CTS 2022 Year in Review

 CTS's members are looking forward to our annual holiday potluck party and gift swap coming up December 3!

In the meantime, it's fun to look back on everything we accomplished over the past year, especially as this was a time of serious transition and we rose to meet the challenge.  Earlier this year, as we emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided as a group to experiment with a hybrid meeting schedule (alternating virtual and in-person every other month) and learned to manage the logistics pretty seamlessly.  Members continued to step up and design great online presentations for our virtual meetings, including some topics that leveraged the virtual format and could not have been done in-person.  Meanwhile, it was great to start seeing each other in-person again.

This year we met in person to read for each other, show-and-tell our favorite tarot books, and give away a number of free decks kindly sent to us by a past CTS member who had moved away.  Online presentations spanned all kinds of interesting topics like tips for giving romantic readings, Jungian principles in the tarot, active listening as an important tarot skill, and using our astrological sun and moon signs to identify teacher and coach cards in the tarot deck.

We also used one of our online meetings to get together to collectively design a tarot card together using a photo editing phone app and screen sharing.  We also used the breakout rooms feature in Zoom to engage in comparative reading exercises (which allowed for structure, quiet and privacy in a way that meeting in-person to read for each other never could).

We are currently working on our presentation schedule for 2023, which will continue to follow an alternating virtual and in-person meeting format.  It will be exciting to see what types of presentations and activities our members will cook up!

Creating a Community Tarot Card

 Earlier this year, CTS opted to shift to a hybrid meeting schedule, with every other meeting taking place in person and every other meeting taking place online.  Little did we know to what degree continuing with online meetings would enable us to take advantage of topics and technologies that would be much harder to implement in person.

September's meeting topic was a perfect example.  We worked together as a group using a combination of Zoom screen sharing, a phone app called PicsArt, and a stock photo site called Unsplash to create a Queen of Coins tarot card image.  The image is below, next to the original image for comparison.

Everyone really seemed to enjoy the presentation and we were very happy with the card we created.

Hybrid Schedule Update

 On April 2 CTS had its first in-person meeting in two years!  It was very exciting to see everyone again.  The meeting featured a tarot book show and tell - a fitting activity for an in-person meeting.

As we detailed in our previous post, CTS is switching to a hybrid format.  Every other meeting will be online, and every other meeting will be in-person.  This means that May's meeting will take place via Zoom, and we will be back in-person again in June.  You can check out the entire schedule, including which meetings are in-person and which are online, on our meetings and presentations page.

One thing we have all missed during the pandemic has been opportunities to sit down and just read for each other.  In years past, an informal gathering would take place after our formal meeting activity or presentation, sometimes at another location nearby, and many of our members would sit down and chat and perform readings.  This unstructured reading time was some members' favorite part of being in CTS!

For this reason, we are modifying our hybrid schedule going forward.  Online meetings via Zoom will involve a structured presentation, because that's the format that works best for a video chat with several people.

In-person meetings will be less structured, without a formal presentation or planned activity.  People will be able to make announcements and share ideas as needed, but then we will move directly into periods of free reading where everyone can just hang out, enjoy each other's company, and read to their heart's content!

We are very excited to introduce this new structure that balances all the different things CTS members need and love.