Tag: card meaning

Today’s Tarot: From a Certain Point of View

Deja Vu. Have we just had this card and this energy recently? There is something out there, in the general zeitgeist energies that is a bit of a flashback replay.

I try to be vigilant about blaming my own issues or emotions on energy, spirit, or any of this psychic intuitive thing…true enough, this could be my annual ‘I don’t like August’ funk, but the volume is turned up higher than usual. I’m not sure what or why, but there is some abstract something that feels like March 2020. Yes, I have my own stuff that probably accounts for a big part of it, and no, I’m not going to share any of it here because I’m very protective of everyone’s privacy, but still, there is some something in the ethers that’s ringing the old intuitive-sensitive bell too.

Has anyone else noticed anything like that or is it just my need for another cup of coffee and a nap? Seriously. Comments and email are open.

For whatever reason, this card and its energy today seems all too familiar.

There were a few ideas so equal, it was hard to pick one for the video caption. First there is the boilerplate “it all depends on your perspective” idea. Think about the view from the standing person’s perspective vs the seated person’s perspective on the card. The standing person can see the way ahead is actually clear and can see the landscape fully for what it really is. If the seated person sees anything of the landscape or the water, it is through sharp edges, gaps in a wall of swords.It is very much reminescent of that Obiwan line from Star Wars about what he told Luke being true “from a certain point of view.” or the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Small shifts in perspective can create big changes in feeling and understanding.

Equal with the idea of perspective, the energy idea of obstacles steps forward. Funny thing, obstacles. Seems like you will either crash into them, crash through them, or figure a way around them. If an obstacle is perpetually floating just in front of you, like swords stuck in the canoe you are riding in, is it really an obstacle at all?

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.

Today’s Tarot: Apply Liberally

Before you get your underwear in a bunch, liberally in this case is used in its dictionary definition, not in a politically knee jerk one.

In other words “in large or generous amounts”

Justice is a large, complex, difficult, ever-changing topic, and getting more so every day. No wonder in the prediction-oriented early days, the card was simplified as an omen about a literal legal issue. Tarot doesn’t pretend to have all the answers to anything this big, and it certainly can’t predict with certainty the outcome of any legal issue.

It can, however, remind us of key ingredients for Justice writ large: wisdom & compassion. It can hint at how energies are flowing, or alternatively, how to nudge energies in the direction you want them to flow.

Martin Luther King, jr told us that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.

From what I’ve seen, it only bends so because of the weight of generations of good people, the weight of untold millions of individual acts of kindness and wisdom pulling it in that direction.

Today’s Tarot: Rent Well Spent

“Money can’t buy happiness. But it sure can rent it for a while.”

Kim Grunenfelder, comedien

Invest in your happiness. It helps if you can be happy with things that fit your budget.

“Simple pleasures are the last healthy refuge in a complex world.” – Oscar Wilde

Today’s Tarot: Coffee and Contemplation

I’m so not a morning person.

One of my absolute favorite lines from any series ever was in Stranger Things when Sheriff Hopper said that “mornings are for coffee and contemplation.”

*raises mug of dark roast to THAT idea*

The Four of Cups has that sort of feel to it. Cups cards reflect close circle relationships. You can’t get any closer to you than you. Tarot is first and foremost an art form of personal development and personal internal spiritual practice. All that crime drama horror movie predict the future fix your love life nonsense is exactly that. Unsurprisingly, all of the cards have some aspect, even a minor one, that can help us to engage with life in a more satisfying way. You know, like the “personal enrichment” use in the small print disclaimer.

When I say satisfying I mean satisfying like a hot cuppa coffee on a day that starts just a little too early.

The Four of Cups has been read to mean all sorts of things: dissatisfaction, (look at the guy’s pouting toddler body language on the card) moping, abiding, meditation, abiding with emotional pain, thoughts or activity below the surface, serenity, meditation, contemplation.

The idea that steps most forward to my mind is the meditation and contemplation one.

I ‘hear’ (meaning that the intuition comes as mental words instead of mental images, so no, when I say that I’m not hearing things for goodness’ sake) – but “meet your meditation where it lives.”

