Learning Tarot From Three Year Olds

G/Son came over yesterday to spend the night with me. When he and his 'rents got here, I was sitting on my screen porch with a glass of iced tea, the computer, and, left out from the night before, my Tarot deck.

G/Son, at 3 1/3, is into games. We often play Hi-Ho-Cherry-O, sometimes according to "the" rules and sometimes according to rules that we make up as we go along because, Goddess knows, someone's going to teach him to color within the lines, but it's not likely to be his Nonna, the witch. This weekend, we tried our hands at Chutes & Ladders.

G/Son saw the tarot cards and said, "Nonna, Can I play?"

He immediately remembered that one time I'd brought them over to his house to give DiL a reading after she got her mammogram. He was pulling out the cards and exclaiming over the pictures: "Look, the horse's legs are on fire!" -- Knight of Wands, and "Look, she has a sword!" -- Queen of Swords. He asked, "Nonna, how do you play?"

I told him, "Well, I don't play a game so much as I look at the pictures and think about what they mean." Flipping over to the Empress, I said, "See, I look at her and I see that she has food all around her and enough wool to make yarn and she's going to have a baby, so I think this card means that everything will be ok, there will be enough, and new life is coming." G/Son said, "Why she is going to have a baby?" and I showed him how her belly is big because there's a baby in there. G/Son had a few questions about that and then he looked at the picture and said, "And, she has a watermill."

He was pointing to the Empress' spinning wheel. And I said, "Yes, she does. To me, that looks like her spinning wheel, to make wool into yarn, but if you see the wheel from a watermill, that's what it means for you." Of course, I will never look at that card again w/o seeing the wheel of a watermill, going round and round, grinding grain into flour for bread and plenty, and grinding each of us to create transformation.

I love that kid.

Photo by the author of the Empress card from Robin Wood's Tarot.