Getting old is the pits. There are many things I love about aging, the biggest being that I know and like myself better than when I was younger. I love that we’re at a point in our lives that we’ve built something: we get to enjoy the fruits of our labors, with a comfy home and awesome kids. Life just isn’t as hard now as the struggle of young adulthood when you’re still trying to figure everything out.
However. Aging also comes with a deteriorating body. Aging brings failing eyesight and aches just from sitting. Now that I’ve started drawing, I’ve picked up yet another hobby that involves being seated and that requires a stable surface to create on, good lighting, and excellent vision, which I no longer have.
I read, I write, and now I draw, and I find myself moving from seat to seat in our house, trying to find a comfortable place to do any of them. Sitting on the couch with a lapboard hurts my shoulder and my back, and it’s not by the window where I can get natural light during the day. The chaise lounge is by the window, but it also hurts my back and neck, and at night, forget about it for lighting — the lamp is behind the chair, so my body casts a shadow on any drawing or writing I try to do. Our dining table is good for lighting during the day thanks to the natural light that pours in through the sliding glass door, but the chairs are hard, and the table is constantly covered in crumbs. My desk in my office would probably do, but I don’t want to be in my office for my me time. It’s in the basement, the lighting is too bright and sterile, it is separated from everyone, and it is where I spend all day for work. I don’t want to be in there for my leisure activities.
When I picture my ideal space for writing and drawing, I picture a small rectangular table by a source of natural light, like you always see in movies where writers have a little desk facing a window, or snugged up next to one, so they can look out when they stop to think. At first I pictured a little round cafe table, but the circular surface would likely be less utilitarian than I’d need it to be for supplies. I’d have a sturdy chair that was supportive yet cushioned, and there would be a good lamp on the table for when there’s no daylight. Ooh! I’d probably also like a magnifying glass, one of those ones mounted on an arm so I could put it in place, hands-free, for drawing. The space would be in a living room, a study, or a library, maybe with a fireplace — a cozy room that’s warm in winter and that’s not isolated from my family. Nearby, I’d have a little storage space for journals, fountain pens, sketchpads, and pencils.
I don’t know how or where I’d set up a space like this in our current home, but I’m doubtful we’ll live in this house forever. Once the kids are both launched in their lives and we know a little better where they’ll be, we might start looking to relocate. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what kind of space I’d like to create on the next leg of our life journey, and a little nook for reading, writing, and drawing is definitely on my mind. I look forward to a day when I don’t have to move all my writing or drawing supplies from one seat to another, and my shoulder and neck don’t hurt, and I don’t have to strain my eyes to do these things I enjoy.
Daily writing prompt
You get to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?
Our living room is a disaster. On the day after Christmas, I’m always ready to be done with it all so we can have our space back. Everyone else likes to keep the tree around for a while, though, so I guess I’ll continue tripping over furniture for another week.
I used to think Christmas kind of lost its magic once you’re not a kid anymore, or once your own children grow up. This year made me rethink that, though. Our kids are 20 and 18 now. Though they still get excited for Christmas, they acknowledge it’s not the same as when they were little, when the whole year revolved around this holiday.
In the past week, they’ve frequently said, “I’m bored” as they waited for Christmas to arrive. The difference now is that when they’re bored, the things they like to do to get unbored are things we, the parents, the grownups, also like to do.
This is a turning point in our lives as parents! Over this break, we’ve played many hands of Euchre (the moment I’ve been waiting for for 10 years). We’ve watched The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Muppet Christmas Carol. We’ve talked about books, TV shows, and movies, our son’s college life, our daughter’s college hopes. We’ve sat in the living room, each doing our own thing, in comfortable quiet. We’ve taken turns controlling the stereo to play music. We gave each other thoughtful gifts that made each other happy. We’ve laughed a lot. After opening presents, we went for a hike to get out of the house. During the break, the kids made cookies together like they did when they were toddlers, except that now, they didn’t need my guidance; they did it all themselves, together, without me even being in the kitchen. I shared pictures with them of then and now.
