THE WISDOM OF KNOWING YOU DON’T KNOW

Most people come to Tarot with a question.

Sometimes it’s a practical question: What should I do about this job? This relationship? This decision? Sometimes it’s an emotional question: Why am I stuck? Why do I keep repeating this pattern? Sometimes it’s a spiritual question: What is life asking of me right now?

Whatever form it takes, the underlying impulse is the same: a desire to see more clearly than you can right now.

That desire is not naïve. It is human.

But clarity is not the same thing as certainty—and Tarot, at its best, does not offer certainty. It offers orientation. It helps you locate yourself honestly, so your choices can be made with greater wisdom.

This book does not serve up seventy-eight disconnected definitions—one for each Tarot card. I’m not interested in handing you a list of meanings to memorize. Tarot is a coherent symbolic system—an ecosystem of images, patterns, tensions, and developmental thresholds—and it only really reveals itself when you learn to read it as a whole.

Still, every journey needs a place to begin. And the right place to begin is not with mastery, but with the wisdom of knowing you don’t know.

WHERE ARE YOU?

Before we go any further, write down one question about your life that feels genuinely unclear—something you would honestly like to understand better.

Then notice whether your question resonates with any of these:

• Where am I, really—not just externally, but internally?
• Which direction am I currently moving?
• What routes are available from here?
• What obstacles or delays lie ahead?
• Do I need to reroute, slow down, or proceed with confidence?

These questions do not seek a prediction or a verdict. They invite discernment.

This is the spirit in which I want you to learn Tarot: not as an infallible forecast, and not as a loophole around responsibility, but as a way of seeing what is already true—and responding with greater freedom. If you like imagery, think of Tarot as a kind of spiritual GPS: not driving for you, but helping you orient.

THE FOOL AS A MIRROR OF YOU AND ME

In asking your questions, you are in good company. The Fool can sympathize.

If you have a deck nearby, pull the Fool and look closely. If you don’t have a deck yet, picture the classic image: a traveler at the edge of a cliff, head lifted toward the sky, a small dog at their heels, a pack on a staff, distant peaks, bright air, a white rose.

Of the seventy-eight Tarot cards, the Fool is unique. Seventy-seven cards belong to a numbered sequence or a courtly rank. But the Fool is numbered zero—a paradoxical beginning.

Zero suggests mystery. Zero suggests openness. Zero suggests that you could be anywhere and nowhere at once: at the beginning of something, or in the middle of something, or at a threshold you didn’t plan to reach.

That is why the Fool is not merely “a card.” The Fool is a condition: the experience of stepping forward without being able to see the whole road.

If that feels familiar, it should.

In this respect, you are also in good philosophical company. Socrates—often treated as the fountainhead of Western philosophy—was famous not for possessing certainty, but for refusing false certainty. His wisdom began with a sober recognition of his limits: he knew he didn’t know. 

This is not despair. It is honesty. It is also the beginning of real learning.

Tarot begins here too—not because we are incapable, but because we are human. We are inside our stories. We are biased toward our own viewpoints. We are skilled at rationalizing what we already want to believe.

So we need a mirror that can show us something we cannot easily see on our own.

A LITTLE ABOUT MY STORY

How Tarot Found Me

Knowing that I don’t know—and that I could use help seeing clearly—has always been at the center of my relationship with Tarot. Here is how Tarot found me.

I first encountered Tarot in a New Age bookstore in Austin, Texas. I was young, curious, and hungry in the way a person gets hungry when they can’t quite name what’s missing. Looking back, what I most wanted—though I couldn’t yet say it plainly—was healing.

Part of that search was intellectual. I became a philosophy major, then went on to graduate school, earned a master’s degree, and taught college philosophy for eight years. I was trying to understand what makes a life meaningful, what makes a life good, what makes a self coherent.

But before graduate school, I walked into that bookstore and found something that spoke to a different register—one not satisfied by arguments alone. Tarot’s images weren’t making claims in syllogisms; they were speaking in symbols, scenes, and archetypal pressures. I left with a Rider-Waite-Smith deck and a couple of books.

That was more than thirty-five years ago. In 2003, I changed careers and became a Unitarian Universalist minister. Tarot didn’t disappear from my life; it deepened. I continued to use it as a tool for reflection, discernment, and honest self-encounter.

Unitarian Universalism has its own way of relating to wisdom. In my tradition, wisdom is not something you swallow whole. You test it. You engage it, interrogate it, and watch what it brings out in you over time—keeping what proves true and life-giving. That is also my stance toward Tarot.

If you walk away from this book unconvinced, skeptical, or indifferent: good. Think for yourself. Find your own way up the mountain.

But if you walk away with greater clarity, deeper self-honesty, and a stronger capacity for wise action: even better.

My hope is simple: that this book can help.

Now—with your question in hand—we begin not with theory but with practice: one grounded question, one card, and a simple way to listen.