Learn With Me: Oracle Dice, Collector of Selves part 2

Time is an ingredient for learning.

Deep understanding is seldom instantaneous.

Sometimes you have to abide, sit with something for a while, squint at it and poke it with a stick before you can really integrate and use a new idea.

That is where I am with this die and lord card. Even after sleeping on it after a late night part 1 post, I still don’t have much to offer. I’m still in the squint and poke stage with the relationship die and its lord card, The Collector of Selves.

The basic “card meaning” level symbolism is easy enough. This is the relationship cube. I connect that with the relationship energies of Tarot’s suit of cups. This seems a little broader, encompassing any level of relationship, not just the cup’s intimate ones. This feels a little like the sword’s broader community and collegial relationships too.

My hunch is that it will make more sense once it is in context with other dice and on the reading cloth.

The Collector of Selves is interesting. I didn’t get it right away, but Mr. Asmund writes about masks and social roles a bit in the guidebook. The die talks about multiple levels of realationship between people it seems, but the lord card seems to pull in our relationship with ourselves, which in Tarot I connect to the suit of wands.

See what I mean about the cards adding layers of meaning and nuance?

As I understand it, the card asks us to evaluate the aspect of ourselves that are involved with the relationship in question, whatever level of intimacy or closeness that relationship may have in the bigger picture our lives. He portrays that facet-of-self quality as a mask. What part of ourselves are we showing, what mask are we wearing? How close to maskless does this relationship come?

Is there such a thing as a completely maskless relationship?

The mask we wear for ourselves is often the hardest of all to remove.

Thank you so much for reading along with this learning process. I hope it is helpful to you in some way. Thanks for coming along as I walk my talk about life long learning.

Sage Sips is fueled by private Tarot readings, ko-fi memberships, paid substack subscriptions and coffee (both real and virtual.) Your support through likes, comments and social media shares are always appreciated!

*Publishing Goblin’s Oracle Dice used with permission

Learn With Me: Oracle Dice, Collector of Selves part 1

Learn with me: Oracle Dice continues. Now that we have our 7 learning dice, we add another layer of meaning.

I’m presenting and learning the dice the same way that I’ve studied Tarot over the years for two basic reasons. First, I know this methodology works. I’ve used it. Been there and done that. Second, by learning the dice with me you can also get a behind the scenes peek into reading Tarot at the same time. There are parallels here. The oracle creator has created Tarot decks. Really good ones. If you’ve read this blog for a hot minute you know how much I like the Alleyman Tarot. I just bought the guidebook to his previous deck the Normal Tarot because it has the best cover art of any Tarot book ever – but more on that another day.

The oracle dice works so well with this method of learning because it was created by hands familiar with Tarot. The dice have all the depth and insight and use-ability of a 138 card Tarot deck.

Tarot is more than memorizing individual card meanings. There are layers, complexities and nuances. In the past it was called gifted. Psychic gifts are really more a matter of skill and practice. It’s like sports. Almost anyone can learn to play a sport – tennis for example. If someone has a natural gift for tennis, they are never going to get anywhere with it unless they learn the rules and swing a racket. Someone with no natural talent whatsoever can play tennis with learning and practice. The person who put in the time and work and practice would easily beat a person with natural talent who was playing their first game. Combine a small seed of Talent with work and practice over time – that can seem like some sort of special gift. No all of us can make it to Wimbledon, but any of us can certainly bang a ball around at the local park.

This series, this blog can’t teach Wimbledon level Tarot reading. It can’t teach you to read for other people, but you can learn some banging DIY Tarot reading for yourself.

But it take time, and blogging unfolds at a different pace. We could do this face by face together and move on to the next thing four months from now.

I don’t think you need that.

You’ve seen how this works.

Hurl dice at the table, get your hunches, mental images and intuitions about it. Combine that with the reference book and there you have it.

Now we are going to add another layer to it.

Seven Dane Asmund has given each dice its own topic and lord card. The topic is analogous to the the suit in the Tarot deck as I see it. Instead of the RWS Tarot’s four minor arcana suits with 14 cards each and the 22 card major arcana, we have basically 22 suits with six ‘cards’ each. In this second edition of the dice, the nuance is expanded and supplemented with the Lords of the Dice cards. The dice’s “lord” is a sort of symbolic spirit guide or guardian for that dice. The Lord card serves a similar purpose to the artwork on the ace cards of Tarot’s suits. The Ace in Tarot holds the core essence of the suit. By the same token, the lord card gives us insight into the essence of the individual die.

Interestingly, the influence flows both ways. After this, the ace cards feel even more important than they did before. I never thought of them as being potential guides and guardians before. But it works, at least for the number cards. The court cards in Tarot (page, knight, queen and king) have their own thing going on. That too, is a conversation for another day.

