Joy Rilling-Hughes, 51, has been here in Alabama since 2016.

“My husband died in 2015, right at the end right before Christmas, and we lost the house. I knew people here and when I would come to visit I never wanted to go back. I just absolutely fell in love with Athens. So, it was the best place I knew to start raising my kids on my own,” Rilling-Hughes said.

“I have three adult children and three young children, and it’s the three young children whose father died. They’re boys, so I brought them here to give them a better life than where I was in Tennessee,” she said.

Rilling-Hughes has been at the Driftwood Dragonfly for about a year now.

“It was exciting that [Michelle Crawford] opened a place with crystals because I love crystals, and so I just came in and kind of met Michelle and I asked her if it would be okay if I ever wanted to maybe do some tarot cards here,” she said. “That’s how I started doing crystal classes and some tarot readings here.”

She has been doing tarot readings for about 20 years now, but even in elementary school she would read people’s fortunes.

“I would take playing cards and read people’s fortunes, but I never knew anything, never heard about tarot cards. It was just something natural that ‘oh, this is what I do with cards,’” she said.

She never saw a tarot deck until 1990 and has officially read cards for the past 20 years.

“I used to just do it for friends and things, and they were always really, really accurate and everything, and people would say ‘you should do this for the public,’ but I just had a real hard time with charging people for things,” she said.

Now she charges $80 for a full reading and $45 for three cards. For someone who is just curious, she’ll charge $5 a card.

Rilling-Hughes keeps a steady flow of clients each week but encourages clients to not rely on card readings to make every decision, often encouraging clients to reduce the number of readings they are receiving.

“It’s wonderful to help when you’re in doubt about something and you need to know that you’re not alone. It’ll help you decide which avenues or what’s going on,” she said. “When people can start to lose faith in their higher powers, they start to lose faith in themselves. So I don’t allow that. I try not to let that happen.”

Beyond reading tarot, Rilling-Hughes is also a medium, describing herself as sort of a “spirit psychologist.”

“I can communicate with past loved ones with, guides, with beings. Some people will call them angels — whatever that comfortable term is, it’s all the same,” she said. “It brings a lot of healing. I do that for the healing both of the spirit and the person involved. There’s a lot that happens after they transition. It’s kind of like being spirit psychologist.”

If you’re drawn to this practice, Rilling-Hughes encourages you to do it but to first seek guidance.

“We’re dealing with things that we can’t see a lot of times; you want to make sure that you know what you’re doing. That’s why the guidance is important,” she said.

Guidance will also help you discern your modality. Some use tarot cards or other cards, others use runes, some use bones.

“There’s a lot of different ways, but it’s all the same thing. It is a way to tune into the energy that’s out there,” she said. “The cards don’t talk to me. They help me to focus in on the energy vibrations. Each thing has a different vibration, and they just help me to see what’s going on.”

For more information about services or her practice, contact her at (931) 802-4246 or joyrilling@gmail.com.