My story.

First, you may wonder why a lot of my story is about being an artist when this site is mostly a space to access my tarot and meditation services. Tarot and meditation are both practices in which we communicate with the divine in whatever form you imagine that to take. For me, art and spirituality have always been intertwined. What follows is a little bit about what this path that led me to tarot and meditation looked like. If you’d like to get straight to learning about my services, feel free to skip ahead to my services page here.

So what is the life of an artist. Well, for me, it’s been driven by answering the question of what is an artist. At 5 I reasoned that if I was going to be an artist I must of course at some point learn how to paint. At ten, a teacher told us that poetry has no rules and I knew then that I would need to write poetry as well. This was confirmed when in undergrad I watched Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet. I knew family sing-a-longs were also a part of it. And even my great-aunts’ palm readings and coffee ground readings and my grandmother’s little feelings that would have her sending me some extra money when I was secretly driving to work without car insurance. My life as an artist led to many things--to poetry, to dreamwork, to shamanism, to ukulele, to yoga.

In my lifelong exploration of what it means to be an artist, I have discovered that virtually any object or action can be viewed as art. And also as poetry. And also as yoga. All of life is art. All of life is poetry. All of life is yoga. All of life is a meditation. All of life is a dream. In fact, most things are a lot like life of course. I have sought out teachers who understood this simple fact and therefore from Anne Waldman I did not learn to write poetry so much as I learned to be a poet. From Lorin Roche and Camille Maurine I did not learn to meditate so much as I learned to fall in love with life. And here I’ll drop a quick recommendation to check out the work of Allan Kaprow whose book Assemblage, Environments & Happenings I repeatedly checked out of my hometown library as a kid. It was a comically large book for a child and is still foundational to my world view.

Ironically--with the exception of a high school art teacher who taught me to ask questions of life--my visual arts teachers have mostly taught me by way of negative example. I am particularly driven by a third grade art teacher who, instead of explaining what “abstract” means, told me “you are too much of a perfectionist to make abstract art.” She clearly didn’t understand the meaning of the word perfectionist. I am still on a mission of understanding abstraction. I even wrote my MFA thesis on Abstractionism in Poetry. And every high school art student who took my classes in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, could tell you a thing or two about Kandinsky.

It was actually for the purpose of developing as an art teacher that I decided to study tarot more deeply. I had been a casual reader since 1999. I was self-taught aside from the little white book that came in the box of my Wonderland Tarot deck. As you might have picked up, I come from a family of intuitives and that coupled with my interest in art helped me to free-associate from the words and images on the cards even without any formal training. But as I crafted art lessons to teach abstraction, I felt my art students deserved to also be taught my least favorite thing as well--symbolism. I didn’t teach my art students to read tarot, but used it to teach myself. It might seem strange--a tarot reader who doesn’t like symbolism. I’ve just never bought into the idea that one thing equals another in the way that it could be looked up in a book. My dreamwork never involved a dream dictionary. Tarot is not built on a system of “this symbol always means that,” so it seemed a good way for me to teach myself about symbolism. I began a more formal study of what others had written on the topic. And I also took my at home yoga practice, finally, to a yoga studio where I could learn from live teachers.

Meditation and tarot both invite us to fall in love with life and I aim to extend this invitation in every service I offer. So what does it mean to be in love with something. It doesn’t mean that thing is perfect--even if we accept it just as it is. It also doesn’t mean that thing is unchangeable or even that our love for it is unchangeable--if we love something we allow it to change and our love for it to change and to become something it wasn’t before. Yet we also don’t demand that it be something other than it is. Being in love means that we bring our attention to something--as it is--ever changing--moment to moment. It means that we yearn to know it, to understand it, to breath it, to dance with it. Being in love means that we care--actively--not only through sentiment but through action. This is how we show the thing we love that we love it. This is how we come to know it, to understand it, to breath it, to dance with it, and to feel love back from it. Now, I’ll be honest, tarot and meditation do not always reach this goal of falling in love with one’s life, but they are useful tools if that is your goal or your path. And if falling in love with life is not your goal in reaching out for a tarot or meditation session--I’ll have to warn you--you may still catch a glimpse of this in these practices even if we don’t set out to see it.

And this is how meditation and tarot are an extension of my art practice. Because art, too, is an act of love, of giving attention, of responding to life. If you have found yourself here and reading this, you are likely thinking about whether you would like to work with me. And if you’ve read this far, we may be a good fit! Whether through tarot or through meditation, I would love to be your guide and witness on this path. 

Read more about my services here.
Join me for a free event here.
Read my blog here.

xo
kim