So I’m still working with the Tarot de Marseille. I haven’t written about it much on the blog this year, but the TdM continues to be my main divinatory deck as I explore this system of Tarot in greater depth. I’m past the fun, exciting everything-is-new stage and into the intermediate slog of “I’ve got the basic principles down, now I just have to apply them until my eyeballs bleed.” Learning a new skill—always so enticing at first and then hard for a long, long time. Certain aspects of TdM reading are becoming clearer to me. I’m now in the habit of immediately scanning every reading for the p ..read more

I had my last session with my therapist today. I’ve been seeing him since 2019, and we’ve been through a lot together: the COVID-19 pandemic, the gruesome death of my father, the completion of my Ph.D. I start a new 8-5 job next week and I live in Utah now, so it just wasn’t feasible for me to keep meeting remotely with a therapist in New Jersey; it was time for our professional relationship to come to an end. That’s a weird feeling; the relationship between a client and therapist is (by design) one-sided, and I would certainly never consider my therapist a friend, but he’s been a major presen ..read more

Hmmm. Are my thoughts coherent enough to write into a blog post? We’re going to find out together. I have a few different topics swirling around in my mind, all of which are loosely related. For one, I’ve been thinking a lot about community and what it means to be in community. I’m living in a new place looking to build up new social connections, and because of that I’m thinking a lot about what community looks like, why it matters, and how to create it. Second, I’ve been thinking about the magical notion of interdependence. Magic (and magical religions like Wicca) relies on an assumption that ..read more

Life is pretty damn good right now. For the past few years, I’ve felt like an animal caught in a trap. No matter what I did, my life just felt stuck, and it seemed like there was nothing I could do to escape it. I would have chewed my own leg off to get out, except, well, chewing one’s leg off doesn’t actually solve the problem when the trap is a metaphor. And I knew that all I had to do was finish my degree before I could finally get out, and that things would be great on the other side of that—but knowing it intellectually didn’t make things any easier. Even once my dissertation was all but ..read more

In the Tarot de Marseille, two of the trump cards are missing something that the others have. One card, the Madman, has a name but no number; it exists outside of the numbered sequence of the trumps. Meanwhile, there’s another card that has a number but no name. This is the thirteenth card in the sequence of the trumps, commonly called Death in other decks. The Madman and the thirteenth card I’m fascinated by the relationship between these two cards, the numberless name and the nameless number. They feel significant, not only individually but in relationship to each other; they are, in a way ..read more

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m in the process of moving. This has, among other things, meant packing up my whole life and making some critical decisions about my possessions. Some things are getting packed into suitcases and taken with me to my next (semi-temporary) home. Some get going into storage until I land somewhere more permanent. Some are getting thrown out altogether. One of the things I had to think about packing was, of course, my Tarot collection. I used to love collecting Tarot decks. I remember the days of the Aeclectic Tarot Forum, when I would interact with other users ..read more

I’m in the process of moving. Now that my doctorate is finally complete, there’s a lot less tying me to the physical environs of New Jersey. My lease is up at the end of this month, and while I haven’t yet secured a job and a permanent place to live, it’s time for me to move on from where I’ve been—so I’m packing up my stuff and moving in with a friend until I have somewhere to settle long-term. New Jersey has never felt like home to me, and to say I’m glad to be leaving it would be offensively understated. But because I’m moving, I have to pack my things. I’ve been living in the same house fo ..read more

Many, many years ago, I wrote a post about significators. Reading back through that post, I frankly don’t love it—as is the case with most of the posts I’ve written on this blog. I’ve been blogging for somewhere around 9 years now, and that means there’s a glowing online record of all the things I have felt, thought, and been over the course of nearly a decade. I’m proud of this blog, but yeesh, I really don’t enjoy being confronted with past versions of myself (as, to be fair, I doubt anyone does). On the one hand, having the blog is great; it’s a personal journal and it lets me see how I’ve ..read more

My year-long adventure with the Tarot de Marseille has been a bit rocky. There have been lots of stops and starts, as I’ve tried one thing, realized it wasn’t working for me, gone back to my starting point, tried something new, encountered another obstacle, and started over again. And again. I’m really trying to feel out a personal relationship with the Tarot that doesn’t draw uncritically on things I’d learned about Tarot in the past, rebuilding my understanding of the deck from the ground up in ways that might leave out cornerstones of established Tarot tradition.* Now, eleven months into a ..read more

I’m a doctor now. Last week, I defended my dissertation and completed the final requirement for my Ph.D. I am, now and forever, a doctor of philosophy. It’s a weird feeling, being done. A good feeling, to be sure—but I’ve been working toward this for the past six and a half years, and it’s weird to be done with it. For so long, I’ve been walking around with a constant low-level anxiety in the back of my mind, a fear of “What if I put in all this work and I don’t get the degree at the end of it?” And now that fear is gone, because I’m at the end and I did get the degree. I’m so proud. I’m so ha ..read more