We’ve eaten cinnamon rolls, pecan pie, cherry pie, rum balls, gingerbread cutouts, peanut butter blossoms, snowballs. We’ve drunk mulled pomegranate and cranberry juice, sugar cookie cocktails, hot cocoa with amaretto and marshmallows, and spiked coffee. Our parents sent us cheeses, cured meats, and smoked salmon, which we ate on Christmas Eve with homemade baguettes, and my husband tried a new menu on Christmas day that I can’t wait to eat leftovers of today: pork roast with an apple-sage relish, garlic mashed potatoes, fresh broccoli gratin, roasted carrots, and a holiday salad with kale, fried shallots, Brussels sprouts, radishes, and almonds.
The kids have loved and appreciated it all, even though Christmas doesn’t necessarily mean big surprises or the fun toy they’ve been hoping for all year. I’ve loved and appreciated it all, too. I love hanging out with them. They’re my favorite people. This Christmas feels like it was less about the stuff (though we did all like the stuff, too!) and more about just hanging out and having fun together.
Mornings have been icy cold the past two days. Yesterday, I sat at our kitchen table with my notebook at 5am before my swim, and my phone rang: schools would be closed due to dangerous driving conditions. I didn’t know whether that meant the aquatic center would also be closed. I debated for ten minutes on whether to make the attempt — to go out in the cold to warm up the car and scrape the windshield in a wind that felt like ice shards — knowing the pool might be closed when I arrived.
I decided to risk it. The roads weren’t that dangerous, not in a Suburu; there was no weather happening except wind, there were just some icy patches. Nobody is on the road around here at 5:15am, and the entire 7 minute drive has a speed limit of 25mph, so I was safe.
When I arrived at the aquatic center, the lights were on inside, I saw lifeguards and our trusty early morning attendant getting the sign-in sheet ready inside, and other swimmers sat in their warm cars waiting for the doors to be unlocked.
On the pool deck, everyone chattered about going through the same wondering thought process I did — will it be open if schools are closed? — and then we all got in and swam our laps. The pool I go to is warm, thankfully, and steam rose from the lap lanes.
The locker rooms, however, are not warm. After my swim, I opened the door to the changing room, and the cold air on wet skin was a bit of a shock. The splashing of swimmers echoed on the tile floors and walls, and I stood dripping in a puddle on the cold floor. I grabbed my towel, which I’d hung next to the sauna. I eyed the sauna door and thought, hmm, it’ll be warm in there. So I stepped into the wood-planked room. The wooden floor was warm on the soles of my feet. The planks were absorbent and welcoming. No standing in puddles. I was enveloped in heat, a muted quiet, and the scent of warm cedar.
I toweled off in the sauna, and it was such a delightful experience, such an easy little treat to myself, that I will make it part of my winter swimming ritual. I’ll brave the cold mornings to drive to the pool and swim, and my reward at the end will be to dry off in the sauna, where the heat warms me to my bones.
My husband sent a message to our family group chat, “I want to see this,” and attached the trailer to the new Godzilla Minus One. Our daughter, like me, was like, I don’t care about this, but I’ll definitely go with everyone to see it. Our son said, yes, absolutely, he’d heard it’s fantastic, when can we go.
Like most of us, I think of Godzilla as a campy monster movie. I care as much about campy monster movies as much as I do about superhero movies, which is not at all. When our son talked about Godzilla, though, he said it’s an allegory for the atomic bomb. I thought, huh, I didn’t know that. That makes it much more interesting.
We ate an early dinner then piled into the car together and drove in the rain to the movie theater. I settled in for some goofy entertainment, and was surprised to find myself captivated by the characters, the music, and the seriousness of the film. It’s a movie about a giant radioactive dinosaur monster that lives in the ocean, and it was not goofy. It showed how horrific it is to be the target of nuclear weapons, how utterly devastating they are, how big, how unstoppable. How monstrous.
I was riveted through the entire movie, and I was moved. It was really, really good.
I’ve been feeling the itch to blog, but as usual, haven’t because of the perennial “what will I write about?” problem. I checked my blog’s dashboard today to see what the built-in writing prompt was, because maybe that would spark something, and lo, here I am.
The writing prompt asks, Is your life today what you pictured a year ago? I have no clue what I pictured a year ago for my life. I looked back at my blog, which is turning out to be a really useful supplement to my actual memory. Our daughter wanted tiramisú for her birthday again this year, and I could not remember what recipe I used that she liked so much last year. I vaguely remembered that I might have blogged about it, and sure enough, here it is.
