I never thought that I would be a tarot reader. I never thought that this would be where I put my blood and heart and skin. But that is life and this is my story of the birth of Tea and Tombstones….

Tea and Tombstones was created before I knew a single card. I started Tea and Tombstones as a blog in a time of deep sorrow and loss. I was dealing with depression, death (both physical and metaphorical), burnout, severe writer’s block, and an overall sense that I no longer knew who I was.

But who was I? I was a graduate from college with a degree in Creative Writing. I was recently divorced. I was in a new relationship with a beautiful Grizzly bear. I was working at an animal shelter, raising my own cats, and fostering kittens. I was a weirdo, a black sheep in a world of white.  I was completely lost.

From the outside, you almost couldn’t tell that was I falling apart, but I was frayed in every thread and fiber.  What looked beautiful on the outside was crumbling within. My relationships were failing. My voice and my writings were non-existent. My body was burned out physically. My spirit, even more. After the loss of a foster kitten, everything came to a head. It was like the world had  stopped, and in that pause, I noticed that I had no idea of who I was anymore. I had no idea how to process what I was feeling, thinking, or going through. So, I tried my old habits.

I started the blog to try to write, to find my voice again, to feel the blood moving within me. It didn’t work. The blog sat dormant, and so did I. I needed something to make me feel whole again. I needed anything to jumpstart my spirit. If writing wasn’t going to be there for my anymore, I would have to find something else. That is when I decided to learn to read tarot. 

It was the tarot that worked. It pulled me in, creating a container for me to grieve, and to heal. It was the moments of reading and shuffling with tears that I saw how beautiful it was to be inside my spirit. I felt a warm sense of tending rising, that I had never felt before.

The tarot softened me, and it brought me home. It transformed me, and I have never looked back. I have found the howling that calls me home. Once I found that, I knew that if I could help another through the darkness, and leverage it with the tarot for spiritual growth, then that is what I was going to do.

Now, the name Tea and Tombstones may not sound like a tarot name. To be honest, this name for a blog site was conjured from the spectrum of nourishment and burial. It honored the losses I was grieving, while honoring the ways I was nourishing myself through the process. It honored the gentle and warm tending in the midst of pain. 

I decided to keep the name, because it was there that I found the tarot. It was there that I saw how beautiful and brutual it is to come home, to live well, to call the howl out of my throat, and to be in my spirit.

And that is focus of my tarot services today. My readings are not predictive, nor are they focused on the future. Instead, we come into a space of sacred centering, letting the cards call forth needed invitations on that vast spectrum. Together, we work to see where the creative and analytical understandings can be used to grow into new spaces, create new meanings, and shift into nourishment.