Tag: albert einstein

Welcome to the Equinox: Zombie Cat Shambles 2021!

READ THE POST THAT STARTED IT ALL: MEET ZOMBIE CAT

Intention is everything in subtle energy work. Anything that isn’t covered by intention is usually covered by symbolism.

The YouChoose post this morning talked a little bit about liminal energies and transitional spaces. Some transitions are sharp and out of the blue, like walking through a narrow doorway. Others are slow and build gradually, like walking down a long hallway. At first I’d thought about making this post as a ginormous list of everything I’ve been working on, posting them today to honor the equinox and the beginning of my favorite season and that would be that.

That’s not today’s energy

I feel nudged to go with a slow roll-out instead of a terse list. That will let me give full attention to the intention and symbolism behind these things such as they are. Today….

ZOMBIE CAT IS BACK!

Zombie Cat is an alter-ego sort of character that came from the old blog, when I working under the name Modern Oracle Tarot, inspired by the famous Schrodinger’s cat experiment and an episode of Menage A Tarot podcast. Zombie Cat lives all year in the special & lower cost readings section of the no appointment email readings page. During Halloween, ZC comes out to play on the home page.

I enjoy Zombie Cat. I enjoy doing short, fun, anything goes yes-or-no readings from that slightly snarky frame of mind. Frame of mind and fun both count in this kind of work. That is why when I do a cutesy pants promotional price reductions anymore unless it has some sort of symbolic meaning for me. In this case, I’m reducing the price of Zombie Cat readings to give energy to all the fun that Zombie Cat gives and all that Halloween and Autumn mean for me.

But I’m hoping it will entice a bunch of you to get these holiday readings, too.

Zombie Cat yes/no readings are $5 off until Halloween. Get yours HERE

Zombie Cat

Today’s Tarot: Learn by Doing

“No plan survives first contact with implementation” – unknown

“Follow the process, not the plan” – Adam Savage

“Actually sir, after all these years, I just, sort of, go with it.” – Harry Potter (Half-Blood Prince, JK Rowling and yeah, her anti-trans stance has soured the books for me)

You can read books until the cows come home, but there is no substitute for actual experience, and that includes the experience of explaining something. While it may not be the high stakes intensity of “see one, do one, teach one” in medical training, the same concept applies to most things, including Tarot, intuition development.

Don’t get me wrong. Books are treasures. Reading is invaluable. Especially about things we can’t easily access in the real world. Books open vistas of space and time we otherwise could never experience. Reading, learning, growing are life long things, or at least they should be.

I love writing stuff. But a writer can’t fit what they write to everyone. Even when I write a custom Tarot reading with your own unique card layout, you are still involved. Writers encode information…we as readers are responsible for decoding and implementing the information. Which isn’t always as easy as it sounds. That’s where Adam Savage’s advice and Harry Potters adaptability comes into play. Things never go perfectly to plan, so we have to rely on the processes we know and just go with it. Good or bad, a result will happen. Good or bad, there is something to be learned from what we do as much as what we read.

Then comes Einstein

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” – Albert Einstein

Explain something. That will teach it to you as much as anything. Try to explain it – whatever your “it” is – simply. Writing leads to understanding as much as it demonstrates understanding. Maybe more. Such is the value of blogs and journals. You don’t have to be Hemingway to write. You don’t have to share it or effectively educate other people. Write, teach something. Even if it is just in your imagination, if you learn from what you teach, either through the process or the end product, then it is mission accomplished.

There is no teacher quite like experience. Any topic can benefit from a little learn by doing…especially if that doing includes a little simplification, synthesis, teaching and explaining to help you really wrap your head around the topic at hand.

Duly Noted

“Growing Ogres” was a challenging post to write. You can tell because it’s long. Einstein was right – “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

There are three basic layers to talking about layers in Tarot: easy, hard and hot mess.

Reading for yourself is easy. I can teach you to interact with the cards by yourself for yourself in no time. In a short ebook in fact. You can order it HERE. And yes, I’m still working on a second edition. We’re gonna need it when this whole pandemic thing is over. Adjusting is hard. Adjusting BACK is hard too.

Reading for other people is hard. Interacting with the cards, plus the intuitive messages from energy/spirit plus communicating that message effectively to the client, plus business ethics plus ethics ethics…professional Tarot reading has several layers of complexity and levels of difficulty above grabbing your favorite deck for a little guidance every now and then.

Describing my side of the table and the inner workings of intuitive readings is wildly complicated because it requires taking a reader right up to the edge of silent mysteries and individual experiences. Trying to put the wordless into words can turn into a hot mess in a heartbeat. Or, in the words of Lau Tzu, “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.”

All I really needed to say was the combination of video and text wasn’t working out the way I’d hoped, so I’m changing it back.

I’ll circle back to personal growth, evolution, authenticity, inner growing new layers, shedding old ones and all of that stuff another time. Meanwhile, if you have any feedback about the tweek in the layout names or the audio/visual combo experiment, I’d love to hear it.

If you are interested in the video & text combination, check out the “Today’s Tarot” posts and the weekly “YouChoose Interactive Tarot” posts.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”

Jeff Rich