Just a brief aside before I finish the daily essay I started working on last night.

Yesterday I finally passed 1,500 posts on this blog that I launched in August of 2017. I took the better part of a year off, so it seems I’ve come fairly close to my original goal of writing something new every day with as little thematic repetition as possible (but don’t hold me to that last claim since I have a weakness for certain controversial topics like “intuition vs book-learning” and “face-to-face vs online reading,” and revisit them more often than I should). Most of those posts conform to my other semi-humorous intention of becoming “something of a minor master of the three-paragraph essay.” You can judge for yourself by poking around in the “Categories” drop-down menu and the “Archives” on the homepage sidebar.

Since I retired from my technical and legal writing career and its occasional forays into middle-management, I like to say that I have loads of intellectual horsepower to spare and nowhere to put it (I’m not a fan of idle puzzle games and I don’t watch much mind-numbing television). So back in 2014 I returned to my dormant practice of tarot reading at a local shop after spending the better part of twenty years in a rural backwater of New Hampshire, mostly concentrating on my esoteric studies interspersed with periodic (failed) attempts to start study groups and join Meet-up gatherings, and pursuing a newfound appreciation for horary astrology in the prediction of world events. While I “love to hate” what social media has done to human relations, discovering the online tarot forums in 2011 was the salvation of my languishing involvement in public conversation about metaphysical subjects. While Aeclectic Tarot, the best of them all (although not everyone agrees) and certainly the most active, folded around the time I began this blog (no coincidence there!), other internet platforms for discussion of the divinatory arts have emerged. Because not all of them produce the kind of stimulating discourse I experienced on Aeclectic, I decided to stick my own oar in the water.

Since that time my tarot writing has appeared in a number of international publications, specifically the American Tarot Association’s monthly and annual periodicals, The Cartomancer quarterly journal and most recently, the AstroLogic monthly online magazine. None of this is earning me any money, but I didn’t start down this path with the objective of making a living at it and I don’t really need the extra income. Although I certainly could, I haven’t monetized this blog for my own gain. I love this stuff and want to share my thoughts about it as widely as possible, so I pay a pittance for the domain name in order to keep doing it. (For what it’s worth, I’m not really striving to be a “force of Nature” with such relentless output, but it does beg the question.) Now if I could just rekindle the face-to-face tarot reading practice I had barely begun and had to give up when we moved in 2018 and then ran head-on into Covid restrictions, life would be good. I happen to believe that’s where the interactive art of tarot really shines, for which remote reading is a pale substitute. (Sorry about that! As Ronald Reagan was inclined to admonish reporters, “There you go again.”)