Category: Tarot Cards

Tarot readings and card discussions

Sunday Turnover: Two of Swords

Blog exclusive:

For “Sunday Turnover” we turn the reading process around a little. Instead of picking the card that is right for you, as with the YouChoose interactive readings, this time I choose that card and you choose the meaning that most resonates with you.

Today’s card: Two of Swords

Classically it symbolizes a logical indecision, being “of two minds about something. I personally like Diane Morgan’s interpretation of “mystical unity.” The two, while it is related to balance, it also hints at dichotomy. Many cards, like the eight of swords or the seven of cups sometimes suggest using intuition and following your heart when logic and reason fail. The same is true here, especially on cards that follow Pamela Smith’s depiction of a blindfolded figure. The blindfold suggest a reliance on internal insight, intuition, the mysterious or divine. Either way, the two of swords suggests a need for decision, a way to decide, and an element of trust.

Key ideas for the Two of Swords :

  • Indecision, of two minds
  • Reliance on intuition and the mysterious
  • Mystical unity, connection to the esoteric as much as the physical
  • Discord between heart and mind
  • Time to decide – at a standstill because of indecision
  • Conflicting ideas
  • Proper use of power (Ted Andrews)

As with the images on the cards, the trick in Tarot’s benefit is to apply it, not just memorize it.

The card showing in a reading validates any feelings of indecision that brought you to the reading. It can spur you to mental action in letting you know that it is time to decide, not to put it off. If logic doesn’t provide answers right now, look to intuition and vice versa

Worth It

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Today’s card is the Seven of Wands.

The classic meaning has to do with success after struggle. You are going to get what you want to go – but you are going have to work for it, maybe a little harder and longer than you expected.

Back and forth, yin and yang, good stuff comes after hard stuff – even when the hard stuff is internal and about personal development rather than literal, physical realm struggles.

Matt Auryn, in his book Psychic Witch reminds us that “everything you touch touches you.” That connectivity and reciprocity is inherent to many if not all Tarot cards. It applies to the Seven of Wands even though it is tempting to see it as the surface meaning portrayed in the picture on the card. It is easy to see the Seven of Wands as an omen of a conflict or a struggle that is in progress, eminent, or looming on the horizon.

Underneath the struggle there is a thread of potential success that you may not sense in cards like the three of swords or the devil card. There is a hint that the struggle will be worth it on some level, even if it isn’t necessarily a victory by surface definitions.

I’m especially fond of Ellen Dugan’s added advice to meet challenges and overcome them with “style, wit and humor.” In his Heart of Stars Tarot, Thom Pham points to the character Obyron from Game of Thrones. Mr. Pham emphasizes Obyron’s persistence, and 100% dedication to the battle at hand. He’s all in and never gives up. But, just like Ms. Dugan, there is a nod to a great sense of style. Obyron is the essence of self confidence, beyond comfortable in his own skin and as much of a bon vivant, racountour and hedonist as he is a fierce warrior.

Both of these give us a hint about how to cope with our daily battles. If you touch daily struggles with your own unique style and personal sense of humor, it may touch you back with a little bit of hope. It might let you see the thread of victory and silver lining that helps you doggedly persist. Challenges that stretch beyond our comfort zone are often just the way of things. A little style and humor makes that way of struggle leading to success just a little more worth it.

Short Sip Tarot: Eyes on the big picture

TaoCraft Short Sip Tarot: guidance for your day in the time it takes to sip from your morning coffee.

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Today’s card is the World from the major arcana.

Back in the day, the world was all there was. Humans have been looking to the stars as long as we’ve had clear nights and eyeballs. Our perspective has changed a great deal since then.

Tarot was in use a hundred years before the telescope was invented. Don’t get your knickers in a bunch, I’m not equating the two. What I’m saying is that Tarot is still a product of the largely pre-scientific times in which it emerged. Tarot was psychology before psychology was invented. It was stress management and personal development and creative problem solving long before we had words for those things. The world was bigger then so the World card carries connotations that it wouldn’t had the deck evolved as an oracle in a more technologically advanced culture. Today, we might be better served calling the card “The Universe” or “The Cosmos” or something that implies a true gestalt.

We are often told to keep our eyes on the prize. That is good advice. Staying focused and avoiding distraction certainly helps us to progress. To focus like that, however, we have to narrow our field of vision. It is a mental reflection of how optics and our vision tend to work. It makes me wonder. What are we missing if we focus “eyes on the prize” too much? Focus is good, but narrow. It’s also a good idea to zoom out, look at the biggest big picture you can muster. It lets you see where the prize you are eyeing fits in the big picture. It lets you see your progress toward it. The big picture lets you see what other prizes are out there and if the original is the right treasure for you. It’s hard to adjust your direction with narrow-focus blinders on.

