My name is Klara Sa-Lees and my interest in grief work grew out of my experience with the death of my parents a few years ago.
I realized that grief processing is an area that has seen little attention. Mourning is the realm of the shadow in a solutions-driven society.
I developed an interest in my own grief process, its ebbs and flows, and the opportunities it gave me to grow into a new person. Noticing a lack of practitioners working in this field, I began working on a framework for healing grief through tarot.
Healing grief through psychotherapy is not new. It is something that helped me and I encourage others to seek therapy. But I also believe that tarot can offer people a prismatic way of looking at loss that is not addressed through mainstream therapy or medication.
My tarot practice began over twenty years ago, when I bought my first deck at a part-time job at a bookstore, along with a copy of Rachel Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. I have always turned to the cards in times of crisis and been both comforted and inspired by their teachings. My career in art and education has given me tools for thinking about images and symbols that I’ve applied to my framework for creative grief tarot.
I see plants - both caring for and learning from them - as an integral part of the healing process. By observing how they respond to their environment and its challenges, we add another layer to our own experience of survival. I learned how to study, identify, classify, and respect and care for plants from my parents who were both landscape architects. I created The Moon Unfolded collection of botanical essences from plants I have cultivated and harvested for over 20 years in my garden in the Hudson Valley of New York. Botanical essences are imbued with the energetic current of flowers, leaves, or other plant parts, which can support us as we move through the various landscapes of grieving. Given their connection to subtle energies and intuition, botanical essences are a natural complement to divinatory practices such as tarot.