But that sets us up for the next little series within the series. We’ve looked at individual dice faces and at the same time chosen our seven learning dice out of the set of 22. Now instead of face by face, we’ll go die by die and look at each dice’s topic and lord card.

There really isn’t a good way to be very random about this, so that makes the active video pretty boring. For this next section of posts, I’ll be working from static photos of each die with its card. For YouTube, I’ll just share the tictok instead of filming the dice roll. It’s just more visually interesting at this point.

Please join me tomorrow when we pick up the “Collector of Selves” in more detail in part 2.

video / photo by the author of Publishing Goblin’s Oracle dice second edition, used with permission.

Middle of the week update-update

Another quick tour of Sage Words Tarot

Hi everyone!

First and foremost, as always, thank you so much for reading Sage Sips blog on Sage Words Tarot.

As I sit here sipping a real world cup of tea and as my coffee cold brews for morning I want to say hello, say thanks, and give you all a quick tour around the website now that I’m taking a break from changing and tinkering. Things will stay like this for the rest of summer at the very least.

Email Tarot readings are OPEN all summer! You can order a private Tarot reading by email anytime, 24/7, no appointment needed. It’s still just me doing this, and I live in the US eastern time zone, so it may take a hot minute to get your reading to you if you order nights, weekends or US holidays. Most of the time I get a reading to you inside of 24 hours, but it can take longer some days. I’ll be in touch whenever you order and give you my best estimate about when I can get the write up to you.

Ask Me Anything is OPEN. Just like the name of the page says (tab at the top on laptop, scroll down on mobile). You ask. I’ll answer in one form or another, maybe a Tarot reading, probably in the blog. You have my promise that no identifying information will ever be used in a blog post. If a post is inspired by and actual question, I change and redact it so that it could be a question from anybody that can help everyone.

The “reading room” tab has two pages, “frens and fam” is a list of links to people I know and trust around the web. Some of it is Tarot related, other not, but they are all good folks, real people in the real world that I trust. The reading list is just exactly that – my favorite reads over the past 30 or so years.

In-person Tarot readings and online readings are available with appointment and prepayment with the secure PayPal invoice that I’ll send to you along with the appointment confirmation.

Sage Sips membership on ko-fi get exclusive content, discount email readings, and free one card readings (one per month please) all for $5 / month. The exclusive content without the discount readings is available for $3/month through this blog and the Substack newsletter.

How to Find a Psychic You Can Trust is an excerpt from the free ebook “TaoCraft Portfolio” available in the ko-fi shop along with my other ebooks.

Sage Sips blog you know. Mondays have a three card energy path Tarot reading for the collective, general audience energies. Wednesday (including tomorrow) has “Learn With Me” as I explore other oracles or who knows what. These are free for the summer of ’23 , but may move to paid subscription this fall. Right now we are exploring the Publishing Goblin’s Oracle Dice, used with the permission of the oracle’s creator Seven Dane Asmund of Publishing Goblin LLC

Friday’s on the blog are my version of “Weekend Update” – at least until I can come up with a better title. There we’ll revisit the week’s energy path and see how it is – or isn’t – unfolding.

Other posts, cards, quotes and assorted other topics will post randomly as time and inspiration allows.

Thank you all.

I’m grateful for your support. The free Tarot content on Sage Words Tarot and Sage Sips blog / newsletter is fueled by your private reading purchases, memberships, and virtual coffees. Your likes, subs, free blog follows, and social media shares are always greatly appreciated!

Energy Week Ahead: Flow, Recharge, Think

Pathway Tarot reading for the week ahead

I’ve got adulting to do.

I’m not saying Tarot isn’t adulting. Learning, questioning, applying, doing all we can to be a better person; that’s actually the adultiest of adulting we can do.

I’m talking oil changes, errands and helping family kind of adulting. Tomorrow is shaping up to be a busy day, so here is your energy look at the week ahead a little early. I plan on taking this batch of advice myself, as I often do.

If these posts ever seem wrong or off or not for you….you can do like I do. Either draw a different batch of cards for yourself to get a more targeted individual read. If you aren’t the DIY type, no worries. Email Tarot is always open and I’m happy to help. Even when it’s busy, I can carve out time to pay attention to an email reading. It’s my strength. Just like our current energy card.

The fading energy card is six of pentacles.

Sometimes the six is about literal generosity, giving and sharing money or other tangible resources. Sometimes it talks about the intangible, speaking of a generous nature or a generosity of spirit. Today, the card brings in elements of both, reminding us give and take, ebb and flow. It feels like a reminder that we get out of life what we put into it. That in turn brings to mind the 90s song “Get What You Give” by the New Radicals.