Eyes on the prize is important, but eyes on the big picture can be very helpful too.

Comfort

Today’s Card is the Hierophant. Some decks call it the Pope or the High Priest.

One of my favorite interpretations for this card is a grandfather figure, the keeper of family stories and tribal histories. The past couple of years have been crazy. Don’t feel bad if you seek comfort in a more traditional holiday season, old routines or some sort of spiritual ritual. It can be comforting.

The card brings the movie Cloud Atlas to mind. There are scenes of an old man telling stories around a campfire. On one hand it is an ancient image, but we find out through the course of the movie it is actually happening in the distant future.

There are threads of time together in language, story, tradition. They are kept alive through adding, adapting…the same as living species adapt and survive. There is deep comfort in old ways, even as they are adapted to our needs living here in the future.

Thank you so much for reading, watching and listening to these new TaoCraft Short Sip Tarot readings. These are (almost) daily short format Tarot readings to give guidance to your day in the time it takes to sip from your morning coffee. Longer Clairvoyant Confessional episodes will be coming, but not in any regularly scheduled way, at least for the time being. If you have a question for the Clairvoyant, please send it to the contact in the podcast episode description or leave it in the comments. Don’t forget to like, follow, subscribe share and do all of those wonderful things that you do. All best wishes to everyone. See you in tomorrow’s TaoCraft Short Sip Tarot.

The One Measure

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Today’s card is Judgement from the major arcana.

The word judgement has to do with assessment and decision making as in “use your own judgement.” But like everything it has a dark side. Good judgement implies wisdom and experience. Poor judgement implies mistakes in reasoning and decision making.

Simple enough, right?

Judgement is my grand nemesis in the Tarot deck. To my mind, it is the essence of that inward looking personal growth and spirituality versus outward, social religion. In my experience, Tarot is all about the former and not the latter. The Judgement card is one of the cards most strongly allied with the Christian influence in the cultures where Tarot first gained popularity. Angelic and “Judgement Day” images are on this card in almost all decks that I’ve seen except for a handful that deliberately step away from the Marseille and Waite – Smith imagery. The Witches Tarot, Animal Wise Tarot, and the Osho Zen Tarot are my favorite examples of this deliberate separation.

In addition to pushing my personal psychological buttons and activating my religion allergy, the downside of all the judgement day/ angelic/consequences images is the way it can slip into judgmentalism rather than reason and judgment. Zealotry and blind idealism can slip in very easily here.

The up side to this line of thinking is the idea of second chances. The judgement card is also associated with a fresh start after paying your dues. It’s about cleaning up the mess you made and moving on.

On one hand you have judgement and reasoning. On the other hand you have judgement day and judgementalism. On the other other hand you have second chances and taking responsibility for your actions. How do you bring all of that into one card?

Compassion.

It is the one measure of it all. Good judgement is guided by compassion. Judgementalism is kept at bay by it. Compassion grants second chances.

Compassion is the ultimate judge and judgement. If it isn’t compassionate, it isn’t good judgement.

Thanks again for watching, reading and listening. See you on the print side!

YouChoose Interactive Tarot: Commitment, Congratulations, Cognition

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Short Sip Tarot: Imagine

Short Sip Tarot is a a Tarot reading in the time it takes for a sip (or two) of your morning coffee.

Today’s card is the Page of Cups.

I’ve always loved the fun and absurdity of a fish in a cup, which is probably the most iconic image associated with this card.

It takes an active imagination to really enjoy it, I think. That’s the cool thing about imaginations. All it takes to activate it is to want to do it. Want to be imaginative? Imagine what it would be like and POOF it’s there.

We tend to associate imagination with children and artists. I disagree. I think we are all wired to be imaginative. It’s what gives homo sapiens our evolutionary advantage. We can imagine something out of impossible nothingness and then figure out a way to make it tangible. Logic and science and imagination and intuition are all deeply interdependent

That’s why I believe we are all capable of intuition. Imagination and intuition are closely linked. Try this sometime: Imagine what your day will be like tomorrow. It can be anything. It can be what you WANT to happen or it can be what you EXPECT to happen. It can be as realistic or as fish-in-a-cup absurd as you want it to be. Close your eyes and imagine it as best as you can for a minute. Write a few notes about what you imagined if you want. Written or remembered revisit your bit of imagination at the end of tomorrow.

