YouChoose Interactive Tarot: Don’t Give Up Now

I learned a long time ago that the fastest way to torpedo a plan is to 1. make one and 2. publish it on the blog.

Which is precisely why I like the quote that Adam Savage had on Tested.com…”Follow the process, not the plan.” Very Taoist, that. Follow the natural flow of things, which changes, often randomly. It looks like these YouChoose posts are going to be either Saturday afternoon or Monday morning. Hopefully. In one time zone or another. Maybe. I find myself unable to get pedantic or fussed up about it. In my opinion/experience being to rigid, or finicky about these things is antithetical to good Tarot. Tarot and intuition is about reading the dynamic flows of the energy. Imposing your will, your schedule, your expectations on the Tarot experience is seldom helpful. At the same time, it helps to have some internal structure, some common ground or else we can get disoriented and drown in the flow. It is a little like a soft stuffie with a poseable wire skeleton. Adaptable underpinning is what I think I’m trying to say. And the adaptable underpinning for these videos will be to look for them on Monday mornings. Except when they post early, on Saturday – but they will still be here waiting for you come Monday. You get the idea, so let’s get on with this.

If I were to put all three cards together in a sentence, it would be evaluate and persist. Or, look how close you are – don’t give up now.

Left: King of Swords. The air and intellectual aspects of swords step forward, along with the decisiveness of a king. “Be the decider” comes through along with “Evaluate.” Let your head lead this week. Fly by instrument. Feelings can bubble and surge, but use logic and reason to navigate it all. Evaluate where you are – you might be farther along in the process of things than you thought.

Center: Five of Pentacles (coins) Times have been tough, many have been generous. Don’t stop giving, helping, cooperating just yet. Keep doing what you have been doing to survive. “Some winters are long” Don’t give up now. Persistence is our way out of the cold.

Right: Nine of Cups. Nine is the largest single digit card. Things are close to wrapping up. The nine of cups has to do with family celebrations. “Don’t be tied to time.” again with a feeling of head rules heart this week. “Do what needs done to prepare” because things delayed before may be coming back to play in days ahead if we are disciplined and prepare just a little more.

I can almost hear some of you out there asking “when?” Tarot does not predict the future…it tells you how to create it. Our three dimensional universe runs on an engine of cause and effect. If you give up or change course you get one set of results. If you keep doing what logic, intellect and reason dictate then you get another, different (in this case better) result. And yes, as a matter of fact I am referring to keep wearing a mask until a real expert and not an idiot right wing politician says to change. The virus is a prime example of why persistence is valuable. If we stop masking and distancing too soon, then the mutant strains keep mutating and we lose the ground we’ve gained with vaccines and people die necessarily. Public health has two parts to it. One part is the community at large: what you do affects how many people get sick and die in total. The other part is your personal health: what you do affects your chances of getting sick or dying. Wearing a mask and staying home away from indoor groups helps BOTH parts.

Thus ends my public service announcement for today, the same as it was roughly a year ago…wear a mask, stay the heck at home and wash your hands.

Don’t stop. A year is an arbitrary thing that human beings made up. The virus don’t give a damn about calendars, so you have to give a damn about yourself and the health of others. Don’t give up now.

Today’s Tarot: Dam it

Or more accurately, don’t.

Accidents happen. Poor choices are made, more often than not unintentionally. We wouldn’t set out to hurt anyone, but sometimes we are less careful with ourselves than with others.

There are some times, hopefully minor ones, where we are our own worst enemy and our self sabotage is our own damn fault. I have a theory that is the precise time when obstacles are a potent spirit message and life lesson.

When the challenge comes from things outside of us, all of the adages and advice about persistence come into play. When the obstacle is our own doing, then it is more a matter of beating our own head against our own wall until we get our own clue.

The feeling with the card today is not really preventative. It feels like the message is about something now, something in progress, something where the cosmos is telling us to knock it off already. Where are you putting on the brakes (or building a dam) when you need to go with the flow?

I’ve discovered that I like making playlists. Not going to put the brakes on that just yet. Here is another one for your enjoyment: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6hDnolAabh3u3g4vcGpS68?si=19ee6787bdcd47be

YouChoose Interactive Tarot: Booking

Sorry about that. When I said this would post “Monday morning” I didn’t realize it would be Monday morning in some other interdimensional cross rip parallel universe Monday morning. Today has been an interesting week.