So anyway, I looked back at my blog for this time last year, and discovered that as of December 14 last year, I had blogged for 30 days straight. Thirty days! How on earth did I do that? How did I find something to write about 30 days in a row? The 14th was the last of the 30 days; I picked back up again on December 20 and wrote about a crackling fire, and then the solstice on the 21st. I didn’t write about my future self, except that in my solstice post I jotted down our menu because I liked it and wanted to document it for future years. But if I know myself, I probably pictured myself being cozy at home for the holidays. I probably hoped for myself that I’d be writing and blogging, that we’d be warm and safe with a twinkling Christmas tree and crackling fire, that our kids would be home and happy, that we’d be satisfied in our jobs and lives.
When I think of where I expect to be a year from now, that’s what I picture. Only a year from now, we will have done a bunch more stuff in between. Our daughter will have graduated from high school, and we will have taken her on her graduation trip, possibly to Costa Rica. This time next year, I hope she’s having the college experience of her dreams, and that she loves college as much as our son does. I hope our son will still love his college experience and roommates and friends, and that he will have a chance to get the summer work he’s aiming for. He may have even had a chance to study abroad. I hope my husband and I will have gotten to travel again and take fun trips, like our trips to NYC and Pittsburg this year. I picture myself still employed and finding meaning in my job, and I picture myself still writing, drawing, photographing, and appreciating birds and leaves and books and food.
This time last December, I hadn’t explicitly thought about what my life would look like in a year, so it’s hard to say whether I’m there. While my general life stuff is likely where I pictured — we are cozy, the kids are home and happy, we have a twinkling Christmas tree and crackling fires most nights — I probably hoped for myself that I’d still be blogging regularly. In that sense, I’m not where I thought I’d be. I don’t know why blogging is important to me and why I always want to be doing it. I do enjoy using my blog as a sort of searchable reference book for my life, and that only works if I actually publish, so maybe that’s part of it. It helps me remember what I was thinking about and cared about at different times.
But I don’t think that’s the reason I care about blogging. I joked once that I do it for the likes and comments, which is definitely true (thank you to everyone who reads here ♥️), but I don’t think it’s just that either. There’s something about moving from a private journal, which I’ll never go back and read, to publishing on my own little public corner of the web, where I take a little more care with my writing, where I reference posts, where I have a community that’s not limited by geography. Blogging is both expression and validation. I can express myself in a journal, so maybe it really does come down to validation. Or maybe being able to share stuff that others resonate with? That feels really good too. Is that the same as validation? I don’t know, but I really like that part — the connecting. The being human together.
Whatever the reason, the fact is that I care about blogging. Even so, after all these years (this will be my 1046th post on this blog), it’s still hard to overcome the “is this worth sharing?” question. When I saw today’s prompt and realized I had no recollection what was on my mind a year ago, I was really glad for all the times I did post. Something is better than nothing.
This year, the magnetism of the tarot tugged at me more than usual. I’ve played with self-reading for a few years, but I struggled to make meaning of what I was doing.
This year, I wanted to really learn the tarot. I’d never owned or really even looked at the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith cards, which are the most well-known and referenced tarot images, so I bought myself the Radiant version of the deck. The deck came with a proper guide book I could learn from rather than the tiny paper insert that often comes with a small box of tarot cards. I also bought the book Tarot for One by Courtney Weber, and I started listening to the Tarot Heroes podcast. Those resources, along with the guidebooks from my existing decks, help me understand traditional interpretations of individual cards, deck-specific interpretations, and how to think of the tarot in general.
But what brought it all together, what helped me start to internalize the cards and really make meaning of them in a fun way that adds zest to my life, was to not just pull cards every day, but to journal about them. Pulling tarot cards helps me set an intention each day and focus my attention towards that intention. For example, as I shuffle I might ask, “What should I pay attention to today to have a fulfilling day at work?” Journaling about the cards helps me learn them: I pull cards, look them up, consider what I see and what guidebooks say, and write my thoughts and interpretations. At the end of the day, I look at my journal entry from the morning and reflect on the day as it relates to the cards. This last step helps me understand cards that might not have made sense at the beginning of the day (and maybe they still don’t at the end of the day! And that’s okay! This is a hobby, it’s all for fun, this is not life or death.)
