My Tarot collection

What you choose to collect can say so much about you. It’s curious how it also reveals how much you have changed through the years. I have collected many objects during my life. From CDs, to books, to watches, and many other items. Right now I’m in my Tarot collection phase.

Classical music phase

There was a time when I used to collect classical music CDs. I love beauty, and music has the ultimate aesthetic appeal to me. It’s also rooted in formal structure and tradition, but at the same time it’s moving and emotional. It’s fascinating how something created by adhering to rigid rules and mathematics can touch our feelings so delicately.

Well, that phase has passed. Don’t get me wrong, I still love music as much as I loved then, if not more. What has passed was the CD phase. Today, we have streaming services. Even if we want to buy music, it will most likely be in a digital format. But I can’t part with my collection yet. At one point I needed to save some space in my apartment. So, I got rid of all the plastic cases for nearly a thousand albums. I put them in special briefcases with folders for CDs. I downloaded all of them to my cell phone. In a sense, I still have them with me.

So many books, so little time

Then I had the phase of collecting physical books. I had a limited budget, and still have. In Brazil we use to call the used books store sebo, what literally means tallow, or animal fat. That’s because of the characteristic stale smell that thousands of used books exhale in a crumpled space. I will be honest, I love that smell! It reminds me of economy and reward. I spent countless hours on sebos looking for that particular elusive book missing from my personal library.

That phase has also (partially) passed. I still buy some physical books, but much less than I used to. Now, again, everything is in a digital format. So, I have all of my books in my computer, cell phone or e-reader.

Tarot decks, a portal for our collective symbols

I have an obsession for symbolism, for the unconscious, for that part of ourselves that we can’t quite understand. When I got this book for my birthday, I loved it right away. Tarot cards are so rich in symbolism and the occult. They play an important part in the black arts. I wanted to learn more. I got a Tarot deck here, another there, a book about it on the public domain. When you see you have quite a respectable collection.

Each of these collections — the classical music CDs, the watches earned through work, the shelves of books spanning mystery, philosophy, and poetry, and the richly symbolic Tarot decks — tells a story about who I am and what I value. They speak to a life lived between logic and intuition, discipline and curiosity, tradition and mystery. More than objects, they are touchstones of meaning, memory, and identity — a quiet map of the inner landscapes I’ve explored and continue to navigate.