The Cards on the Table

You have probably heard some strange stories before, but here is a new one.

This weekend, I am doing tarot readings at a big three day festival in Boulder. Booths are very expensive, so I share the tent with two other readers to make the cost reasonable. As we have done in the past, we took what we need to work down there the night before the festival opened and set up the tent. Then we leave it for the night. This is common practice for outdoor festivals.

This morning, when we arrived, we found that someone had gotten into our tent and went through all of our bags. That's odd. All three of us keep very busy schedules and sites like this are usually secure.

Oddly, the only thing they took was the tarot deck which I have been using for years doing public readings. I had it in my bag at the festival site so that I would be all ready to go. In the suitcase with it was a brand new deck still in the shrink wrap that I am offering for sale. It is a very strange perp who would take the deck that is well worn and in a rather simple bag, rather than a brand new deck still in the factory wrap.

So I pulled out a couple of other decks that I have been getting familiar with and did my readings with them. That was no problem, because once you have many years of reading experience, you can read with any deck, with of course, some adjustments for variances different artists create.

I had been so connected to the old deck that I was beginning to feel that I needed to change for a while just to stretch my mind. When you go back and forth with different decks, it helps to sharpen your wits and open to additional insights. But of course, I never would have gotten rid of that deck, just brought out others more often.

So there you have it. Another strange but true story of weird criminals. And another amazing chapter in the life of this tarot deck. This is the same deck that gale force winds blew off my table last year, but a couple of other people helped me get all the cards back. So either the deck is now being used by the person who stole it or it was passed on to someone else. Or perhaps they just threw the cards away and kept the bag. Who knows? If this is the biography of a tarot deck, it is quite a story and quite a journey it is on.

Of course, there is one other possibility. Perhaps the person who stole it will start to think about the fact that it is a very well worn deck and start to feel a strange compulsion to return it. We will see.