Physical or philosophical, now is the time to find your flow before attention needs to shift to other things.

The other thing our attention my shift toward very soon, if it hasn’t already, is Strength. Just like the major arcana Death card always talks about change and not literal death, the Strength card always talks about strength of character and fortitude. This feels very simple and straightforward. Tap into your inner strength, endurance, and courage now while you can.

@bobthewritingcat is one of my favorite Instagram accounts. Bob the cat, through the opposable thumbs and internet access of his human Jenny Graves, often tells us to “gird our loins” against the inevitable approach of yet another Monday. That is the feeling here. The Strength card is like that today: gird your loins, spool up your best people skills, batten down any loose hatches, there might be a minor kerfuffle on the horizon.

The Growing energy is the three of swords. From the decks that I’ve seen, it is always a dire looking card. Like every other card, it has different shades and threads of meaning. The word “petty” is really stepping forward today, along with “quintessential ‘karen'” Be on the lookout for inane squabbles and back-stabby sort of pettiness “from all the usual sources” It might work your last nerve, but that’s where the strength and flow from earlier can come in handy. If you can see the petty squabbles as just that, and deal with the week from a place of strength and flow and calm, it will be easier to get through this particular burp in the energy flow. Girded loins will prevent frayed nerves if you’ll permit that really odd way of saying it.

Overall the feel of the week right now isn’t bad or foreboding as much as just plain weird and potentially annoying.

Assuming the adulting goes to plan (HA!) next up is Wednesday’s “Learn With Me” now that we have picked 7 random dice to learn with, we’ll get a little more meta with it and look at the general meaning of each individual die and it’s “Lord Card” which gives each one of the dice it’s own subject or realm, akin to the arcana and suit meanings in Tarot. In this series of posts, I explore the Publishing Goblin’s Oracle Dice and learn to use it in the same methodical way I taught myself to read Tarot back in the day and over the years since. The process gives you a small behind the scenes peek into the intuition development process.

Thank you for reading! This free Tarot content is fueled by your support through private Tarot readings, memberships, paid subscriptions, and ko-fi coffee. Likes, blog follows, and social media shares are always much appreciated.

See you at the next sip!

This free Tarot reading is fueled by your support: Your likes, social media shares, blog follows, paid memberships and virtual ko-fi coffees are all very much appreciated!

Weekend Update: Connect and Do/

Update from the last Energy Path Tarot reading

Email readings are OPEN. You can order 24/7, no appointment needed. June 23 – 27 might experience some delivery delays. I’ll be in touch with estimated delivery times when you order.

Since you can’t copyright titles, I’m using this one. Consider it an homage to one of my favorite Saturday Night live segments. I would never claim to be as good as theirs, but in the spirit of SNL’s update, I do intend to keep these Friday or Saturday posts light and short. I’m enjoying the end of week check in with Monday’s pathway reading. Instead of focusing on any particular card, I thought it might be fun to take a peek back at the whole layout to see how it is unfolding, if it is unfolding or if it has totally veered off course.

No veering this week.

The contemplative energy around the four of swords has dropped off the radar, but the two of swords and four of pentacles are very much intact. The Pentacles are the brighter of the two energies. The two of swords still is very much connected to the “mystical unity” shade of meaning we talked about during Monday’s reading.

Now is the time for a practical, down to earth point of view and frame of mind. Practical, budget friendly actions. Take the stairs to save electricity level of things. It doesn’t feel like a weekend to spurge or be overly restful. It feels like a good time to invest action into things that will conserve money and resources later. Kind of like making lunches for the week that will save you time and money later. Very much a mow the lawn, catch up the laundry kind of vibe right now.

I don’t mean to sound like your mother, but do stuff now so you can enjoy the July 4th holiday or whatever else you have planned in the near future.

That being said – enjoy the weekend in spite of any chores that need attention!

Next up – Energy Path reading for the week of June 26-July 3 (should post Monday afternoon)

See you at the next sip!

Give As You Claim

Six of Pentacles and quote from freethinker Rober Ingersoll

Quote via goodreads.com

Robert Ingersoll was a nineteenth century writer, speaker and lawyer famous at that time as an agnostic and freethought advocate.

The Six of Pentacles is about the flow of abundance and generosity. It often speaks about generosity of spirit as much as it talks about money or physical things.

Learn With Me: Oracle Dice 6&7

When it comes to dice, I guess you have to roll with it.

All puns intended.

Like fiction detectives, when you are learning Tarot or a new oracle of whatever type, it pays to follow your hunches.

