I did a Tarot pull the other night. It was right before bed.

It's important that you say your question out loud. It's important that you pull and shuffle with your own hands. I cut, flipped, rotated, reshuffled, recut and reshuffled.

I asked, "What am I missing right now?"

Page of Swords (reversed)
King of Pentacles (reversed)
Ten of Swords (reversed)

So what does that imply? Well, you can look up each one in a search engine if you like. It will give you vague themes or a placement in "intentionality space," and then the goal is to divine a synthesis through the montage of cards and meanings. I like to ask GPT and Claude and whatever -- they usually take a gentler bent to my own perspctive, and often actually align on their meaning.

In this case:

Page of Swords reversed means you're going too fast, not expressing yourself, not acting but talking about it.
King of Pentacles reversed means an overemphasis on material success and not enough on personal values (or outright material loss).
Ten of Swords reversed means you are delaying an inevitable change, not being ready to accept the state of affairs.

Do you understand? It's not really divination. It's just Images, or Meanings, or Archetypes. Maybe you in your own life can infer some situation that this combination of symbols speaks to. The fact that *that thought* comes first is what makes the pull meaningful; you get a powerful library of symbols, apply some RNG and then stir up your own meaning-making engine and wonder if that matters *now*. It's like getting a latlong into personal vector space. You inspect it, then pull away.

I sometimes wondered if I was connoted with Fortune Arcana -- Fortune is actually kind of cruel. She seems like she's your friend, but she's really only your teacher. She is constantly changing, she is never a constant presence. Like a turbulent storm. I felt as though I could never sit in one place. I had sudden, volatile shifts in life circumstances all the time; I seemed to constantly undergo personality shifts or fixations.

I've realised that she is the flipside of the Devil Arcana, though. In the Meditations on the Tarot the pseudonymous author writes about how the Devil is the child of the man and the woman, who bind themselves to it. He says that the whole thing about tulpamancy is not discovering how easy it is to make a tulpa but also how easy it is to disperse it. Once birthed, it's still your child. It is still *you*.

The Devil, then, is something we attach ourselves to while saying it has to be done. But we are really attached to very little by obligation. Responsibility can be a pleasure. Duty can be a pleasure. It doesn't mean we're free love children, cutting all our responsibilities. It just means it's important to know you enter into your contracts freely, and that anything is possible. All that matters is what brings us closer to love (Christian) or our true nature (Buddhist). Both, to me, are fundamentally liberatory practices.

I think Fortune, in this case, teaches us through material success that it is another set of chains. You begin to reinvest to keep your finances stable. You begin to pursue life paths that preserve a lifestyle. I've felt as though I was not ready to go back into art because it would mean re-developing a vulnerability I hate in myself: to not be able to provide for others or myself. To actually need something from others.

The meditation for today is that sometimes other people really enjoy providing in turn.