I love two things about the journaling process. First, journaling reinforces the message of the cards so that throughout the day, I pay attention to events or my mindset in relation to my intention. Writing about the cards helps me remember them. For example, when I pull cards I might ask, “How can I approach today so that I have a happy day?” If one of the cards indicates “Be open to saying yes,” writing that out will help me remember that message during the day. If something comes my way that my knee-jerk reaction is to say No to, maybe I’ll pause and consider whether Yes is actually a better answer. Second, by keeping a journal, I can reference previous entries to see what happened when I pulled a certain card last time, or I can identify patterns. This helps me learn the how the cards show up in my life, what they mean for me, and what lessons keep showing up that I might need to learn.
A coworker asked for any tips on how to get started with tarot journaling, so here are some of the ways I journal.
How I journal
I started by journaling on paper, but this method missed a really important part of the tarot, which is the visual element of the cards. Tarot cards are tiny pieces of art in which every component has meaning: suit, numbers, colors, posture, sight-line, atmosphere, clothing, plants, animals, tools. In a paper journal where I just wrote words, my journal entries lacked that visual representation. So I switched to a digital journal using the Day One journaling app*. I pull cards first thing in the morning, take a photo of them, then drop the photo into a new entry in my Tarot journal on the app. I title the post with whatever intention I focused on when I pulled the card, then I write my thoughts about what the cards mean. At the end of the day, I check back in and write a summary of the day and how the cards seemed to relate.
*An added benefit of keeping a digital tarot journal is that it makes it much easier to search for specific cards from past readings.
Different kinds of entries
Daily encounter This is a three card pull: the first card represents me and how I’m showing up, the second card represents an encounter that day, and the third card represents the outcome. When I first started my tarot journey this year, I’d pull these three cards, read about them in the guide book, and write out those meanings in my journal. I pretty much copied the books verbatum, and then at the end of the day, tried to correlate the card meanings with what my experience was like that day. After a while, I realized this copy paste style was akin to memorization rather than understanding, so I switched to pulling single cards and studying the art on them to find my own meaning. Now, when I pull my daily encounter spreads, I jot down what the cards mean to me and then revisit at the end of the day.
Single card Sometimes three cards are too much to digest, or I find myself not really paying attention to what I think about them and instead just regurgitate what the guidebooks say. In those periods, I’ll pull one card for the day with the sole intent of learning that one card — I’m not even necessarily asking a question about the day. I’ll put the card next to my laptop and look at it closely while I describe it in my journal. I’ll describe the colors, the facial expressions and body language, and the overall feeling it gives me. Then I’ll write what I think it is saying as a piece of art. Throughout the day or at the end, I’ll jot down moments that felt like the energy of the card.
Bigger spreads It’s rare that I do spreads any more complex than three cards except on my birthday. On my birthday, I’ll usually do a solar year spread where I pull one card to represent the whole year, and then 12 cards: one for each month. I photograph the spread and tag it in my journal so that when the month changes over, I can easily find the spread and see what to look forward to that month.
Reference Sometimes I want to take notes that are general to the tarot, and that I use as reference entries to help in my own interpretation of cards. For example, I have an entry that describes the suits (swords, cups, pentacles, wands) and an entry for numerology. I imagine one day I might have one for colors, and I have a couple of reference entries from exercises in Tarot for One. I tag these with a Reference tag in my journal app, which makes it easy to find them when I want to jog my memory.
Have fun!
My favorite thing I learned this year about the tarot is that it originated as a card game: they were playing cards. When asked for advice he’d give beginners, Jeff Petriello, co-creator of the Pasta Tarot deck said on the Tarot Heroes podcast, “Oh my god, have fun! That is absolutely the biggest thing to remember…These cards were used as playing cards for centuries… so it’s really important to remember to play with them. They have a whole history in play so I really try to encourage beginners to have that spirit.” His advice helped me not take anything seriously, and to just play around with my cards and in my journal.
Butterfly Mind 