At the end of April, Tim and I started a new series called 78 Connections, which I’ve been sharing on Instagram and saving to a dedicated page in this space ever since. It’s essentially an exercise that takes two cards and attempts to find as many connections between them as possible. Most of those links are of a visual nature, but inevitably we end up exploring numerical, astrological, and qabalistic similarities as well.

On the surface, this all appears rather simple and straightforward and I’m not sure that the value is immediately obvious. But what I can say is that this practice of comparing and contrasting scenes has been one of the most interesting, eye-opening, and integrative methods I’ve so far found to squeeze as much information as I can from the cards. It’s a general principle that follows us daily; if we want to really know something, to truly define it, we will benefit from examining it next to something else.

However, that wasn’t the expected outcome when this activity was born. This all began while trying to work through something that was irritating me. Inevitably if you spend enough time online, and around social media, you’re going to be exposed to a world of thought that clashes with your own. Without getting too specific, I will say that it touches a nerve when I see people putting an unnecessarily negative slant on something without having a basic understanding of its history. This is especially the case when it devolves into declarations around who can and can’t read tarot, which decks should or shouldn’t be worked with, or otherwise making dictations based on presumptions. Dogmatic attitudes, opinions presented as absolute facts, don’t settle comfortably with me regardless of the topic. But I realize that’s none of my business and partly my problem. I also don’t need to confront misinformation directly. But, what I can do is sit longer and look harder at this tool that has done so much for me and, I’m assuming if you’re here, for you as well. In doing this, I’m either going to see what they’re seeing too or reinforce what I already hold to be true, and as far as I’m concerned, either is a fair outcome.

I have never, in all my years of reading tarot, been a daily drawer. To me, it felt too burdensome to commit to, but another part of me just disliked the idea of starting the day off with some kind of definition. It’s all fun and games when you’re pulling The Sun, but for a morning to begin with The Tower just felt like a bunch of unnecessary anxiety.

I realize there are lots of ways to approach the daily draw that could have circumvented these concerns, but I also hadn’t been inspired to seek alternatives. That is until I finished T. Susan Chang’s 36 Secrets at the beginning of April. While the book is intended to illuminate the decan associations in tarot, it included many of her own daily card reflections and this got my wheels turning. Maybe I didn’t have to make this so personal. Maybe instead of approaching daily pulls as a “what can I expect today?” I would be better suited to approach them as a “what card am I bound to learn more about today?”. In this way, the teaching can take any form! Maybe it’s a stray thought, a conversation I overhear, a movie I watch, something in the news. And of course, it could also be something more direct, but it doesn’t HAVE to be and that’s an important distinction. So essentially, when I’m doing these draws now it’s like this: Don’t tell me something about me - tell me something about YOU!