As for the cards, I’ll let the video interpretation stand. Since books stepped forward a tiny bit as the closest thing to cards-working-together theme for the week, here are some books and links that might go along with this week’s cards.

Leave a comment or send an email if you are interested in more reading suggestions – always happy to spout an opinion!

The Moon (psychic development)

  • The Healer’s Manual by Ted Andrews
  • How to Meet and Work With Spirit Guides by Ted Andrews
  • Psychic Witch by Matt Auryn

Knight of Pentacles (Career Related activity)

  • Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar by James Marcus Bach
  • Kahn Acadamy

Nine of Cups (celebrations, traditions)

  • Twoseven – watch video together online
  • Allrecipes – has recipes from various traditional cuisines, American comfort food

Today’s Tarot: Wordless

Connect your heart

Some things are beyond words.

Mat Auryn superbly and poetically describes the idea of mystery tradition in magick (and in some ways, I might add, Tarot.) There are some things that can only be directly, wordlessly experienced. That is the essence and definition of spirituality to my mind. Spirituality is our individual experience of the wordless and intangible parts of our human experience. Religion, on the other hand, is exernal experience, not internal. Religion is social, and group focused. Spirituality is wordless, expressed from the inside out. Religion is codified, group behavior that influences from the outside in.

Expression, experience and wordless are the key words here.

The High Priest and High Priestess cards also deal with these great wordless mysteries. Although this and other contemporary Tarot decks don’t have the explicit Christian religious imagery for the High Priest/Pope/Hierophant card that you see on the Marsielle, RWS and other older decks have, the nature of the tradition keeper and even the mystery seeker priestess cards are outside-in, just a hairbreadth on the religious side regardless of their visual depiction.

So what does any of this have to do with the Knight of Cups?

The Knight of Cups has always had some degree of spiritual connotation. He carries a message. Cups are associated with water (deep water is often a symbol for deep spiritual and cosmic mysteries) and intuition (often a wordless experience.)

Knights are associated with action. We are three dimensional creatures. Even the purest, wordless, silent, direct experience if the spiritual and intangible still has some physical third dimensional corollary or action. To have direct spiritual experience requires some action or doing be that sitting in meditation, gazing at the sky, performing a ritual, or taking a shower. Whether you call it spontaneous enlightenment or simply a moment of insight, this direct, wordless experience of emotion and insight is a normal, natural, inherent part of being human.

If you have chosen to read and watch this, if you have chosen the knight of cups card today, there is a sense of urging. There is a strong push to do the spiritual things that put you in a mental and physical space where wordless experience of the profound and spiritual is an open possibility. Follow your heart to the doing of it. Do the thing that connects your heart to the wordless.

Kitten Whiskers: Buddha and the Crackpickles

What’s the use of having your own blog if you can’t have a little fun with it every now and then? It’ll never be a scheduled thing, but “Kitten Whiskers” is the name for posts where I go rando fangirl for a few of my favorite things.

“I’m hungry,” Sloan said. She was jittery and getting on my nerves.

“You’re not hungry.” I said

“How would you know?”

“It’s just subliminal suggestion. You feel an increase in appetite because you’re watching a guy eat.”

“The pickles here,” she said.

“I know.”

“Right?”

“I know.”

It’s like they put something in them that makes you crave them all the time. It might be crack. Do you think they put crack in the pickles? Like maybe in the, what do you call it? The stuff in the jar with the pickles?”

Easy Buddha by Brett Dinelli, all rights reserved, used with permission.

I have learned how to make crackpickles.

NO they do NOT have crack in them. Not even in the stuff in the jar. They are just good old fashioned deli style fermented pickles. But YES, they are heavily crave-able. I mean, you seriously, seriously want one at random times. Especially when there is a big old jar of them in the ‘fridge that you made with you own little hands for a fraction of the price of those tiny little tubs in the grocery store.

When the lockdown first hit, I did the sourdough thing like everyone else. Mostly because jars of yeast for baking was nowhere to be found and we were in serious grilled cheese and cinnamon roll comfort food mode.

