introduction to meg

Today on CARD TALK, I’ll cover:
-who I am
-the story of how I came to the tarot
-3am.tarot's origins
-goals for this podcast

For more on Meg, check out 3amtarot.com, and order your copy of Finding the Fool through Bookshop.org or your favorite local bookstore.

Find episode transcripts and more over on the CARD TALK website.

Love what you’re hearing? Support the pod with a one-time donation or recurring subscription, and get the chance to submit topics for future episodes! 

Transcript

Meg: 0:11

My name is Meg Jones Wall and you're listening to Card Talk, a mini podcast for Tarot Basics and Evergreen Insights. I'm glad you're here In this first episode. Well, we're going to be talking about me. If you're new to me and to my work, or if you've been following me for a while but don't know as much about my personal tarot journey and lineage, this episode is really just going to include a brief summary of how I got here, what I do and where I hope to go in the future. And before we dive in to my story, I just want to give you some kind of quick bites on who I am and how you can refer to me, and just kind of some basic information on where I came from. So again, my name is Meg Jones-Wall, I am queer and bisexual and non-binary, and my pronouns are she, they and I am white.

Meg: 1:02

My primary ancestry, as far as I know, can be traced to Scotland and Spain, and I'm currently living in New York City, but I have history in Southern California, new England, and I've also lived in places such as Ithaca and Budapest, hungary. I am a Marseille-style tarot reader, which means that my main focus in readings is on numerology and elements, rather than utilizing specific keywords for cards. I've been reading tarot since 2016, when I bought my first deck, and I don't think it's really fair to say that I'm self-taught, since I have leaned on the wisdom and writings of a lot of different teachers along the way, but I do think it's useful for you to know that I have never had a formal mentorship with another tarot teacher. I am disabled and immunocompromised. I live with idiopathic insomnia as well as major depressive disorder, and both of those things very much color my practice as well as my perspective on the world. For the astrologers in the house, I'm a Gemini rising. I have a third house Leo moon and a sixth house Scorpio sun Gemini rising. I have a third house Leo moon and a sixth house Scorpio sun. My chart ruler is Mercury and Sagittarius, and I also do actually have a final dispositor of Venus and Libra in my fifth house. And for the numerologists in the house, I'm actually an 11 life path with a public persona or expression number of six. Lastly, for my archetype lovers, my most closely treasured archetypes are the sage and the rebel. They inform a lot of my work as well as just the way that I generally move through the world and, before we get any farther.

Meg: 2:32

I want to be crystal clear with you about my own values. I believe that Black and Indigenous and trans and disabled lives matter. I believe that abortion is healthcare and that mutual aid is the future, and that the things that we do and say and feel can have a lasting and powerful impact, even if we don't see it in that moment. I believe in reparations and in land back. I believe in humility. I believe in dismantling white supremacy and I believe strongly in challenging my own biases. I also believe in science. I believe in COVID consciousness, and I still wear a mask when I leave the house. I believe that Palestine should be free and that we should not be afraid to call things what they are, especially when those things are genocide. I believe that change is possible, but that it will take courage and community action to achieve that change, and I believe in constant learning, in never thinking that I have it all figured out and in being not only open to excited about discovery. For still here, thank you. Now let's hop into the meat of my story, because I think it's important for you to understand how where I've come from impacts my current everyday work as well as my trajectory, and where I think I might go in the future. I think the best way to summarize my story is that buying my first tarot deck on my own, with no real knowledge or experience, was my first true act of spiritual rebellion. We're going to have to go back a little bit so that you understand what I mean, but for me, tarot has always been intertwined in personal story, personal transformation and building community outside of organized religion.

