Written by I’m going to tell you something that I couldn’t have said a year ago.
I know what I’m for.
Not in a grand, cosmically certain way. I’m still a Scorpio – I’m suspicious of certainty, including my own. But in the quieter, more durable sense that comes from months of doing the thing and watching what happens: I know what this is. I know that CraftTalk is where my particular set of skills and obsessions and years of practice land, finally, in something that makes sense of all of it.
That is not a small feeling. I want to name it properly.
When I started building this in 2024 I thought I was building a website. A platform. A content hub for practitioners who needed better resources than what was out there. All of that is true, technically. But I’ve come to understand that what I’m actually building is a community, and that the community is teaching me things about myself that a decade of solitary practice did not.
The Scorpio thing – the independence, the self-sufficiency, the deep preference for working alone – that’s real. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. But I was wrong about what it meant for practice. I thought solitary meant better, in some fundamental sense. I thought community would dilute something essential. I was building a practice around what I knew rather than what was actually possible.
What CraftTalk has shown me, month by month, is that community won’t dilute the practice. It reveals dimensions of it that solitary work cannot reach. You see your practice differently when you are in dialogue with practitioners whose paths look nothing like yours. You articulate things you didn’t know you understood until someone asks the right question. You receive things you didn’t know you needed until they arrive from the direction you weren’t watching.
The tarot sequence I’ve been pulling lately feels like a description of exactly this.
I went through The Magician, the recognition that the tools were already in my hands, which is what 2025 felt like in retrospect. The Eight of Pentacles, the deep practice phase, the building, the months of just making things and learning as I made them. The Sun, which arrived when it needed to, reminding me that the effort was having an effect even when I couldn’t see it from the inside.
Then the Four of Wands. That one landed hard. Four of Wands is the card of homecoming, of recognising what you have built and allowing yourself to celebrate it, to stand in it, to understand it as something real. I’ve never been good at that. The Scorpio tendency is to be already looking at what’s next before the current thing is acknowledged. The Four of Wands sat on my altar for a week because I needed to practice not moving past it.
Now I’m in the Page of Pentacles. The return to curiosity. The willingness to be a student again even while the building continues. And this morning I pulled the Queen of Wands, which feels like – I don’t want to overclaim this – but it feels like maturation. Not arrival. Not completion. But the settling into the work that comes from having done enough of it to trust the doing.
The Queen of Wands is not a beginner. She’s not performing confidence. She knows her fire and she knows what to do with it. I’m working toward her.
The cloudy skies helps, honestly.
There’s something about building a digital platform for magical community while the clouds create a mysticism consistently on the Pacific Northwest that feels right. And rain, because rain is patient. It doesn’t stop. It keeps coming, softly, and things grow in it that wouldn’t grow in the relentless Colorado sunshine.
I’m growing things. Slowly. Consistently. In the rain.
That’s what this phase of the work feels like.