I’ve been doing a tarot pull every morning for the last six weeks or so. I’ve been working with the cards on and off since my mid-teens, albeit with some long fallow periods, but this is the first time I’ve sustained a daily practice of reading for myself.

I’m coming to understand that daily readings require a different sort of interpretive approach. If you’re doing a one-off or a big spread aimed at a particular question, then the scope or scale of the images is larger, somehow: more diffuse, in that they may refer to characters or events or circumstances further out in the context, but also more specific, for much the same reason. To put it another way, a daily read is essentially domestic; the archetypes of the major arcana, in particular, are necessarily less portentous and cosmic. They indicate, in the parlance of the times, something closer to vibes than true archetypes.

(If I was to make an analogy to futures work, I might say that a big spread brings in contextual trends, but a domestic reading is more about looking for weak signals in your more intimate affairs.)

Daily readings also underscore the uncanny capacity of the cards to tell you things quite firmly, even if it’s not always entirely obvious what they’re telling you until afterwards. Specific cards will appear in a reading and then hang about over the course of a week or two—sometimes in different positions, sometimes in the same position, and sometimes even in the same position repeatedly. I’m no mathematician, but I understand the likelihood of the same card appearing in the same one of three positions three days running to be almost infinitesimal.

And yet, it happens—and you are left with the unavoidable shortcoming of reading for oneself, which is the psychic domesticity already mentioned: you’re not explicitly positioning the question in the wider context, which leaves you to navigate primarily by feeling. As such, many of the directions you’re given only make sense in hindsight, and often only after you missed the turn they were indicating.

A skeptic, in the contemporary and debased sense of that term, would likely dismiss this as a sort of retroactive construction of comfort on my part—a sort of pareidolia of hindsight. I would grant them the comfort, and probably the hindsight too, but I would query the implication that seeking comfort is a failing.

I’m thinking of it instead as getting to know the oftentimes silent companion who has accompanied all my wanderings, learning to notice what they notice… paying attention to a different way of paying attention, if that’s not too stereotypically mystic and paradoxical a way of putting it.

The other commonality with futures work is that it has nothing to do with “the future”, and everything to do with the present. The cards do not explain what is going to happen; the cards reflect, rather, what is currently happening.

You’d think that would be the very easiest thing to observe, wouldn’t you? But it really isn’t.