What will you do once you know?

Last Saturday I went to the RE Halloween Party and did Tarot readings. I wasn’t sure what to expect, reading Tarot for a bunch of skeptical UUs, but I had no shortage of customers – I read for about 90 minutes straight (which is rather exhausting!).

The readings went much more smoothly than I expected. The cards seemed to speak to me – I pointed out details that I rarely notice when I’m reading for myself. I found trends, patterns, and correspondences, and most of the people I read for seemed pleased. I only had one reading that was difficult to interpret, and that was at least partially because I knew the person fairly well and I was struggling to just read the cards and not inject my own feelings. No sirens went off, so where I saw difficulties coming for folks I tried to express them generally and not scream “NO!!!!”

I had one card in one reading that made me jump. Both the card and my intuition told me something that, if correct, would be some fairly personal information. I started to ask if I was right, and then stopped. I didn’t need to know, the person might not want me to know, and since it was clearly in the past it wasn’t like I would be negligent for not warning the person about something.

There is an Inuit saying: “what will you do once you know?” It reflects their very pragmatic culture that while deeply spiritual has no gods (here’s a link to an excellent article on the subject from Indian Country Today). That attitude is antithetical to my own – I crave knowledge for the sake of knowledge. But at some level it’s right. If you’re going to go to the trouble of consulting an oracle (even an amateur Tarot reader at a Halloween party), what are you going to do with the information you receive?

As the Otherworld draws near, we should remember that the messages we receive aren’t given for our amusement. If the gods and ancestors go to the trouble of telling us something, we owe it to them – and to ourselves – to put it to good use.

The cards tell us what will be, not what must be – we have the free will to change the future by changing our actions. What will you do once you know?