It isn’t going to be predictive. What actually happens might be – probably will be – totally different from the way you imagined it. Think of your minute of imagination more broadly and abstractly than that. Was there anything your moment of imagination taught you about how to deal with today? Did it show you anything about bias and expectations that may have tripped up the day that happened?

Or, of equal importance, how did the minute of imagination affect your mood?

Did imagining the day to come make you more anxious for what might happen? Did it really happen that way? Imagination can teach us about anticipatory anxiety, like the Mark Twain quote “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, most of which never happened.”

Maybe imagination helped you feel more prepared and calmer about the unexpected. The possibilities are endless and also useful. Imagination can be a very grown up thing. Although grown ups can have fun too. You never know when you are going to need to play stare eyes with a fish in a cup.

A Sip of Tarot: One More Time

Today’s card is the traditional first of the Tarot deck, usually given the number zero.

The zero is interesting. You could get all philosophical about it. Zero, as in “you’re a big zero” was an insult, but I don’t know that anybody has cared about it since the 70s. I think of it more in terms of the Zen enso, the circle. It is a symbol of infinity from which all springs, including the newborn journey of the Fool. From there you can veer into the oroborus, the snake biting its own tail which in turn points to alchemy, manifestation and sorts of other things. It’s interesting as heck, but not the path where the energy is flowing today.

The word fool didn’t originally have the connotations that it does today. The king’s fool was more of a court jester who, through their antics and seeming insanity could tell greater and blunter truth than any other advisor. Think of comedians like George Carlin and Eddie Izzard and many others. They can make incisive social commentary, and nobody seems to mind because it comes wrapped in humor. Laughter really is good medicine. Stand up comics still remind us of the legitimate value of laughter, fun and play. Call it stress reduction if it makes you feel better, but it works, and it is imprtant.

That aspect of the Fool card is where the energy is flowing right now.

My intuition has a clairaudent (clear-hearing) aspect to go along with the clairvoyant (clear-seeing) part. Sometimes that means intuition comes as mental words instead of mental images. Sometimes sounds or music will come to mind. That’s not paranormal. It’s not the slightest bit unusual to have a song brought to mind by some circumstance or another. But if you are in a situation of wanting a message or are actively working with intuition and that happens, it is worth paying attention to the song that comes to mind.

In today’s case, the song that popped to mind was “One More Time” from Daft Punk on their Discovery album.

I know that seems wildly random but creativity and intuition are all about connecting widely separated and wildly random dots like this.

The phrase “one more time” means repetition of course, but it can also hint at frustration if the repetition is from something unwanted or out of our control. The mental image here is building a house of cards that falls down and having to start from the beginning one more time. And one more time again.

This combination is akin to the the Ten of Swords and the famous proverb that the ten so often calls to mind “fall down seven times but get up eight.” All that getting up can get exhausting and frustrating after a while. Humor and play can make frustration and repetition and having to start all over again one more time less infuriating. The Fool reminds us that humor and lightheartedness can help make that metaphoric eighth time up a little easier.

A Sip of Tarot: Back Burner

Today’s card is the Seven of Cups

It’s easy to think yourself into circles. This is a card for all the over-thinkers of the world, but anyone can become overwhelmed.

Sometimes the seven of cups is a good problem to have. If you only have one really viable option, then deciding is easy. This card is about an embarrassment of riches when it comes to options and choices. That’s not the worst problem to have. But however good or bad the problem may be, how do you solve it?

The back burner is your friend.

I grew up in a very rural place south of the Mason Dixon line. Whatever else you may think of southern culture in the U.S. the food is fantastic. It seems like everyone is born knowing how to cook and cook well. In that elite company, regardless how many potluck dishes or helping hands you have in the kitchen, making the turkey for Thanksgiving was the black belt test. In our family the hoopla was at the house wherever the turkey baker lived and everyone helped but if you own the kitchen and you make the bird you are in charge. To put it in Star Trek terms, if you are Captain Turkey, you have the con. The way they could get everything together, hot and tasty, all on the table all at the same time was a wonder to behold.

Even cooking a comparatively small meal for our own little household, getting it all in the same place at the same time takes a little strategy. The Thanksgiving meals I make are far more Cowboy Bebop than Captain Kirk. But it is still a hint about how to deal with an overwhelming number of choices, tasks or side dishes: Shift your attention.

Take a break and work on something else. It works for too many choices and for a lack of ideas. If you feel like a deer in headlights or feel like you “got nothin'” to give to the situation. rotating your attention to a different project works a magic of its own.