of preferred realities.* Deconstructing the Tarot is, I think, a timely offering for spring because it carries the energy of that spot on a branch where the bud comes. 

The second event is a live telling of the Grail Legend, which has become a fixture in the Offerings over the last two and a half years as I’ve read and re-read various versions of it seeking meaning. I hope that this event will be an opportunity to share and to practice in a group setting the sort of double-listening that I’ve been learning and writing about these years, which seeks not only to hear what’s being told or shown explicitly, but also the under-considered openings. My invitation is for those involved to perform meaning on aspects of the story where opportunities to do so have been declined, refused or overlooked. With both events, I’m hoping to offer virtual versions in the future, as well. 

Because today’s Offering isn’t quite like they typically are, I decided to go back to last year and open up an Offering from around this time which was originally published for paying subscribers only called “Beginnings, recovery, shame, learning,” in case you’re curious about what typically goes on around here. On top of that there’s a pretty robust archive of Offerings in both text and audio format at this point, which I hope you’ll dig into even if there’s plenty there for me to cringe at. 

Happy Fool’s day and happy spring and thank you as always for being here. 

JD

*My use of the phrase “construction of preferred realities” here comes from Jill Freedman and Gene Combs’ book Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities.

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

You’re reading the Offering for April 2023. I make these Offerings weekly—in both text & audio formats—for those interested in making a contribution of $5 a month, $50 a year, or a higher amount of your choosing if you have the capacity and interest. Subscribers get access to the archive of Offerings going back to July 2021 with audio versions starting weekly in October of that year. To upgrade your existing subscription, hit the subscribe button below.