“The Springtime of My Life:” The Second Coming of Inspiration
“Look around
The grass is high
The fields are ripe
It’s the springtime of my life”
(from A Hazy Shade of Winter by Simon and Garfunkle)
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I was just listening to The Bangles’ power-pop version of the Paul Simon folk-rock song and picked up on this verse. At my advanced age (those who have been with me for a while will know what that is or can at least make a pretty good guess), it seems paradoxical that I would be thinking about springtime. (Maybe it’s because I’m vacationing in sunny Florida at the moment and watching the snow at home on my Ring camera.)
I had the good fortune to be involved in a vibrant esoteric community while living in Connecticut during most of the 1970s; it was a lively, active group that spawned a number of now-famous authors. I was still very much a neophyte but was rapidly closing in on a solid grasp of the occult tarot. Natal astrology was the premise behind the organization, but I branched out into divination and didn’t gravitate back toward astrology until I went online and encountered several classical and horary astrologers with impressive credentials. That occurred around 2011, and became my primary astrological focus. Those were heady times, but I married and moved away at the end of the decade.
I spent the intervening years helping to raise a family and pursuing a fairly distinguished career, activities that offered little social opportunity for fortune-telling in my adopted rural hometown. But I kept my hand in by studying and experimenting with new ideas based on established principles, as well as returning to mystically-influenced artwork. Therefore, when I finally entered the realm of online conversation in 2011, I was prepared for the fresh insights I obtained from the dialogue. This led to an on-call reading gig at a local metaphysical shop that I stayed with until we relocated in 2018 and I had to start all over again in a new locale (still a work-in-progress).
I began this blog in August of 2017, shortly before we moved again after 38 years in the same place, carrying on from the stimulating exchange of ideas that had so intrigued and inspired me for six of those years in the aggregation of themed posts that was Aeclectic Tarot, a phenomenal discussion forum that had become dormant earlier in 2017. I was harboring a wealth of unkind opinion regarding the state of divination in the social-media age that fueled many of my fledgling missives, the first few of which carried the title “Cheap Shots.” Backing away from that curmudgeonly attitude, I gradually settled into a more relaxed groove that explored specialized topics of interest such as esoteric reading techniques and produced numerous experimental spreads, many of them employing mixed media such as cards and dice. I also eventually published five e-books of my blog output on Lulu and wrote an unpublished book on “astro-lithomancy.”
The renewed inspiration of the header came largely from my resolution at the beginning of 2024 to post a full year’s worth of new divination material, one essay per day, and I’m now at 342 consecutive days. (At that point I had already made a couple of aborted runs at it, having previously reached just over 240 posts.) Consequently, I’ve had to think deeply about where I want to take my daily observations in order to come up with worthwhile content without repeating myself too often. (And yes, I’ve covered this bio in previous posts, but the “wrapper” here is its connection to the phenomenon of late-blooming renewal.)
Because I acquire numerous cues while roaming the online tarot community, it’s inevitable that I will run into the same subjects time-and-again (for example, “thinks-or-feels” questions ad nauseam), but I’ve tried to put a unique spin on them whenever I choose to revisit the territory. There is always more to learn even after 50+ years of study and practice, and by regularly probing the general state-of-the-art I’ve turned over a good many stones and brought a slew of hidden gems to light. Or so it seems to me; your mileage may vary. In case you’re wondering, I think I can hold the “second childhood” at bay for a bit longer.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.org on February 10, 2025.
