Picture This

You wouldn't know this without me telling you, but one of my daily uses of the tarot is to let it inspire my writing every day.

Sometimes when I am mulling over different ideas and thinking about what to write, I draw some cards and make a spread, and that points me in a direction or helps me choose between the various possibilities.

Those of you who only think of tarot as a fortune teller's tool might be pleasantly surprised at how well it works as a self teaching guide. If you draw one card or several with the intention of finding a life lesson to reflect on each day, you will find your tarot deck to be a valuable, handy and easy to use method, same as a lot of people use books of quotes or thoughts for the day or meditations for the day.

If you have never used the tarot in this way, try it.

Point of clarification. A tarot deck contains 78 cards, including 22 major arcana, 56 minor arcana, divided into numbers 1-10 and court cards in 4 suits.

There are many other kinds of decks that people like to use although they are not tarot decks. These are referred to as oracle cards, and they can work just as well for many people. Many of these have varying numbers of cards, may not have suits or court cards or be divided into major and minor arcana. The most popular decks include Animal Cards, Angel Cards, Soul Cards, Power Deck, Psy Cards, and playing cards, although there are many others out there, more than I could name.

Consider a deck of cards as a self study tool plus a way to enhance your creativity, in addition to being an oracle, and in this way you open yourself to making fuller use of your deck. And yes, you can play games with it, just as you use playing cards, although the imagery opens itself to whole new dimensions of uses, since there is a picture on every card.

The fact that every picture tells a story is quite useful, like having your own little art gallery in your pocket, with story lines that never get boring because they always change.