Rituals

A few years back, I found Labyrinthos and their iOS app. Since then, I’ve started each morning with a quick three card spread: Thinking, Feeling, Doing. I’m not really sure where I got the idea or why it stuck, but it did.

Look, I’m not big into the occult or even the minor woo-woo stuff. Something like this? It forces a moment of reflection and it’s interesting to see what the mind attaches to as the cards and their meanings land. It really can change perspective.

I haven’t read up on it, but I’m willing to bet that Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies comes out of this same place.

The obsession I have with simplifying and getting my hands onto physical things has moved me away from the iPad app. I’ve reorganized my desk to allow me to more easily use my paper journal and paper organizer. Not sure if I’m ready for a paper calendar again (probably not as I still coordinate with other humans). Somewhere in this process, I picked up my Great Lakes Tarot deck and decided that I’d start my morning that way since I was journaling at the desk now. I guess the goal is to get to almost zero screen time until I sit down to get to work on things that need a computer. And that computer? I want it to live in a specific place.

It’s all part of a larger pattern.

All of that said, I’m a Textual User Interface and ASCII Art nut, so I built a quick python script that pulls from a couple of projects that had ASCII Art tarot cards and tarot interpretations in plain text so I could feed my spread into a terminal and get this:

“But you just said…”

I know what I said and I meant it. This is just cool. Remember the whole Code as Art thing back when slashdotters wanted to be knows as “Code Poets”? Yeah, that was dumb too. But this was fun to make. Yes, I did use the robot to invert the ASCII art for me. Took it less than 10 seconds. Would have taken me at least 2 hours of copy/paste or writing some weird regex.

Rituals. Coffee. Journal. Tarot.