For the past month, I’ve been using AI image-generation to create personal tarot cards, and it’s led to profound inner shifts. I wanted to write about that journey here.

It started when I came back from a family trip to Asia.

I’d gone to Taiwan to visit my aging parents, and my brother and his family. Though I spent a stretch of my childhood and young adulthood there, I feel a bit lost these days when I stay in Taipei. Friends from my Taipei American School days have scattered across the globe, and while my family is loving, they are quite different from me. My passions— everything from community-building to rock climbing and philosophical discussion— are foreign to them. So in Taiwan, I felt only half-awake, half myself, as I wandered through the city’s bookstores and cafés.

I remember landing at JFK airport late Friday night in early August, taking the Lyft back towards East Williamsburg, and arriving at the loft I share with my three roommates. I was elated as I stepped through the front door of Merlins Place, this third-space we’ve created together, and which attracts a steady stream of people who understand me deeply, with whom I’ve had dialogs ongoing for months or years. Since nobody was home yet, I started to journal, and ended up making my first card.

In this card, I depicted my roommates Doug and Jacky as warriors protecting the space. Part of our social experiment is to run our space like a Burning Man camp, with community members free to come in and out. Our sense of security doesn’t come from having locks on our doors, but rather from the confidence that we are able to enforce our boundaries if they are ever violated. It’s because both Doug and Jacky are so solid that I can offer events with a spiritual bent where we can be undefended, vulnerable— everything from introspective writing workshops, to massage class and cuddly parties.

Both Jacky and Doug fit the archetype of the builder. Doug built a 3000 LED light-matrix on our basement ceiling, which has illuminated many music-listening parties. Jacky built the stage on which we host our open mic. A 40-foot Chinese dragon, from the “Dragon and Fairies” rave Jacky organized for 200 people, currently hangs from our upstairs ceiling. Jacky’s current obsession is to build high-end speakers we could rent out to event-organizers around the city.

Doug is the friend who introduced me to burner culture, taking me to Love Burn in Miami in 2022, and then to Black Rock City in 2023. When, freshly back from the Love Burn, I discovered the Fractal co-living community, I immediately thought of asking Doug to sign a lease with me in the building, and we ended up creating the social experiment that is Merlins Place.

The richness of Tarot means that individuals can represent different archetypes, and here Jacky is both a guardian, making sure consent is always honored in our space, and also a sower of chaos with his wild ideas. For example, for a burner-adjacent event, he rented a U-haul and created the Dumpster Dive Experience in its cargo box, where people dove into a pile of puffy trash bags and rooted around for “treasure” (dildos) that could be exchanged for a prize of “trash juice” (a mixed cocktail).

Having made these two cards, I started to think of what archetypes other friends could represent, and ended up making a card for Samson. We met by chance over a year ago waiting in line to use the bathroom at an all-night-dance party in Greenpoint. Since then, we’ve become climbing partners, exchanged massage almost weekly, and gone on trips together to Vermont and Massachusetts.

When I made this card, something resonated in me. I remembered: I was a healer too! Doug and Jacky were already such competent builders that we didn’t need a third builder; instead, I could lean into and express my particular talents, and that’s what would enrich our space. So right then and there I decided to offer my Fractal U massage class again, and to invite Samson to co-teach the class with me. It seemed like such a self-evident thing to do. Here was a first clear consequence of working with the tarot. There was nothing supernatural about it. Instead of predicting the future, my cards served as a mirror of the energies at play in my life, and so helped me to get clarity on how I wanted to proceed.

I continued to make cards, and a visual vocabulary emerged. My fool, the starting card, was the guy with a backpack, striding out with curiosity to explore the world, following the north star. I thought it would be fitting to have the fool arrive at an Accomplishment, a climactic destination, where he would realize that he’d been holding the north star all along. This way, whatever other cards were added to the deck, there would be this skeleton of a narrative arc. This arc was a reminder that I could become the author of my own destiny.

I began to think of other pairs that could go into the deck, that would represent both the challenges I faced, and their possible solutions.