Meg: 4:13

I was raised in a fundamentalist, conservative, evangelical home, and I was raised to a family that was deeply invested in planting, building and expanding churches all around the world. I was a true believer too. I wasn't just dragged, kicking and screaming to church. I did chafe against some of the rules in my own way, many of which were bred from having parents that were really known and respected in the church. There was a lot of attention on me, a lot of eyes on me. I did my best to be the good eldest daughter and young leader that I was so regularly called to be, but that position was very often uncomfortable and required me to wear a lot of masks. I did what I was told. I went to a Christian college to study technical theater and got married young, in my early 20s to a lovely man that I met at that college. I kept attending church, even while I was starting to acknowledge my own bisexuality and queerness, which was a facet of myself that I was really told to hide and be ashamed of. When I was growing up, the church that I was raised in was particularly homophobic and very active in the community in trying to ban gay marriage and gay rights. It was a tough place to grow up closeted ban gay marriage and gay rights. It was a tough place to grow up closeted.

Meg: 5:28

The older I got, the less safe church felt for me and the religion of my youth just started to feel more and more distant. I couldn't connect with it. In trying to connect with it and in trying to kind of set boundaries and start to distance myself from that church and that faith, I fell into a lot of deep depression. I dealt with some suicidal experiences and I'm honestly really lucky to have survived that part of my life because there were times when it did not seem that I would. Eventually, thankfully, I found an amazing therapist. But I also really recognized through that process that in trying to separate myself from my church and my faith, I was really desperate for spiritual connection. I was lonely. I was spiritually lonely. Not only had I lost the community that church so often provides, but I'd also kind of left behind those spiritual connections and I did not know how to build new ones outside of organized religion.

Meg: 6:21

So I bought my first tarot deck. I had never had a reading, I'd never even held a deck in my hands. I hardly knew anything about tarot, but I kept seeing it showing up in books and movies. It was showing up in my dreams. I couldn't stop thinking about tarot and it felt really strange to be drawn to something that I didn't know anything about. But it also just felt loud. I kept thinking about the cards, I kept wondering if it might be something that I could connect with and I struggled a lot before I bought my first deck because I saw a lot of rules that I wasn't sure that I wanted to follow.

Meg: 6:59

Having left such a restrictive religion, I was reluctant to enter into a new spiritual practice that felt like it had a lot of rules. But after months of trying to make myself buy the Rider-Waite-Smith deck that I saw so many other tarot teachers and tarot leaders telling me I had to buy, I literally finally said to myself fuck it, I don't want to buy this deck and I'm not going to start this new practice following rules that I don't like, when I'm just now trying to separate myself from the rules that have caused me so much harm. So I was 30 years old and in 2016, I bought my first tarot deck, which was the Wild Unknown Tarot Deck, a very different deck than the Rider-Waite-Smith. Now, who's to say, if I'd actually followed the rules and bought the Rider-Waite-Smith deck that was so often recommended, if my tarot journey would have taken a different track? I'm not sure.

Meg: 7:54

I was not good at tarot when I started, whatever that means. I didn't pick up the cards and immediately know what to do with them. I didn't start doing readings and immediately understand where to go or how to read the cards or how to string them together as a conversation. I was completely lost and confused and I quit tarot a few times throughout that first year. I just kept coming back to them.

Meg: 8:19

It was like this push and pull where I would tell myself that I wasn't good enough to read, that this wasn't for me, that I was rebelling in a way that was not safe or not okay, but then my intuition kept tugging me back to the cards, and you have to understand that, being raised evangelical, I was specifically taught that my intuition was the enemy, that my instincts were inherently sinful, that anything I wanted couldn't be good. So this push and pull just felt like such spiritual turmoil within me. I knew what I wanted, but I was afraid of that wanting. I had been told that that wanting was not okay for me. Fortunately, my intuition prevailed and that rebellion that I started with my first deck continued to build as I finally started to find tarot writers and tarot teachers whose work really resonated with me. I found the work of Carrie Mallon and Beth Maiden, who were really the first two tarot readers who encouraged me to start building my own meanings and helped me find confidence in my readings beyond just flipping cards over and struggling with them. Eventually I expanded to reading the work of Baccarat Wintner and Michelle T and Cassandra Snow. I even found Teresa Reed, who's become now a dear friend and tarot mentor. Truly, when I felt fluent enough, I started digging into Rachel Pollack and Mary Kay Greer, and all of these writers, many of whom are also tarot teachers, truly helped to shape my relationship with the cards in a fundamental way In terms of my tarot career by mid-2017,.

