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 […]
Read more "Four Tarot Lessons From Therapy"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 […]
Read more "Late-Night Thoughts: The Lovers and the Interdependent Self"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 […]
Read more "Death and the Madman"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 […]
Read more "Downsizing My Tarot Deck Collection"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 […]
Read more "Baba Yaga Lied to Me (And That’s Okay)"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 […]
Read more "… Apparently, Once He Has a Ph.D"As we draw to the end of my year-long project with the TdM, I thought I would do another sample reading—about my career, because that’s my top concern of late. I had a job interview earlier this week, and it went really well. The company seems interesting, they seemed to like me, and on the […]
Read more "A Year of Tarot de Marseille: Another Career Reading"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 […]
Read more "A Year of Tarot de Marseille: Finally Hitting My Stride"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 […]
Read more "The Doctor and the World"As the nights grow longer and colder, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about descents to the underworld. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the hero’s journey, the prototypical underworld descent myth laid out by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. This book is flawed, and I hesitate to bring […]
Read more "A Hero’s Journey Tarot Spread"
Jack Chanek 