You Broke It, You Bought It

Women and the convenience of poison, Jenn Zahrt’s podcast, and my well-honed ways with the Tarot

Nov 09, 2024

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“The universe is change, life is opinion.” —Marcus Aurelius

SO, HOW DID THE ELECTION TURN OUT? I just woke up.

Actually, I haven’t slept in three days.

But anyway, I found the graphic below by sheer serendipity/synchronicity while rummaging through my bookcase while thinking, “What graphic do you want to open a future post with that will reference the MAGA honeymoon period and what will follow after it withers?”

And then, while stumbling upon and opening up a book I hadn’t looked at in years, there it was—the Canadian band Honeymoon Suite’s first album cover. You get it, right? “You made your bed, now lie in it.”

Or you could apply this bromide from another angle: “You broke it, you bought it.”

Also, from the synchronic realm, it’s no accident that I started rewatching I Claudius last month; this sprawling, award-winning BBC production of Robert Graves's 1934 novel is a masterclass in how women (or in this story’s framework) a woman discreetly, covertly, pulled all of the levers in Rome—and with deadly effect—changing the landscape of the imperial empire drastically, and its parade of emperors. Her go-to strategy is what most women (unless they’re Artemisia Gentileschi) resort to—poison. (Hint.) 😉

Revelations with Astrologer Jenn Zahrt

I was recently a guest on astrologer and bibliophile

Jenn Zahrt

’s Within Orb podcast. (I love that Jenn keeps her cast down to 30 minutes. A perfectly swell amount of time that curtails the blowharding).

Topics we discussed:

• Must-have astrology (and non-astrology) books
• My first teacher Ivy Goldstein-Jacobson
• The possibility that women invented astrology
• The mechanism of divination.

We also looked at the hidden prescreening upside of pop astrology and how writing about Saturn is like pulling teeth (see what I did there?) I also shared details about breaking up with a serial killer and completing my new romance novel, I Love You Jeffrey Dahmer.

The Tarot and Me

My relationship with the Tarot started several years after my interest in astrology bloomed. So it’s been a long, long-time love affair. A series of comments to my last post (and one over on

Cynthia Giles

’s Substack) got me thinking it would be a good idea to share some of my philosophy regarding my approach with the Tarot.

First, some crazy-ass data; having worked for a year and a half as a telephone psychic back ‘in the day,’ I’d say that within that stretch—combined with my usual output with my clients since—I’ve conducted well over 4,000 readings. I’m rounding up for obvious reasons, but if you read my book Secrets of a Telephone Psychic, you’ll recall that in the back of the book, I brought my Jupiter in Virgo receipts—with detailed breakdowns of numbers, gender, states, and age groups. By the time I left the network, I’d documented 3,287 Tarot exchanges.

Doing over 4,000 Tarot readings—especially speed readings, which you must deliver under the gun when people are paying 3 dollars a minute to talk with you—rewires your nervous system and sharpens your ability to trust your intuition's spontaneous, synthetic workings. People often assume that you need the person you are reading for to be present—in the flesh—when you read the cards. This is inaccurate (at least in my world of the Tarot).

I’ll also add that it is possible to separate oneself from one’s experiential ‘essence’ when interpreting the cards. IOW, if I were a MAGA advocate, would I have read the cards that came up for the Harris/Trump campaigns differently? No.

And would my orientation somehow magically control the cards that appeared after shuffling and cutting the deck.? Uhm, doubly no. It’s nonsense to assume that my preferences determined the revealed cards. That’s like saying you could go to Vegas and, with sheer will, cause certain cards to show up to your advantage in a poker game.

The beauty of the Tarot is that novelty and chance call the shots, which is why we love the Tarot. Novelty combined with the workings of ‘the unknown’ determine what we eventually experience as the linearity of reality.

Day-to-day life, to our ego, seems to be something that can be marked, grasped, and cornered (as defined and explained). This, too, is nonsense. I could keel over right now before I finish this sentence, and the ‘event’ would come as a surprise, as all things do in life.

Imagine how horrifying life would be if each moment were predicted or predetermined according to our preferences. This was the telling theme of the old Tears for Fears pop song Everybody Wants to Rule the World. The song’s message applies to all of us.

Secretly, we believe our cosmology is how the entire world should be arranged. LOL! I’m a Democrat, and of course, my perspective is best for the country. I’m an Amish, and my removal from American reality is how to maintain one’s sanity. I’m MAGA and…on and on. This is the beauty of the teachings from the Tao: not knowing is the only thing we can know.

Speaking of the Tao, my friend Vedika, after it was clear that Trump had won the election, pulled out her phone and did a ‘draw’ from her Tao Te Ching app. Here’s how the random transmission read—coloring that moment for each of us:

“To talk little is natural.
High winds do not last all morning.
Heavy rain does not last all day.
Why is this? Heaven and Earth!
If heaven and Earth cannot make things eternal,
How is it possible for man?
He who follows the Tao
Is at one with the Tao.
He who is virtuous
Experiences Virtue.
He who loses the way
Is lost.
When you are at one with the Tao,
The Tao welcomes you.
When you are at one with Virtue,
The Virtue is always there.
When you are at one with loss,
The loss is experienced willingly.
He who does not trust enough
Will not be trusted.”

And as John Oliver Would Say: “And Now This…”

A big lesson for me this election cycle is summed up succinctly in John Stewart’s video from ‘the morning after’…highly recommended for anyone losing their shit.

Love,