Hermit Witch Tarot

We’re halfway through 2026, and I haven’t updated this in a couple of years, which in internet time may as well be a century. I kept paying for my hosting plan and my domains, all the while promising myself that I’d add something here tomorrow… and tomorrow… and tomorrow… well, you get the idea. There were also a few difficulties filed under the broad banner of website housekeeping, such as:

I wanted to change my domain (because I understood the title “kitchen table tarot” to be that of a book by another writer and tarot reader, and didn’t want to step on any toes or confuse potential visitors), so I did (to hermitwitchtarot, which frankly suits me better, and I claim “witch” only so far as I have an eclectic spiritual outlook and am open to things a lot less solid and dogmatic than established religions or programs of belief), though I don’t necessarily know how to let that original domain go. Speaking of letting things go:

I want to stick all of those readings I posted here on a page called “Archive” and let them rest there for perpetuity, allowing this front page to be fresh and new and disconnected from the old purposes of this site, because:

I want this to be a space for creative efforts inspired by tarot, including but not limited to: personal essays and vignettes prompted by the drawing/choosing of a particular card or cards; writing about how I use tarot for my own introspection; reviews and analysis of my (many) decks; discussion of tarot related books and materials; and art related to card meanings and concepts–but I don’t want it be an exclusive general collective reading platform anymore. I like reading, and do for myself every day and others on occasion (I get a lot out of seeing how cards interact with together and applying them as a broad guide or perspective shift on a given day or issue for which I seek clarity), but at this stage in my life I want to focus on creative writing (both creative non-fiction and fiction/poetry) and to use this site as a place to share those writings. I still want to read cards for individuals, but not so much for a nebulous collective consciousness that may or may not ever see the words.

SO–

I just want to clarify a few things about my creative output. I do not–have not ever–used LLMs to write, and don’t plan on ever doing so. Yes, I use em-dashes, but that’s because I’m a wordy sumbitch and I’ll employ any method that will allow me to stuff a sentence full of whatever it is I’m trying to say, whether that’s parentheses or dashes or ellipses or whatever. If you see the use of dashes as an “AI writing tell,” I’ll just remind you that this occurs because “AI writing” is slapped together from large language models built from the writing of actual people, and actual people use all sorts of punctuation formatting to get their actual human points across.

This may have me looking all sorts of haughty (oh, she’s too good for machine assistance!) or “scared of AI” (oh, she just can’t get with the technological times and embrace the future!) or a “Luddite” (same verse as the previous, except it seems cooler and more knowledgeable to apply a historical term broadly thought to describe a person “afraid” of technology, when really Ned Ludd is more of a folk figure who supposedly broke a piece of 1880s tech in a fit of protest about how it would be used to replace or reduce human labor in an effort to generate more profit for an owner, so in sum: calling me a Luddite just calls me an anti-capitalist, and yeah, sure. What of it?).

I don’t care.

The reason I don’t care is because I have much, much, much more care for the act of creation itself. Yes, writing is hard sometimes. Clear expression is a challenge. It can be a frustrating, painful labor of getting past oneself in order to find all of the words necessary to breathe life into an idea or philosophy, followed by another frustrating, painful labor involving the culling of words–even ones you really, really liked–to better distill and serve the original purpose of writing. It can be extremely difficult to know when to stop drafting or editing or polishing and just let it all flutter into hands of readers; even more difficult still to accept that sometimes, no matter how hard you’ve worked, misinterpretation may ensue and prove that the effort fell short of its intention. But oh, when it works! When someone, even just one someone, understands and connects to your outpouring; if it elicits a snort, a giggle, a chortle, a tear, a weeping so soft it cannot be heard; if a reader feels comforted, or seen, or moved to highlight a passage furiously before stabbing a finger over the sentence that put the highlighter in their hand before yelling “EXACTLY, MOTHERFUCKER!”–

Come on. Few feelings are more wonderful than to know you reached over time and space to gently boop another human being with your beautiful mind.

I also don’t use LLMs to generate “art,” for the same set of reasons. If my visual art output sucks in some way, so be it. It’s still mine.

To summarize: no AI, but also no schedules, no promises, and no chopping off and cauterizing my own self-worth by calling any of this content.

Until next time, dear friends. May the joy and light of actual creation follow you always and contain but never capture your spark,

-Cosmic ♥️