Daily Notes #2

Doors, Death, Widget . . .

My vision for this daily email test involved (a) sharing shorter items and (b) being more spontaneous. But apparently my subconscious missed the spontaneity memo.

So I woke up at 3 AM with a voice in my head saying (rather loudly) “What about the daily note? What will be in it? When will you write it?”

After some fidgety thinking, it dawned on me that having a theme for each day would be helpful. And since there are ten days in the test, I decided to use Ten Doors to Tarot as a model.

Which would make yesterday the Symbolism Door:

From this vantage, you will see Tarot as an organized set of aesthetic/cultural elements (tropes or archetypes), represented primarily by pictures. | Along the symbolism path, you can expect to find works of literature, worlds of myth, and scholarship drawn from the fields of psychology, anthropology, and cultural history.

Which actually works out well enough, since yesterday’s serendipity gift brought connections to Laetitia Barbier and Morbid Anatomy’s Tarot curriculum—both focusing on Tarot through an archetypal lens.

Newly Discovered/Remembered

And speaking of MA’s Tarot curriculum . . . I’d skimmed through it so quickly that I missed knowing it will include courses from Mary K. Greer and Rachel Pollack (to be announced soon). So I’m now thinking of MA as a rich resource for creative engagement with Tarot.

But I first came across Morbid Anatomy for a different reason: I’m interested in death.

I’ll elaborate that statement in the next EP newsletter. But for now—here’s another site I find fascinating: The Order of the Good Death. And as luck would have it, that opens #2, the Esoteric Door:

From this vantage, you will see Tarot as a visual document that encodes hidden philosophical constructs. |Along the esoteric path, you may find Tarot in connection with secret societies (such as the Rosicrucians and Golden Dawn), as well as a long history of hermetic literatures and occult traditions.

The Order of the Good Death (OGD) is not a secret society in the old-fashioned sense, of course. Strictly speaking, it’s “a group of funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists exploring ways to prepare a death phobic culture for their inevitable mortality.” The Order was founded by Caitlin Doughty, who wins my clever-title award for her 2014 book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory.

But the OGD definitely takes a philosophical approach to an occult (hidden) topic. And it developed from insights long known only to those involved in a specific practice: caring for the dead.

I’m close to the end of today’s three minutes, so will close this part of Daily Notes #2 by saying the OGD blog publishes some thought-provoking content—and their whole approach contributes to one of the things I’d like to see happen in Tarot: putting “death” back in the Death card. (Not always, obviously, but also not never.)

Party Favor

I did finish the Notion Tarot Widget, as promised—at least in the sense that I created the table and page templates, plus a sample record. I also added a cover and icon, but of course everything (including the template properties) can be changed to suit your own preferences/needs.

If you’re new to Notion, all you have to do to use the Widget is create a free personal account, then click the link above. You’ll see this:

And in the upper right-hand corner, there’s a “Duplicate” button. Just click it and you’ll have your own copy of the Widget. Feel free to share the link if you wish.

Each trump has its own Notion page, and when you hover on a name in the table, you’ll see a little “Open” icon. Click it, and the “Emperor” page (for example) pops up. There you can create and add tags, write notes, and upload images.

This will all be pretty easy if you’ve ever spent time in the data universe, but Notion isn’t actually that intuitive otherwise. It’s a really great tool, though, once you get the hang of it.

Post a comment here if the link doesn’t work, or if you have questions/suggestions. And I’ll plan something completely non-tech for the next party favor.

---

In the meantime, thanks for reading! And by the way—serendipity was so generous today that I found exactly the right thing to feature in Daily Notes #3. That will be coming on Monday. This Sunday: a preview of my book-in-progress. C