Meg: 9:55

I had been tracking my tarot polls daily with a journal, but I'm a photographer my background is in still life photography and event production so I was taking these pictures on my phone, trying to connect them with journal entries. It was not working, so I made an Instagram to combine everything into one place and have a visual diary, which just made a lot more sense for my learning style and my personal preferences. I kept it private at first, but after mentioning to a couple of friends that it had been really helpful for me to have as a space, they asked if they could follow it because they wanted to start their own tarot practice. I never thought anyone would find it, so I just made it public. But the account started to grow and as the account grew, my practice was growing too. I started to dig into numerology and explored archetypes more intensely. I even started to host some different card studies and try to foster conversation on this app in a way that both helped me find more confidence in my own readings but also pointed me out towards even more people that I could connect with and learn from. My confidence grew not just in my tarot readings, but also in my writing. It felt like communicating about tarot came really naturally to me, and I loved getting to share what I'd found and discovered, watching my own experience with the cards grow in tandem with the people around me.

Meg: 11:15

By 2018, I had started to tentatively read for other people at a very low rate, but I was still so shy about it. I was still really kind of finding my footing and finding my sense of confidence within myself as well as in my work. I attended my first tarot conference that year, but I also went to a queer camp that was hosted by Autostraddle, where I met a ton of incredible people, many of whom are now some of my nearest and dearest friends and my partner. One of those people that I met was Heather Hogan, and in the months after camp we not only became friends, but she actually asked me if I would ever consider writing about tarot for Autostraddle. She told me that my work had really excited her and made her really curious about tarot really excited her and made her really curious about tarot. I was so nervous, but I decided to just go for it and I pitched a monthly tarot scopes column with no real awareness that that's a pretty ballsy move for a writer who'd never been published with them before. Nevertheless, the editors at Autostraddle said yes and my first tarot scopes column published in January 2019.

Meg: 12:15

Writing about tarot so regularly like that really pushed me to step up my game. I started experimenting with newsletters and Patreon. People kept asking questions for me to answer. My social media accounts were growing really fast and my knowledge kept growing too. I started digging more into tarot history, learning more and more about different correspondences and challenging my own assumptions around the cards. I also really started to use tarot for spiritual practice in a way that has continued to grow and grow to this day, and which I do keep pretty private. I will talk about tarot and spirituality in some future episodes, though, I promise by the middle of 2019, I was starting to get a lot of questions about writing a tarot book, and I really didn't feel like I had been reading long enough to do such a thing, but people kept telling me that my work felt easy to understand and that they felt connected to my work in a really beautiful way.

Meg: 13:10

It was inspiring to me to hear their stories, so I thought it was worth a shot. I started to map out what would eventually become Finding the Fool. I wrote the first draft as an experiment, really just to see how much I had to say around tarot, and I participated in NaNoWriMo in 2019, which is National Novel Writing Month. I hit 50,000 words that month and realized that this actually could be a book, so I started taking the steps to publish. I queried, found an amazing agent, we went out on submission with the proposal and I find my. I signed my first contract with wiser books in the summer of 2021 and finding the fool was published in the spring of 2023.

Meg: 13:49

Running alongside all of this is a lot of personal change. I had been married for 13. No, we'd been together for 13 years. I've been married for 11 years, when my now ex-husband and I were part of the wave of couples that decided to separate in 2020. That decision was made with so much love and respect and has deeply proven to be the best possible decision for each of us. I fell in love with my best friend, came out as non-binary and have really gone all in on 3AM Tarot as my full-time business. I've also really stepped into a new kind of spirituality, building relationships with planets and deities, embracing my own gifts and working in ways far beyond what my childhood self ever thought was possible. The version of me growing up who felt smothered and stifled in the church would not recognize me today, and I think that's great. Now I live in a really rich community with a huge variety of writers, occultists, witches, astrologers and different spiritual practitioners, and I'm constantly learning from all of them on a daily basis. I really do think of myself as a forever student, someone who is insatiably curious, who's rarely afraid to ask questions and always wants to scratch the surface to keep going deeper. It's really tempting to list everyone whose work has impacted mine, but I think we would be here for a year. I wouldn't even know how to start naming everyone whose work has impacted my own.

