I am excited to open the registration for David Vine’s upcoming “Tarot as a Second Language” workshop at Solutions for Healing and Renewal in Clifton Park, NY. To give you a bit more information about David’s connection with the Tarot, I had the opportunity to interview him. I am going to share that interview with you in a series of posts over the upcoming weeks. Check out Part I of the interview below!
How did you get interested in the Tarot?
When my sister and I were little, we read a series of books by Edward Eager that all had the theme of magic suddenly appearing in the lives of ordinary children and transforming them. The two volumes I remember most fondly are Half Magic and Magic by the Lake. In Half Magic the children have just begun what they expect will prove a very dull summer vacation when they stumble across a mysterious talisman that has a peculiar way of granting wishes, and the magic begins! Tarot dropped into my life in a very similar way. I spent time growing up in Spain––an experience in itself that was pretty magical––and on Sundays my father would sometimes take us to the gigantic open-air flea market called the Rastro. In a very comical way, he’d have us synchronize our watches so that we could meet back at a central point at a given hour, and off we’d go adventuring through the stalls and shops. I was fifteen when, one day at the Rastro, I stumbled into a little boutique––and yes, it was through a beaded curtain!––where, inside, I found dozens of shelves filled with the shabbiest junk and bric-a-brac covered in a thick layer of dust and draped in cobwebs. I wandered the shop with relish, of course! And there, beside a hideous turquoise and orange ashtray sat a pack of cards wrapped in brittle, yellowed cellophane. It was the Vieja Baraja Española, the “old Spanish deck”, a sort of quasi-tarot which, I discovered, had its own divination tradition, and it changed my way of looking at the world forever. In the years after that, I found and acquired the Marseilles Tarot and, eventually, the Waite-Smith. Oddly enough, only recently, it struck me that Pamela Colman Smith’s style of illustration is uncannily like the drawings Bodecker did for the enthralling Edward Eager books of my enchanted childhood.
This workshop will be held on Saturday, May 5th, 2012, from 9:30am to 12:30pm. Depending on the size of the group, I may change the venue to a larger space to accommodate the group. Investment for the class is $35, and registration is required to attend the class. To register either e-mail me at mclarkson-hendrix@nycap.rr.com or call me at (518) 383-8311. Come join me for an exciting class!