Sourdough is, after all, a sort of fermenting. Maybe my prohibition era Appalachian ancestors were whispering though the ages to amp up my fermenting skills. Maybe it was my love of dill pickles. But sourdough gave way to pickle making.

After googling up a storm for hints, tips and recipes (not to mention all the probiotic goodnesses of fermented food) plus several months of experimentation I found the magic formula for our version of crackpickles. That isn’t to say anyone else would like them…or be able to get past the slightly funky looking brine (you know, the jar juice) Here is our favorite version. It is in the middle between the throw anything in a crock with some saltwater and a plate on top school of thought and the water lock fermenting lids that look like they escaped from Frankenstein’s laboratory.

Here is what I consider essential gear:

  1. Cucumbers. Nothing fancy. Just the big, ordinary cucumbers from the grocery story. We tried some fancy bumpy cucumbers that were supposed to be THE ones for pickling. They weren’t.
  2. A wide mouth mason jar. I started with just one (they sell singles at Michael’s craft store and probably lots of places during gardening and canning season) If you start with just one, it lets you experiment at small scale until you find your true love addictive recipe. More and larger jars are easy enough to find if you want to ramp up production later on.
  3. Fermentation lid and weight. I used the single starter kit from Mason Jar Lifestyle. It was affordable, with a simple, elegant design. Easy. And no, they didn’t sponsor this or give me a sample. I bought it just like everyone else. This is random fangirling, remember?

The Recipe:

  1. Wash and dry your jar(s) lid(s) and weight(s) Any kind of canning or food prep like this is one of those crazy scrupulous clean freak kind of things.
  2. Put a bay leaf in the bottom of the jar (optional) for crispness
  3. Chunk, slice, quarter or whatever cut the cucumbers and pack them into the jar. Stuff them in there…you’ll get the hang of it. A tight fit is good.
  4. Dissolve 1 rounded Tbs salt in 2 cups of chlorine free water for each quart jar. Casper the friendly lactobaccilus doesn’t like chlorine or the iodine, so don’t use those. Iodine-free fine granular sea salt or pickling salt with filtered water worked well for us. Tried some fancy pink Himalayan in one batch because it was close at hand from another recipe. Tasted fine, but made some deeply weird looking pink sludge at the bottom of the jar.
  5. sprinkle 1 Tbs of dill weed (yeah, I used dried and it gets all over the pickles. So what?) and 1 tsp of granulated garlic (yeah it makes the brine look cloudy and a little suspect in the end, but it is really ok. Honest!) over the cucumbers in each quart jar.
  6. Pour the salt water over the cucumbers until jar is filled. Put the glass weight on top to keep the cucumbers submerged and close with the fermenting lid.
  7. Let them set for two weeks at room temperature. Tweek the lid once a day to release any carbon dioxide that forms. If you forget, the lid will spit juice out all over the place as it releases the gas and you might have to add a little more salt water to top it off. Days 3-5 seem to be the most bubbly and science experiment-y
  8. At the end of a week or two of wondering if you have just made a jar of botulism sauce, take a whiff. If it smells bad, or is moldy, pitch it all, wash the daylights out of the jar and try again. If it smells like mouth watering dill pickles, try one. If it tastes good, put a regular lid on it and store the jar in the refrigerator. If the pickle isn’t sour enough, let them go another week or two at room temperature before moving them to the refrigerator. I have no idea how long they will last beyond that. We ate ours within a couple of days.
  9. Buy more jars and fermenting lids. This may ruin you for store bought vinegar based pickles.

While you are eating your new pickles, get yourself a copy of Jimmy the Buddha and the sequal Easy, Buddha both by Brett Dinelli. They are brain candy and comfort food in book form punctuated by moments with all of the feels and brilliant insights. Chapter 8 of Jimmy the Buddha. That. Forever that. It may be a fictional detective adventure, but the characters are deeply relatable and real. Kind of makes you want to put your arms around them, although I suspect Sloan might object.

I’ve never actually met Brett or his special lady and their family, but we have chatted many times on Twitter and I call them friends. *raises cup of medium roast columbian – coffee*

Related: TaoCraft Tarot has playlists on spotify: Rando Fangirl