For example: The Suit at the Pool captures a state of hesitation I get into at times. The guy is at the pool, but not dressed to swim. He stands on the sidelines, not getting involved. And the antidote to that? Simply to dive in!

The Weaver of Error is about my tendency to overthink. All that intense mental activity just leads to me being trapped in a larger labyrinth. And its pair card would be The Architect of Flow, who implements systems where his diverse projects receive attention, and thus grow and develop.

I have so many interests that my attention sometimes becomes dispersed. But there are also moments in my life where I’m able to combine different elements into a unified, synergistic whole: for example in my multi-disciplinary Illustrated Journal class, or in the psychedelic rituals I occasionally facilitate. It was reassuring to remind myself that I wasn’t all dark— that both light and dark were in me.

As I made more cards and felt their resonance, I experienced something akin to the magic of Tarot. I thought about all the synchronicity I’ve experienced in the past three years. How I met Doug at a Brooklyn Psychedelic Society comedy night, both standing in the garden waiting for the performance to begin. How I met Samson standing in a bathroom line, and found Jacky on the Fractal Discord where he was looking to sublet a room. I though of how deeply and unpredictably these encounters changed the course of my life. To enter the Tarot dimension was to open oneself up to synchronicity, to see opportunities everywhere. Indeed, Merlins Place, the fruit of my meeting Doug, has itself become a synchronicity machine, where people encounter their future friends, lovers, and collaborators. So I made a Tarot metacard to express this magic.

I decided I wanted to share this work with others. I imagined a meetup where we’d show cards we’d made, and tell the stories that went along with them. Maybe we’d exchange cards as well, in which case, I wanted to sign my cards. So I started to add a little signature: a line drawing of a red dragon somewhere in the frame. I made up a name for the community: Tarotizans, made up of Tarot and Artisans.

I wanted to keep the entry barrier low, so I thought each Tarotizan could make just five starter cards: The Fool, Accomplishment, the Tarot Metacard, the Lover and Death. My Lover card is based on an experience I had in the south of France. On summer vacation with my ex-partner, I was walking up from the beach back to the villa, through a vineyard, and I suddenly felt the grape leaves and fruit pulse with life, the same life that was in my body.

Samson accepted my invitation to co-teach the class. We published a listing and people started signing up. When I had to go offline for ten days to attend Burning Man, Samson was the one to send emails to our prospective students and have video calls with them, a basic vibe-check to make sure our group would be a place where consent was honored and people felt safe. I was so impressed with the tone of his emails: clear, friendly and reassuring. I knew I’d made the right choice asking him to teach with me.

My roommates and I came back from Burning Man with fire in our eyes. We’d survived rain and mud and dust storms featuring 50-miles-per-hour winds. But we’d also experienced such moments of beauty and connection that we now wanted to create our own Burning Man camp.

Some of the my most beautiful moments at the Burn were bicycling through the darkness towards distant points of light on the playa. One sound camp, the Mayan Warriors, had powerful green laser beacons shooting into the sky. As I got closer, I would see the art car with its array of speakers, the DJ console, the embellishments of flashing lights, smoke and fire, and thousands of dancers gathered around, dancing on the desert floor.

So, in light of our plan to start a Burning Man camp, I forged a card that would serve as a temporal beacon, pointing to a future one year from now. I’d like our camp to offer fresh-brewed coffee with live classical piano every morning. The offering would be called “Bach and Coffee.” It would be a place where people could journal, rest and reflect before plunging back into the hectic chaos of the playa.

Last night, Samson and I taught the first session of our massage class, to twelve students. It was a beautiful experience, serene, unhurried and connecting. After the class we invited those who wanted, to stay on for open practice. Eight students chose to stay. It was beautiful to see these people who’d just met choosing to prolong the exchange for close to an hour. I felt an echo of the Accomplishment card.

If you’re interested in joining the Tarotizans community and forging your own set of cards, please get in touch at ulyart@gmail.com