What the cards do (and what they don't)

The question almost always turns up in the first few minutes of the call, sideways, the way people apologise before they ask: "Cris, is he coming back?" Or: "will I get the job?" Or, more bluntly: "when?"

I don't correct anyone for asking. It makes sense to arrive that way. We were all taught that tarot is fortune-telling, and when life gets tight the first thing we want is a date on the calendar — anything that interrupts the waiting. Asking about the future is often the only way left to say that the present has become too heavy.

But prediction isn't what I do. I say it up front, not because you're wrong to ask, but because there's something better on this side of the table.

I'll start with what the cards don't do, to get that out of the way. They don't say what is going to happen. They don't set dates, don't tell you who's to blame, don't decide for you whether to stay or go. They don't take the place of psychotherapy, medical care or medication. If something comes up in our conversation that needs clinical attention, I'll say so plainly and suggest you see a professional — that assessment isn't mine to make from this chair. And there is no card that guarantees an outcome.

What they do fits into one plain image: they are a mirror. A mirror doesn't invent your face; it gives back what's already there. And it's one of the few ways to see your own face at all — because on your own, you can see the whole world except yourself.

A mirror doesn't take orders, either. It won't show you what you'd like to see. Sometimes the card that lands is exactly the one you spent the whole week dodging: the tiredness you call "a phase", the anger you call patience, the delay you call being sensible.

In Aion, Jung put it like this: "When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." That is what this is about. When we can't see what is moving inside, repetition starts to look like fate. Once it's named, it can go back to being a choice. Choice takes work, and it doesn't always bring relief straight away — but it's yours.

That's why listening comes first, before the spread. I don't begin by shuffling. I begin by asking what brought you here today, and then I actually listen: the words you use, the ones you swap halfway through a sentence, the subject that comes back three times "by accident", the point where your voice changes pitch.

Without that part, any card turns into a generic line — pretty, neatly turned, true of anybody and useful to nobody. After listening, the same card is addressed to someone. It stops talking about loss in general and starts talking about the thing you've just described — and never heard said back to you.

It takes two of us. The reading isn't mine — it's yours. The cards show possibilities. Recognising which one is yours is your part. A lot of what matters happens in the silence after I speak, when something lines up and you say, "oh — that's it."

I've sat on the other side of this wanting a date on the calendar myself. I wanted someone to tell me the month, the day, the ending. It took me a while to see that the date I was asking for was only a way of not looking at the question underneath it: why am I still here?

When prediction leaves the room, what's left is the part that counts. What is alive in you now, what you have been carrying without naming, and what can still be done with it. That's where the work goes: we look at mind, feelings and spirituality together, instead of treating them as separate departments.

And if you come to the call with that question on the tip of your tongue — when, with whom, whether he comes back — bring it. We'll start there. It's usually a good way into the conversation. It just isn't the whole conversation.