September 19, 2007

• The Love Rap

  The first eighteen years that I spent reading Tarot cards and other oracles, all my readings were done face-to-face, in person.  For the first seven years of that, my readings were all done for friends, acquaintances, or a few people who would come up to me and ask for a reading while I had my cards out at a party or in a coffeehouse, on the grass in a park, or other public place.  After seven years of that, I began to work professionally, in a booth at arts fairs and festivals, on call for private sessions, or for company parties, etc.

  One of the first things I found I needed to explain to people was that I am not a fortuneteller.  Fortunetellers tell people what they want to hear.  My aim has always been to tell people what they need to know.  Art and science are both involved in each of those modes, but the former does not require as much guts as the latter does.  Fortunetelling is the preferred profession if one wants to make more money and make friends.  The sort of counseling I do requires some detachment from results and a strong focus on accuracy and full disclosure regardless of consequences.

  The first spread I used as an amateur, the Celtic Cross, needs a question or a topic on which to focus.  Very early on, I noticed that most people had questions about their love lives.  That pattern held true for the eleven years of my professional practice before I started doing “absent” readings by mail in 1987.  Within months of my beginning in ’69, I started adding other spreads, different decks, and different oracles such as runes and crystals.   The first thing I would say to someone was to ask whether he or she had a question, or wanted a general reading.  Most people took the easy route, the general reading, which I eventually began calling a reality check.

  When anyone asked a question, the question most often involved love.  I noticed another pattern, too.  The class of questions that came in second in number to love issues were concerned with money or work.  Frequently, my client would preface a money question with, “I suppose most people ask about….”  Oddly enough, I don’t recall any of those in the majority of clients who asked about love ever preceding their questions with such a supposition.  Does this mean that insecure lovers feel that they are alone and unique, while the economically insecure assume that everyone else has similar worries?  That’s my best guess.

  During most of the time I was working in booths at festivals, my exhusband, Charley, my son Doug’s father, stood outside the booth, entertaining those who were waiting to get in and fielding questions about what I did, and how much I charged. (He came up with the words I still use, “Whatever you think it’s worth after you hear it.”) If the fortuneteller issue came up out there, he’d handle it.  If someone sat down and gazed blankly at me until I asked, “What can I do for you?” then said, “Tell my fortune,” I’d have to explain that this is not what I do.  Just like the, “whatever,” money spiel, it became a standard speech, as succinct as I could make it, so we could get on with our business and free the chair for the next person.

  I never attempted to develop any stock phrases for the readings themselves, but over time I discovered many common threads among all the readings, including those about love.  The cards would indicate things that were consistent with what I knew about the biology and psychology of relationships:  the role of sexual attraction and lust, difficulties caused by emotional needs and expectations, tendencies to indulge in denial and blame, and so forth.  When I started doing readings by mail and encountered the same common threads, I wrote my first “fact sheet” (later, online, to become FAQ) on love.  I titled it, The Love Rap.  It changed over the years, remaining a single page for ease and economy of printing and postage costs.  When I wrote the FAQ for KaiOaty, I had no such restrictions on space, and I had in the interim gained a higher perspective on life and deeper understanding of love.

  Much of the material from the print version of the Love Rap went into the Functional Relationships FAQ.  I covered some of the common pitfalls in relationships based on the various emotional needs that are usually called, “love,” in Love Versus Fear and Letting Go.  The FAQ on Love of the unconditional kind was as complete as I knew how to make it at the time.  Now, I realize that my entire LOVE collection is lacking all of the essential information about neuroelectrochemistry that I have learned since I wrote those FAQ pages.  I guess I will be working on that in the very near future.  I haven’t even decided yet whether I will write a new FAQ or edit that info into one of the existing ones.  First, I will reread, edit, and check the links in all the old material.  Then I will decide what to add and where to put it.

  Seeya.

  • 3:23 pm
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