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The winter festival time can be stressful, even for Pagans. Some honor their family’s holiday traditions with a bit of discomfort. Others are caught up in the responsibilities of cooking, baking, gifting and visiting like everyone else.

Whatever you celebrate this time of year, tarot can help you make it more joyful, more inspiring and more fun.

For this Halloween blog entry of mine, I would like to give our kind attention to a truly fascinating interview subject, Stonie Rivera. Rivera has been a a local legend on the Milwaukee music scene for some time. Her punk bands Dummy Club and the Psycho Bunnies were well-loved and the former performed memorably at last year's, "Lest We Forget" concert at Turner Hall Ballroom, which also highlighted the talents of Die Kreuzen. The following are some of Rivera's thoughts on music, the arts, and running an underground art gallery which also houses a pleasant collection of occult supplies. And oh yes, she is a practicing witch.

This blog, 78 Magickal Tools, is about using tarot in ritual and magick. I believe that the only limits on what tarot can help us do are the limits we impose ourselves.

 In my posts I like to give ideas of ways to use the cards with the hope that you, the reader, will be inspired to discover and create even more ways to incorporate the cards into your spiritual practice.

The holidays are just around the corner, and while I was surfing I came across these wonderful Tarot Tile pendants made by Gaea (http://gaea.cc/gaea_tarot.html) I particularly liked the 'blue moon' in teal.

Being a potter myself, these have given me some inspiration, not so much for making the Tarot tile pendants, but for doing a line of Tarot inspired plaques and masks. The runes are talking to me fairly loudly at the moment, too. I feel some sculpting approaching...

Your tarot deck is a fabulous tool for magick. Each card carries specific energy. You can use your cards as altar tools to invoke energies and entities. You can use your cards to offer protection, to quickly usher in change and to assist with healing.

You can use tarot as part of formal magick in ritual. You can also use tarot in casual magick by carrying an image with you or pinning an image to your wall.

I watch the news with my mother sometimes. For the record, probably not something I would recommend, especially when I have more leftist leanings and she is surprisingly conservative for how open-minded she is on certain topics. I digress. No matter how different our perspectives are, we usually end up saying the same thing after a particularly heart-wrenching news story about yet another murder or tragedy: “What is this world coming to?”

I was raised Episcopal, so I would assume that the whole idea of “God must have needed that person in Heaven, so He took he/she away from us here for a good purpose” filtered into me, by osmosis since I don’t remember anyone ever saying that to me directly. Since I never had to deal with personal tragedy, there was no reason for me to ever hear this statement, so I didn’t really think of it much until lately. Yet I keep saying that good ole phrase in the back of my head: “There must be a reason for this.” What if there isn’t?

     Recently I was given the opportunity to review Lily Oak's newest book, Quick & Easy Tarot, released by Hedge Witchery Books (http://www.hedge-witcherybooks.com), and I am so very grateful for the opportunity. I read tarot every day; I have even been known to carry my deck around in my purse for no other reason then to have it nearby. I am not a beginning reader by any means, but Lily Oak has included pieces of information in her book that were quite new and fascinating to me.