Like innumerable writers before me, I had a revelation while plunging into a glass of red wine. Unlike most, I’d also perched myself before a tub of my own spit, and my revelation was about tarot.
I was at the Napa Wine Academy in a weekend-long certification training. The goal: to supplement textbook learning with actually tasting wine.
It was all as blissful as it sounds until a Rioja Reserva almost broke me. I glitched upon swishing, like a cow at a cattle guard. Books tend to offer the same vocab words about Rioja Reservas. I rifled through my memorized textbook datapoints: “Complex notes of dried fruit”; “leather”; “vanilla”; “structured flavors with firm tannins.” But I tasted none of that. Just grape juice. And also some panic.
I gave up, fatigued. I decided to just sip and zone out.
Surprisingly then I thought of the ’90s. I tasted the fig newtons from my grandmother: deep, jammy figs, dried like some burnished hippie store fruit leather. There it was.
Feeling first thinking second let me enter into the experience and actually forge neural pathways. That reversal unlocked it all for the rest of the weekend. I learned that the “petrol” note on some Rieslings is just my memory of sprinting around Toys R Us inhaling the perfume of pungent plastic dinosaurs. Fino Sherry is just my grandmother’s pork chops. And, to the horror of probably most wine people, Sauternes is animal-style fries at In N Out. (I will die on this hill—feel free to fight me in a reply to this newsletter.)
Are these “correct” wine descriptors? No! I would get harpooned for sure with a Champagne sabre in a formal blind tasting exam. But, they are valid: They helped me anchor and mindfully immerse. Grounding into my own subjective experience, not only memorizing the sterile textbook datapoints, became key to knowing each wine.
I realized I was just relearning lessons from more than a decade ago when I started tarot. There’s a pressure to adhere to what the “experts” say: learning cards and key words, plus the themes, history, symbols, and many other correspondences. Did you know that each card has herbal, deity, crystal, flower, planetary, and even more correspondences? It’s a wealth of knowledge, but the way people pressure themselves to memorize them all feels unfair. And a little too rooted in our society’s cognitive supremacy, where wisdom comes from intellect only.
When you’re reading the cards—using tarot as divination—the message comes through what you sense. The memories and associations only you have, and the body only you inhabit.
The concept for this newsletter was born: These correspondence systems weren’t just handed down from the astral plane. They were constructed piece by piece by curious people playing close attention to their Earthling experience. The system came second. The noticing came first. Let’s return.
Since I was an arts and culture correspondent for many years, you’ll hear about the TV characters, dishes, songs, herbs, lesser-known stories behind beloved works of art and culture, and the historical figures you might have never heard of before but will admire henceforth. They’ll all be portals to a specific card of the week.
You like intriguing little dispatches from art, culture, and the realms of witchy wonderment to tickle your inbox weekly
You want to see how an art witch works in her studio
You appreciate the cross-pollination of the spiritual with the sensual and sensory
You’re curious about tarot or astrology but don’t want to feel like you need to pass a test — you want to vibe with it
You want someone to give you permission to play — and then hand you a structured, curated, slightly Virgo-brained framework to do it in
Reply with what sounds the most interesting to you.
Thanks for reading!
Cristina
A quick note: I am not the authority on any of this — no one person is. These traditions belong to lineages, communities, and teachers who came long before me. I will do my best to trace ideas to their sources, spotlight the voices who shaped them, acknowledge how history has shaped them for better or for worse, and collaborate with other practitioners and experts. If I get something wrong or miss a credit, tell me. This is a living map, and it gets better with more hands on it.
