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Tarot for all folk
Northland resident starts tarot card reading business out of her homeThandie Vela Northern News Services Published Tuesday, November 1, 2011
"There's no mystic properties about anything that I have to say," the self-taught tarot reader said. "I'm just the lady behind the table." Last month, the City of Yellowknife approved a development permit for MacNearney to operate her tarot card business out of her Northland home. Now that the regulatory licence is in place, she is letting her angels take care of the rest. "I'm actually following what I consider to be my spiritual destiny," MacNearney said. "It's really not about the money. "It's just about helping the person in front of me make a connection with their guardian angels." A departure from the traditional oracle tarot practices of the occult, MacNearney does not attempt to tell your future when a card is drawn, she said. "It's not about telling the future or anything like that, for me it's about being in the now," she said. "What do you need to know now?" It takes less than four minutes of quiet, "zen" time to reach this end, MacNearney said, and it begins with the selection of a gemstone, in a small room which was once the bedroom of her two small sons. MacNearney sits on one side of a table, displays her collection of about 100 gemstones of various properties and energies, and instructs the client to select one, based on instinct, she says, "the one that's calling your name." Once the stone is in hand, she instructs the client to take deep breaths, relax, listen to your inner voice, and place your energy of self into a question. She then shuffles the deck of cards with the energy of the stone and question, and then a card is selected by the client. MacNearney has found her niche in the angel deck of cards, which are billed to provide "daily guidance from your angels." Don't expect her to reveal your imminent death, because the readings are all positive, MacNearney admits, with messages such as "Go for it." Following the reading, she asks, "Was that relevant to your question?" But sometimes she can tell. "When they're crying, you can tell," she said. MacNearney herself was brought to tears by her own first, fateful tarot card reading. A year after picking up a deck from a bookstore in Edmonton, she finally gathered the courage to open it. "I was actually a little intimidated," she said, noting her Pentecostal upbringing in Truro, N.S., made her wary of the tarot. "Though it intrigued me, it scared me as well," she said. With encouragement from a friend, she read the instructional book, and was taken aback by her own reading. "It was very poignant," she said. "Very relevant to the point, it actually moved me to tears." She went on to do readings for her close friends, and did her first public readings last summer at Folk on the Rocks, where she saw almost 60 clients for free. "Something that I learned at Folk on the Rocks is that people are definitely intimidated by (tarot) but it's for everybody," she said, explaining the chosen name for her business -- Tarot for all Folk. "It resonates." MacNearney is currently doing evening and weekend readings from her home and plans to move the business into a six-metre-tall tipi erected last year in front of her home during the summer.
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