Blog

Musings on keeping a tarot journal

Over the past two days, I’ve been going through my tarot and writing playbooks. These disc-bound notebooks contain notes on my business ideas, Works In Process, and other important list and notes that have action items attached to them. I keep them nearby my writing nook and they help keep my ideas written down and visible.

My tarot book includes the following sections:

Card Study:
This area keeps notes about classes about the cards I’d like to present and notes on the cards themselves.

Readings:
I usually record my readings by myself and others long hand. These notes get transferred back to a Scrivener file at a later date.

Group Study:
This section contains notes taken at cons like PantheaCon, Readers Studio, or BATS. These also get transferred over to computer at a later date. And honestly, these days I really use Awesome Note on my iPhone to capture notes. So I’ve been using this section for keeping track of students I mentor.

Business Items:
These are my to-do lists for the Inner Compass business. I have lists of blog posts, things that need to be done or reordered, etc.

Quotes:
This section includes quotes specific to tarot. Whether I’ve read them in books, or heard them from peers, etc.

At the end of this book, I keep a small stash of the most commonly used sheets for the other sections. I’ve had moments where I’ve run out of blanks and it’s never fun.

However, over the past year or so I’ve been lax in touching them. As a result of leafing through them over the past two days Ive decided that tools are only as good as how you use them. If you don’t use them, then nothing gets done. It’s a bit like why I condensed my twitter feeds down into one. I may be multifaceted but I found that when I have more than one “posting” place, I get a bit overwhelmed. And when I’m overwhelmed, I don’t do anything. I turn my head and ignore things.

Which is why this site and my writing site haven’t been updated in forever. It’s also why I’ve been going through the playbooks to figure out how to condense and make each one useable.

Tools are only as good as how you use them…if you’re not using them, maybe it’s time to take a look at what works and what doesn’t and shake things up.

As I uncover the process of what works for me, I’ll do my best to post updates here and at my other site. For those who write and have hand-written tarot journals, I ask you, what works for you? How do you line your books out? I’d love to know! Leave a comment and let’s discuss what works for us!