What the Paid Layer Is — and Why I Built It This Way
Introducing Ecotone Tarot and the paid tier
If you have been reading this Substack from the beginning, you have been part of something that has been quietly taking shape beneath the surface of each essay.
The mycorrhizal network of trees and the collective unconscious. The seven layers of the forest and the seven that keeps appearing in sacred systems across cultures. The nine-year ecological succession cycle and the Pythagorean Personal Year. The wolf as projected Shadow. The Hero’s Journey as the psychological root of civilization. These were not independent essays on loosely related topics. They were the foundation stones of a single coherent system — laid one at a time, in public, so that by the time the system is fully revealed it feels not like a new idea but like something you have been thinking all along.
Today I am opening the next layer.
Introducing Ecotone Tarot
Most of us who care about the environment experience a gap between what we know and how we live. We understand the climate crisis but feel paralyzed, overwhelmed, or disconnected from any meaningful personal response to it. This condition — known in clinical psychology as eco-anxiety and ecological grief — is not a knowledge problem. It is a psychological one. We don’t need more information about what is happening to the natural world. We need tools, such as software apps, artworks, and other products— that help us understand their own relationship to it.
At the same time, the tarot market has drifted toward mass entertainment and predicting the future. Social media “collective readings” — where a single reader interprets cards for thousands of anonymous viewers simultaneously — have turned a deeply personal symbolic practice into a passive spectacle. The result is a growing audience of spiritually serious people who sense that something important is missing from the way tarot is currently being used, but haven’t found an alternative that takes both the tool and the individual seriously.
Now under my company, EcoLiger Solutions, I’m introducing a Tarot deck that will merge art and science in a logically coherent way that actively encourages solo reflection over divination.
That system is the Ecotone Tarot — a 66-card deck grounded in Jungian ecopsychology, ecological science, and Pythagorean numerology, currently in development. The free essays are its intellectual foundation. Everything published here has been building the conceptual vocabulary it speaks.
Every one of its 66 cards is a symbolic mirror held simultaneously between the inner landscape of the human psyche and the outer landscape of the living world — because the Ecotone system is built on a single foundational insight: these are not two separate landscapes. The psychological crisis of disconnection from the self and the ecological crisis of disconnection from the natural world are the same crisis, experienced at different scales. Healing one requires healing the other.
What the Paid Tier Is
Paid subscribers receive access to a growing library of Archetypal Profile essays — one for each of the 22 Major Arcana archetypes that form the psychological spine of the Ecotone Tarot system.
Each essay takes a single archetype and brings it fully to ground. Not abstract interpretation but a complete psychological portrait: the archetype’s core energy, its shadow expression — what it looks like when the energy is distorted or suppressed — and its integrated form, the version of the archetype that has done the work of becoming whole. Each essay then maps that energy onto concrete sustainable living practices that flow naturally from who the archetype is, and closes with reflection prompts that help you locate your own relationship to that archetypal energy using your numerological profile.
This is where the intellectual framework of the free essays becomes a personal practice.
If the free essays ask why does the world work this way — why the forest is organized in seven layers, why the psyche projects its Shadow onto apex predators, why the Hero’s Journey is both necessary and ecologically insufficient — the paid essays ask the follow-up question that matters just as much: how do you apply this to real life in a way that positively impacts the planet? How do we move from intellectual abstraction to lived reality both personally and collectively?
The free layer builds the map and allows us to see what nature is teaching us. The paid layer allows you to navigate the map with a community of deep thinkers that want to explore sustainable living through that lens. You will be welcome to comment on the blog posts to give me feedback, and we will also have a community chat open.
Why Sustainable Living and Not Just Psychology
This article diagnosed the gap between knowing and living — the way climate-aware people can hold the full weight of ecological crisis in their minds and still find themselves unable to really do anything about it. Information alone does not close that gap. What closes it is meaning — a symbolic framework that makes sustainable living feel like an expression of who you are rather than something we must do. In other words, it should come naturally to us.
That is what the archetypal framework is designed to provide. Someone living as The Restorer archetype does not compost because they feel guilty. They compost because it is an expression of their psychological orientation toward the world — toward healing what has been damaged, toward contribution over extraction, toward the longer view that restoration requires. The behavior is the same. The relationship to the behavior is completely different.
Each paid essay is built on this premise: that the most durable form of sustainable living practice is one rooted in psychological self-knowledge, and that the archetypes are the most precise map of “knowing thyself” as well as one’s place in the Circle of Life. And when we do that, we will naturally become more healthy over time. Instead of fighting the biological clock, we move more in harmony with it.
The Lion King Connection
The second version of the movie The Lion King, released in 2019, has themes that resonate with the ideas central to the Ecotone Tarot deck and this publication in general. Our main question is:
Are we meant to dominate nature, or participate responsibly with it?
Timon and Pumbaa take the approach of blind faith: Enjoy life, take things as they come, and avoid all worries. Go with the flow. Hakuna Matata!
Mufasa’s philosophy takes the approach of balance: Enjoy life but recognize your responsibility within a larger system. Think more of what you can give to the community rather than what you can take. Wherever the light touches is our Kingdom.
Our Tarot deck and intellectual framework is inspired by Mufasa’s philosophy. It seeks logical analysis as a way to support one’s faith and find the “Kingdom of God” within. Instead of thinking just about the desires of the self, we think about how our actions affect the whole system.
What Is Coming
Starting in August 2026, the Archetypal Profile essays will be published biweekly, moving through the 22 Major Arcana in a sequence that is connected to the collective numerology of the month of publication. Free essays will still be published, but biweekly.
With your support and feedback, the Ecotone Tarot deck and guidebook will be released in 2027. Paid subscribers who have been reading the archetype essays will arrive at the deck already fluent in the language it speaks. The Substack is not marketing for the deck. It is the intellectual and psychological foundation.
Unlike other Tarot enthusiasts, my purpose is not to be a Tarot reader and sell you my services on social media or even to show my face on this platform. Our purpose in the community is centered on the esoteric concept of “Know Thyself” and using Tarot in a similar way as Renaissance art—as a tool to understand the connection between the self and Mother Nature.
The Renaissance artists who painted self-portraits were doing something that had rarely been attempted before — turning the tools of observation outward onto the self, The self-portrait was not vanity. It was the practice of knowing oneself. Our purpose in this community follows the same thread — the ancient instruction “Know Thyself” carried forward into a new medium. The Ecotone Tarot is that medium: a tool for turning careful observation onto the self, and for discovering in that act of looking, that the self and the natural world are not as separate as we thought.
Other tools can be developed, including software solutions, to facilitate sustainable living in a more down-to-earth way. Our first app is a Chrome browser extension called “EcoLiger Solar Assistant.” Click here to learn more. Although this is not the primary focus at this time, other apps may be developed in the future to support us in this sustainable living journey.
If you have found the free essays useful, the paid tier is where that usefulness becomes less abstract more practically aligned.
If you’ve subscribed, I’m glad you Ligers are here in our version of the Pride Lands. The next layer of the Kingdom is ready when you are.
To become a paid subscriber and access the Archetypal Profile essays, click the button below.