Talking Life, Love, And Tarot With Fort Greene Resident Xochitl Gonzalez

If you walk along South Oxford Street on any given upcoming Saturday afternoon, you may encounter neighbor Xochitl Gonzalez sitting on a stool on the sidewalk, a book in her hands and a deck of tarot cards on a small table beside her. And if you’re curious and have 15 minutes, sit in the spare chair across from her and get a tarot reading.

The pop-up business is the result of Gonzalez’s friends’ efforts to get her to share her talents with others.

“I’m not psychic,” she tells me right off the bat. “I’m just someone like you in the neighborhood who hangs around and if you have a question about your career, pursuing some relationship, or something else, I’m not divining the future, but giving you insight into things you already know. It’s really meant to help people get in touch with their own intuition.”

For Gonzalez, a native Brooklynite born and raised in the Sunset Park/Borough Park area with her own wedding planning business and blog, the practice of reading tarot and exploring people’s nature is an interest that comes naturally.

“When I’ve gone to [tarot readers] in a little booth, it’s felt a little smarmy and like fortune-telling in a shady way, so I’m trying to demystify tarot reading,” she explained. “I read with a cool deck, too — a hand-illustrated one called Wild Unknown that is related to nature and family relationships. Tarot is very medieval, so it used to be all kings and queens and knights, but this is tied more to mother nature.”

If you’d like to meet Gonzalez for a reading yourself, stop by the sidewalk outside 65 and 67 South Oxford Street between 12 and 4pm on Saturdays. Readings cost $10.

If you’d like to “meet” Gonzalez before meeting her in real life, then tune into TLC tonight at 10pm for an episode of “Extreme I Do’s,” in which Gonzalez helps plan a destination wedding on a volcano in Maui, Hawaii.