The friend is confused. Has Julia never met Avis? No, Julia says, they’ve only written letters.

The friend is amazed, and clearly we in the audience are meant to be as well. How can you have a years long correspondence with someone you’ve never met? To me this is quite ordinary. I have been writing letters for years with nine or ten people, only three of whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting face to face (and them only once or twice).

I collect fountain pens. Some are brand new, others as much as 100 years old.

Fountain Pens

[Group of Wahl pens from the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s. The gold pen, second from left, inspired my story “Master Matyas” in my bookThe Tarot of Perfection: A Book of Tarot Tales. Look closely and you can see the inscription, “M. Matyas”.]

The pens are not for show, I write with them. I write almost all my books and stories and articles by hand, in journals with blank pages (I don’t want to draw between the lines, why should I write in them?)

And I write letters. There’s a whole community of us, connected by online forums (my favorite— www.Pentrace.net) but then branching off into actual letters, sometimes running eight or nine pages. When I first starting doing this a friend asked “What do you write about?” (considering that I didn’t know any of the people). I kind of mumbled “Well, mostly what pens we’re using, and where we got them.”

That’s changed. With some people I write about politics (including a friend in Baltimore who’s as far right as I’m left), some it’s metaphysics, some it’s issues of psyche and identity, and with some it’s just about our lives. My pen pals include a horse rancher in Texas (formerly of the intelligence community), an Indian-American physicist in Anne Arbor, and a poet and academic in New Zealand (okay, her I met first, before we began writing),

One of my favorite correspondents is a woman deeply versed in Jewish history, Talmud, and other spiritual traditions, including early Christianity. Her name is Myra Love, and she’s one of the people I’ve met (twice now). Myra’s letters are long and rich, covering a lot of territory.

In the most recent, she wrote that when the Israelites heard the divine voice at Mt. Sinai they responded “We do and we hear.” This, as Myra says, is an odd construction, since we’d expect the opposite. I wrote back that what they were being told was not immediately clear to them, and that the only way it could ever become clear, be really heard, was by doing what was asked of them.

Some things cannot be theorized. We have to do them to know what they’re about, and often, keep doing them before we can start to get what they are. Tarot reading is like this. Some people try to study books, and memorize meanings before they try out reading the cards. But reading cards is so fluid and dynamic, changing every time we do it, that the only way to learn is by doing. We do and we hear.

I decided to ask the Tarot about this issue—literally do a reading and see if I could hear what the cards were telling me. Two cards, one for doing, one for hearing, from The Shining Tribe Tarot.

Justice

Doing—Justice. One of the primary attributes of this card is seeing, looking. The Tarot version of Justice does not wear a blindfold. And of course, the first thing we do with a card is look at it. But the seeing of Justice is also a commitment to truth. We do readings justly. In my book Rachel Pollack’s Tarot Wisdom: Spiritual Teachings and Deeper Meanings, I quoted a line from the Torah: “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” Thus, one of the main things the Israelites pledged to do before they could hear was pursue justice.

Chariot

Hearing—the Chariot. The Chariot is a vehicle of action, of will, but not just the will of the ego. By reaching up into the light, the Charioteer connects his will to something higher. The Chariot is a vehicle. Two thousand years ago mystics traveled to heavenly “palaces” through intense visualizations of a divine chariot. “Hearing” is not a physical act but a total experience that takes us to unknown places.

We do and we hear.

The Tarot of Perfection: A Book of Tarot Tales

Tarot of Perfection

The Shining Tribe Tarot, Revised and Expanded

The Shining Tribe Tarot

Rachel Pollack’s Tarot Wisdom: Spiritual Teachings and Deeper Meanings

Tarot Wisdom