Today when I did the bag shake thing just like in the previous videos, two dice came out. My hunch was to keep them both.

The grey person icon looking one felt as if it was meant for today, so I’m naming that one dice six of our learning seven.

As for the other one – YODA!

Actually, I get it that this is the Publishing Goblin, in silhouette from the publisher’s logo, but some things come flying out of your brain like that. I’ve been a Star Wars fan from the beginning – I do mean the beginning way back in 1977 – and Yoda has always been a favorite.

So I couldn’t resist. When these two dice came out of the bag together I kept them both because – Yoda. And at the time I had a nagging feeling that people are getting a little tired of the long, drawn out, week by week methodical thing. I mean, that is why I charge for private readings. I have thirty years of doing this, learning this stuff in granular detail.

That’s also a little bit why I decided to learn the dice this way. It is mirroring how I’ve learned Tarot over the years. Card by card, layer by layer, with ever increasing complexity, followed by ever increasing simplicity.

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Albert Einsteian

I don’t know everything. I’m still learning stuff too – this dice set included. But I think I understand the process of learning a fortune telling device well enough to explain and bring you along for this particular ride.

To review: The basic game plan is to randomly select of the 22 dice week by week, and take a look at whatever face turns up that week. As a dice is chosen, I set it aside the following week so there are no repeats and we could get on with the dice selection. Today was a twofer bonus in that part of the process.

Now that we have our seven learning dice we’ll start combining them…and at the same time look at the other dice faces as they turn up.

Each die has a them or an oracle “lord” well go through that one by one…meet the lords of our seven chosen dice, so to speak. Why seven? Seven has a long tradition of being a lucky, magical, spiritual number. I’ll leave the numerology googling up to you. It’s also a nod to the dice creator and author of the Alleyman Tarot, the Alleyway Tarot, the Normal Tarot, the Alleyway Oracle cards, descktop games and, I think, previous ebooks and an astrology blog – Seven Dane Asmund. I’ll definitely be posting about the oracle cards from the recent kickstarter once they arrive. If you want to see what all this fangirling is about, please visit publishinggoblin.com.

But back to the dice.

The grey die that I’m calling dice six is the Relations Die (the guidebook is brilliant the way it is cross referenced by dice color) This single figure, reminiscent of every social media default avitar, represents self. I ‘hear’ that song “one is the lonliest number” from what? The 60s? That one is even before my time. I get the feeling that is speaking to the loneliness that pulls people to readings in the first place. Whether is a lonely person in search of a life mate or someone who just wants to re-connect with universal energy and their own inner guidance that sense of self, a sense of isolated oneness is often the impetus for getting or doing a psychic reading of whatever variety.

It’s feeling alone that pulls us to readings, not the actuality of it, because we are never actually separate from the cosmos at large. We are connected to the oneness of everything whether we feel it or not.

In a reading, the self die-face points to the inner world. This is about your relationship with yourself, your inner thoughts, feelings, fires, passions, isolation, hopes, dreams, philosophy or spirituality. Think of Wands cards in Tarot and their aggregate suit meaning. That is the flavor I get here.

Mr. Asmund also describes it as a stand-in…very much the querants avatar within the reading. In Tarot this is sometimes called a significator card. It puts the person getting the reading in perspective with the reading as a whole.

That’s really pulling at me at the moment. I have an idea how to incorporate just exactly this into my Tarot readings….see….lifelong learning in action right there. Instead of calling the center card of my TaoCraft Layou “advice and choices” it might be more potent to call it “YOUR CHOICE” because you really are in charge of all of this: your choices cause things to happen.

I think maybe that is THE message for us today, why this dice seemed like the “today” dice of the two, and partly why it felt important to keep both

But I like the Goblin image, I gotta keep that too. I refer you to the fangirl paragraph above.

This is the Goblin Die, and this face is called inspiration. I love it because that is just what inspiration feels like. I can see where the idea of the crown chakra (energy center at the top of your skull) comes from and why it is representative of your connection to spirit and the divine.

When inspiration comes, I’ve always though it feels like the muses dropping it right in through the top of your head like a weight.

Add doink! kaching! bazinga! eureka! or any other appropriate exclamation. It fits. I like the way the guidebook puts it “Inspiration is the moment of consummate explosion.” It is the bolt from the blue and lightning in a bottle.

It could be a good keyword to add to the Tower Tarot card’s repertoire as well.

Lightning is one of those particularly potent universal symbols, it seems.

Thanks so much for reading! Next up: Energy revisit on Friday or Saturday where we’ll look at a card from our week-ahead energy path reading from Monday and see how things are unfolding.

See you at the next sip!