Offering: June 8, 2025

Tarot, beach roses & dimensions of transformation

This weekend I’m teaching the tarot class I’ve been offering and revising on and off now for years. I am a person who enjoys repetition, often returns to the same things again and again in both creative and “everyday” life, and tends to find reiteration, perhaps counterintuitively, wildly stimulating.

Day in and day out, I get up at the same time and do the same things and take the same walks and eat the same meals. I love to see what remains and what’s changing. I re-read things over and over to see what I get now that I didn’t before. After gathering wild rose petals at the beach this week for example, I re-read Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”

This is an aside (though related to doing the same walk every day), but I honestly didn’t think anything could be more beautiful than coastal Maine winter and then the beach roses started to bloom. And the perfumed saltwater air reminded me that you should never let what you know about beauty get in the way of how good it can be. Eager to share the magic of this recognition with others, I waited for petals to pile up on the sand and then gathered them up for a batch of rosewater.

Of that desire, Le Guin says that:

…to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again…¹

…is human.

So, I pressed fresh petals into an old peanut butter jar with a moist paper towel inside, tossed it into my backpack and then hopped in my truck to catch a train to the city.

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Anyway, I haven’t offered this tarot class in a year or so, and it’s been such a big year of learning, and I’ve worked with tarot a lot though I don’t write about it all that much these days. But I do have some new things to share and one of them is that—in light of all my grief studies—I’ve been imagining the four suits of tarot as to do with dimensions of transformative experience.

Taking philosopher L.A. Paul’s notion of transformative experiences as those “momentous, life-changing experiences that shape who we are and what we care about²” as a point of departure, I’ve been thinking specifically about the way profound loss can transform. Paul’s transformative experiences don’t only change what we know but how we know.

Through all this, such experiences change who we are. Paul writes that “when you have a transformative experience, something new is revealed to you—what it’s like to be in that situation or what it’s like to have that experience. Once you discover this, you discover how you’ll respond, and in particular, who you’ll become as a result of the transformation.”