Hearth & Horizon

I'm writing this to distract myself from the itch to buy "stuff". In my case, I'm fairly sure this is good ole American consumerism mixed in with neurodiversity and maybe some fantastical thinking.  I live in a house full of stuff. Stuff that I needed, stuff that I wanted, stuff that I thought was a good idea to buy for that possible need someday, stuff that I probably have no idea that I own stuffed in a box somewhere. Yet here I sit, staring at a cart page that beckons me to check out with a siren call unlike any other. And recently, I've been finding myself wanting to break free from its grips. Well, let me back up a bit. I say  that I want to be free of it. And rationally, that is the case. I have seen the effects of hoarding in the lives of loved ones and how it affects the people around them. I know that all sort of unmet needs, personality traits, or other issues can be transformed into a "buying this is gonna fix me" complex. I've read a book...

One thing I'm celebrating is that I seemed semi-consistent with my tarot practice last month. I wasn't able to pull a spread daily, but I was not expecting to maintain that level of consistency either. I may be an idealist at heart, but my feet are still on the ground. Looking through my journal, I was looking for any trends or anything that jumped out at me. I noted that the suits I pulled the most were wands and swords, the suit I pulled the least was pentacles. Of the pip cards I'd pulled, I pulled 8s the most and pulled no 2 cards at all. So, I'm thinking on what last month looked like and how it relates to these stats. Wands and swords are both active elements and pretty expansive. Fire burns and air circulates, feeding into each other. They're not really two sides of a coin, but they seem to play off one another. Your thoughts and dreams will be apparent in where you place your drive and energy. Eights tend to represent skills, business, manifestation, decisio...

So, let's begin the inaugural Monthly Reading Wrap Up for July 2026! Better late than never! I'm a data nerd so let's go over the stats real quick. So, I read 4 books and a total of 1,491 pages. The average length was 373 pages and it took me an average of 11 days to finish a book. There were 3 e-books and 1 paperback. All of the e-books were library loans.  July was a slow month in my reading with my Kindle being MIA. I know it's in a box, somewhere, in our house. It'll get unpacked eventually. So, I've been roughing it with the Kindle iOS app and Libby iOS app. I didn't realize how much of a difference it was until I found myself getting distracted every other chapter with notifications. My July reads were: The Witches of El Paso by Luis Jaramillo Ward D by Frieda McFadden Pachinko by Min Jin Lee None of This is True by Lisa Jewell I kicked off July with The Witches of El Paso as a random TBR selection and it was such a good choice. It has magical realism,...

What does that even mean?   I, for one, do not know. It's such a subjective designation. However, if I polled 100 people, I'd bet that there would be some common threads. Perhaps it is someone that reads a lot of books. Okay, but what if they're all middling quality or all in the same genre?  Perhaps it is someone who has read all of the classics. What classics? Contemporary classics, historical classics? Fine, now we have to decide what makes a piece of literature worthy of being deemed a classic. Do we weigh the worth based on how well written it is, on how influential it was on literature or on the world, or something else entirely? While I was pondering what makes a "good" tarot reader and whether I counted as a reader or not, my mind wandered to other things that I'm considered "good" at to compare. Reading easily came to mind. I've been a voracious reader since I was a child; I recall several instances as a child where I had read everything...

As I said in my previous post, I am making the effort to reintegrate tarot as a practice in my daily life. I started today with an open mind, well, I tried to. For one, there's a level of feeling like I'm an imposter here. I don't believe that I actually count as a tarot reader. Whether that's realism or some nagging shadow whispering in my ear, I'm still not sure. I think that I see other practitioners out on the web and they seem like they just know  how things work. But, I have to ask myself. What makes someone who uses tarot a reader? Have they done readings for other people? Have they gathered a certain number of reference books or decks? Do they have a page where people purchase readings from them? There's a post from Substack that I think of right now. The author writes that sometimes we cling to motivational identities to comfort ourselves and forget to actually become what we are idealizing and daydreaming about.  Maybe you could be a great writer, but ...