Meg: 15:18

I write about tarot every day, and my practice particularly has centered now around sitting with folks in times of grief, change, transformation and discovery. I fully believe that tarot can be both powerfully spiritual and intensely practical, and I like to use the cards in both ways, often simultaneously. I also really emphasize personal relationships with the cards. I am not interested in telling you how you should read or trying to force you to build a tarot practice that resembles mine. Instead, I'm really just interested in supporting you to figure out what your relationship with the cards can be and help you understand, build a tarot practice that resembles mine. Instead, I'm really just interested in supporting you to figure out what your relationship with the cards can be and help you understand how tarot can fit into your life and your world and your goals and your dreams. I do sell readings in a few different formats, but my true work and passion is in writing and teaching books and classes and resources, all designed to help you walk your own tarot path, build confidence in readings and find clarity and support with the cards. There are tons of ways to work with me, so if you want to head to 3amtarotcom, which you can also find in the show notes, now that we've gotten all of that out of the way and I apologize that this is going to be a slightly longer episode than normal let's talk about this podcast.

Meg: 16:30

Car Talk has been a long time coming, but it was really pushed into being by a series of reels that now are over like 150, I think that I've been creating over on Instagram. I've been answering questions for you in this really quick, accessible format and I'm still on Instagram, but 90 seconds is not a lot of time and, as it's proving to be a challenging limit with the increasing complexity of the questions that I'm receiving. Plus, it's just really hard to keep them organized and browsable and accessible. A podcast really has become the best format for sharing information in a easier to find, bite-sized sort of way. You will always be able to find transcripts, as well as browse all the current available episodes via the podcast link in the show notes, which is also linked at 3amtarotcom, and I'm pushing Card Talk out to stream on all available platforms, so you should be able to find it on your favorite podcasting app.

Meg: 17:25

Beyond occasionally telling you about my own courses or current offerings, I am really deeply committed to keeping this podcast completely ad-free and completely sponsor-free. I also want to make sure that every single episode is available to everyone and not put anything behind a paywall, but this is only possible because of support from listeners like you. So if you have learned from me over the years, whether through Instagram, my newsletter, tarot scopes or anything else, and you're in a position to support this ongoing resource, you can set up a recurring donation through Buzzsprout, which is the distribution hosting platform that I'm using for this podcast. You can also make a one-time donation or tip anytime you like. I already have over 200 mini episodes planned covering topics like Tarot basics, how to choose your first deck, how to start learning cards, how to read tarot itself, as well as walking you through all of the different sections and stories contained in the deck. I will do episodes on all 78 cards and I'm also going to cover different techniques, traditions and tips for working with the cards in a variety of ways. However, I know that more topics are going to come up as we go, so if you do become a paid supporter, you'll have the opportunity to ask questions and suggest topics for me to answer on future episodes.

Meg: 18:38

It is my sincere hope that this podcast supports your personal tarot journey, that it answers questions, offers encouragement and maybe even supports you in practicing your own bit of spiritual rebellion. I hope that this helps get you excited to dig into the cards on a consistent basis. Our world is a hot fucking mess. It is in turmoil. There are so many scary things happening right now. There are so many disruptions happening right now. We are witnessing violence and genocide and insurrection and a lot of really overwhelming things that can make us feel incredibly helpless. But I truly believe that tarot can help us remember who we are, help us connect with one another and build community, and can also clarify a vision for the world that we want to build together.

Meg: 19:24

Tarot is not stagnant and it doesn't want you to stay stagnant. You can use the cards for your own growth and evolution and, no matter where you are on your journey, card Talk is going to be a resource that is available to you anytime. Thank you so much for being here and I cannot wait to walk through the tarot with you. Card Talk is committed to staying ad free for everyone, which is only possible thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. To pledge your monthly support or to make a one-time donation, click the link in the show notes. You can also find episode transcripts, more about me and additional tarot resources through my website, 3amtarotcom. See you next time.