Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot

With an emphasis on individualism and alone time, this week’s energy is an introvert’s paradise. Extroverts might have a tougher time ahead and need to go out of their way to stay and feel connected.

Hello and welcome to the Sage Words Tarot blog and Sage’s Short Sip Podcast where you get Tarot contemplations for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee.

I’m Sage and I’m glad you are here. Thank you all for reading and listening. Personally, I’m thrilled for this kind of energy to come along. After changing the blog and podcast name and all of the re-arranging and updating that’s been going on since the new year began, I’m glad for a little low key time to recharge the batteries a little bit. I hope the respite is as welcome for you.

The cards are less chatty this week and the intuition is back to the typical visuals. First thing that comes to mind is a map of the US with no state lines on it, just an outline with red and blue dots on it, like a new graphic of some sort. I’m not sure exactly what else the visual might be trying to say, but my hunch is that it is pointing to individuality, like the individual dots. It’s a strange way to think about it, but that meme that has been so popular with Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal seems to have planted a seed with the music. The lyrics “Make your own kind of music, sing your own special song” may have planted themselves deeper in our social media loving psyche than we realized.

Unless you accept and include the diversity of everyone else on the planet, in your individuality you will walk alone.

For some alone time is a treasure, that allows us to rest from the drains and demands of life.

For others it is suffocating, isolation from the collective energy on which they thrive.

The energy this week is asking two things of us.

First is to know our own source of strength. If you are the type to need a little down time away from other people in order to rechard, that quiet is essential this week. If you thrive on unplugging for a while, then by all means do that. This isn’t the week to push outside your comfort zone. This is the week to build and protect and strengthen your comfort zone. By the same token, if you thrive on connection, this is the week to ensure that connection for yourself, yes, but also as a kindness to others who might be feeling over-isolated.

Second is to protect your energy. If your energy comes from connection, focus on those in particular. Protect your connection to groups and other individuals. The quality of connection is the important thing. Heath is the emphasis in both directions of the connection. Make sure your relationships and connections are healthy and not dependent or narcissistic or draining.

For those who thrive on disconnecting, do that. Protect your energy in total. Shields up, let it go. My go to reading recommendation when this energy comes along is Psychic Protection by Ted Andrews. That, and his earlier book The Healer’s Manual are two of the most useful books I’ve ever read. Taking care to guard and protect your energy feels especially important for the introverts among us.

Whatever your energy style – no matter whether you thrive on making connections or disconnecting, no matter whether you thrive on a rave or listing to rave music alone, whatever your recharging style may be – honor that style. Protect that energy because that will help you have the clarity to see your way through the path ahead. There is so much potential, so many choices and options for you if you let yourself be true to yourself.

Imagine this. Imagine a hall of mirrors where the reflections in the reflections seem to go on forever. Now imagine a crowd of people all dressed alike in that hall of mirrors. How do you see your way forward if you force yourself to be like everyone else? With that image we go from introvert paradise to introvert hell. That’s why the be true to yourself part is important. It is one good way to find your way forward in a dizzying array of energies and possibilities.

Here I get a sense of this crowded mirror room requiring us to adopt an attitude of radical and fierce compassion for others, for diversity and inclusion. There is room and reflections and possible paths for us all.

That’s the purely intuitive read of these cards that are from The Alleyman’s Tarot by Seven Dane Asmund and Publishing Goblin LLC who graciously gave me permission to use the deck in my blog and social media.

The cards today are not traditional Tarot cards, which gives a sort of ‘time out of time’ or ‘time apart from the rest’ feeling.

The first card, the Hole is by Seven Dane Asmund, I’m guessing created for the Alleyman’s deck.

It speaks to the unspoken, the deduced and implicit. It highlights the missing. It is, as I see it, the arrow pointing to the things that are conspicuous in the absence.

There is a scene in one of the Star Wars movies where Qui Gon is was told of a planet, but can’t find it. So Yoda (and his class of younglings) pull up the star system where the mystery planet was supposed to be, but nothing was where the planet was supposed to be. What WAS there were aberrations and irregularities. The planets that were on the moving 3D map were moving as if a planet was there. They found the missing, or actually erased, planet by the evidence left behind where it was not. Qui gon proved the theory true by going there, to the place where the planet was calculated to be based on the movement of other things around the empty space.

As convoluted as that sounds, that is exactly the plane Neptune was discovered in our own star (solar) system.

Uranus was wobbling weird so scientists used Newton’s laws of gravity to calculate where another planet should be based on how Uranus was moving around space we thought was empty. We couldn’t go there yet, so they looked at the spot through a telescope instead and BOOM – hello Neptune. (source nasa.gov)

And such is the power of the empty, the hole, the alone. Introverts thrive on it. Extroverts need a little sip of it every now and then.

The Hole and The Comforter are less fading and current energies so much as they are opposite sides of the same, equally strong current energy. I don’t get the sense either is going to fade either time soon. Again I get the feeling the major message is to know which side of things is best for you and do that. Do that big time.

The comforter is all about the power of connection, of comforting ourselves through connection and the comfort of helping others through our connection with them. This card is urging us to celebrate and cherish, protect and strengthen all of the healthy connections in life or forge new ones if needed. This card was originally created by Natasa Ilincic for the Compendium of Witches Tarot.

The creator of the Thing among Reflections card is supposedly unknown, although I suspect it is the deck creator’s work. He reads the card as a vaguely disconcerted feeling that something is wrong or off. This card hasn’t turned up very often for me so this being a new (to me) card gives it that exact feeling just from its unfamiliarity. It feels more than the embarrassment of riches feeling that the many choices we see in the seven of cups card. This is about so many potential outcomes that it is disorienting and overwhelming. If the seven of cups is a big restaurant menu level of many choices, this card is multiverse, hot dogs for fingers, Everything Everywhere All At Once level of many choices.

Knowing yourself, being yourself, and knowing the best way to protect and recharge your energy will help us through a hall of mirrors if and when we walk through one.

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Thank you so much for reading and listening! See you at the next sip!