I used to do an anonymous question segment over on Facebook, until someone decided to grind an ax because I apparently didn’t live my life to their expectations. So I decided to end that particular segment rather than deal with a troll or spend time ignoring that person. But I did so with a handful of questions unanswered, which I decided to answer privately. I had another slew of questions asking if I did other things. So I thought it would be interesting to answer those.

Q: Do you do tarot readings or some other form of divination, fortune-telling or gazing into the future?

To be honest, I am reluctant to do things like this. In truth, everyone has the capacity to do tarot cards or any other form of divination. With more experience, and belief in yourself and your abilities, I believe that one can make those abilities quite good. But not me. Its not that I don’t believe I could do tarot readings or crystal scrying or any of the rest of that; its that I don’t want to know. I really don’t want to know about the future. While I can do the readings and the scrying, I suffer from analysis-paralysis. I do a lousy job of trying to read the layouts correctly. I put too much personal bias into what I read, so my readings are either way underwhelming for what happens or way overblown. However, that’s just one part of things. I truly do not want to known the coming future. For me, life is about experiencing events for myself. I don’t need an early warning of what is coming. I need to be ready to experience life as it shows up at my door frame and I need that experience to be honest and clean – without bias. So, no, I do not do any such thing as divination.

To be honest, that has gotten in the way of some of my studies, as there are some requirements to take up and continue a divination practice. That’s really hard to do when I have avoided divinatory practices for so long. To snip that issue off at the stem, I have chosen to utilize divinatory practices as something akin to a study, more than anything else. The results that I achieve through tarot layouts are for studies of how to read the layout and interpret the cards, but I choose not to apply what I read there into daily life and events – again, because I do not want to know. So far, this methodology has worked for me, for the most part. Super strong events in life are hard to keep from bleeding through into card readings, but I do the best that I can.

Q: How do you keep your daily journal? Do you use a digital format or do you hand-write?

I keep three different journals. The first, my daily journal, is kept in digital format. I find it easier to have at my fingertips most of the time. I use Evernote for this function. For me, its easy to use, does everything I need to, and allows me to search through gobs of notes that I have. My other two journals, my Gwers work, and my poetry journal, are handwritten. For these two, there’s something more intimate about handwriting things. And in all honesty, I tend to retain knowledge when I physically write items of knowledge. I use simple, lined notebooks (single subject, not spiral bound) for both of these endeavors. I have a shelf in my home office where I keep these journals, but the shelf is not even one-sixth of the way being full. I hope one day soon that changes.

I don’t write everyday in my Gwers-work or my poetry journals, but I try to get something in each of them at least four times in a week’s time. My daily journal, on the other hand, I write in everyday. The subject matter is exactly what you think it is – what happened to me over the course of the day. Occasionally, I will leaf through the pages and see how things were going on a particular day. I not only find it cathartic to write and read from it, but I also find it informative. Sometimes, I have found emotive patterns that I have developed over and issue or towards a person. Analyzing those patterns has helped me to find better, more informative, less tense manners in dealing with those issues or people going into the future. In essence, I have managed to find far more Zen-like approaches to some of the more difficult issues and people in my life. Applying those is where much of the difficulty comes in because…well, people. I can predict how I would like to approach something, but other people do not always help with the approach. 🙂 But that’s a topic for another time.

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Well, that’s all I have for the moment. I’ll have a few more things coming up in the next few days. With the work schedule being 10-hour days, Monday through Thursday, I have to pick my times for writing smaller essays and the such. Speaking of such, I have a few short essays that I am writing for a few publications. Hopefully, some of them get published. I am spending time writing, revising, rewriting and polishing those particular pieces. Best foot forward, ya know? As the status on those pieces changes, I will let you know. In the meantime, pushing forward on those pieces…and fingers crossed. Have an awesome day!