And I do mean meditation.

For some a long run is meditative. Knitting is meditative. Braiding bullwhips is meditative. For others it is the classic cushin sitting zazen TM meditation style. As I understand it, there is a lot of overlap between zen, ch’an, taoist and transcendental meditation styles and it seems that everyone who tries it, loves it. Meditation is a pleasure. If not, I suspect you’ve been told something if not wrong, at least unhelpful.

But anyway, the point is you can sit under any tree to meditate. You don’t have to sit under a tree at all. Meditating is easy. Finding where and how it naturally, easily fits into your life is a good first step.

Even if your first meditative step of the day is contemplating a good mug of coffee.

Today’s Tarot: Of two minds, and neither one has an answer

Of the different meanings for the Two of Swords, “of two minds” comes to mind. A lot of times when we think of that, it means that two options are equal, and there is no obvious, logical, good way to decide between the two. There is six of one and half dozen of the other as they saying goes.

So what do you do when you are of two minds and both options are equal: equally bad that is? What do you do when you don’t know what to do at all? What do you do when you are of two minds and neither one of them knows what to do?

It’s ok not to know. It’s ok for some things to be unknowable. And it’s ok to try and find out. If you don’t know, ask. If you don’t know, learn. If you don’t know, welcome to the universe. It is like that sometimes. We haven’t figured it all out, and that’s OK too.

“I’d rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”

Richard Feynman

Today’s Tarot: Lights Out

What do you do when the lights go out? Darkness is a normal, natural thing. It happens every night.

We are the children of technology, descendants of fire and flame. We like light. It tells us what is in the darkness, it tells us we are safe and whether immediate danger exists or not. We don’t like it when the lights go out. When they do we grab flashlights, light candles, build campfires…as we should. If it’s an emergency, we need that to secure our surroundings and our loved ones. For the sake of argument, let’s assume for a moment that it isn’t an emergency, and you are safe, but it’s night, there is no electricity, and no place to build a fire.

Night is fundamental to our world. It’s just how things are. It’s the primordial soup we all evolved in. So why do we fight the darkness so much? What do we do when the lights go out? Why did we turn them on in the first place?

We are daytime creatures. For the vast majority of us, we rely on our vision for almost everything. Dark makes it harder to do just about anything…except sleep.

What do we do when the metaphoric lights go out? It happens. Night falls. Every. Single. Day. And so, times of uncertainty come to everyone.

The King of Wands is often associated with passion, energy, leadership, fire. When it comes to times of darkness this card often has a “light your own torch” “find your own unique light in the dark” sort of vibe. It can be a very Dylan Thomas “rage against the dying of the light” kind of card.

What if the lights going out is an incredible stroke of luck because we are looking at the wrong thing? What if the darkness comes because you need a good night’s sleep?

Do the best you can with what you have. Of course “it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” Sometimes, when the candle just won’t light for you, maybe it is better to nap until dawn.

Sunrise is as inevitable as dusk.

Just a reminder: In-person readings are once again on hold until community covid transmission rates go back down and we see what happens with this delta variant thing.

YouChoose Interactive Tarot: Wandering attention

If there is a better name for it, I’m not sure what it would be.

Psychic attention a thing. It may be related to Jung’s synchronicity, Yes, my dear nay sayers, it probably is full on cognitive bias and it may be Baader–Meinhof phenomenon for all I know, but that is perfectly fine. Tarot IS psychology from days before psychology was was psychology as founded by the likes of Wundt and Freud and that crowd. Some things need scienced, like business policy during a pandemic. Other things need art-ed. There is nothing paranormal about psychic attention either. It enriches our human interaction with our physical environs. It definitely enriches our ability to do a Tarot reading.

We as humans are pretty good at filtering out background details. So if something, be it in our daily life or on a Tarot card, grabs our attention it likely is for some reason. It might be trivial. It might be subconscious. It might carry meaning. It might not. When something grabs your attention why not give it the attention it is asking for? What is the harm in paying attention to coincidences when all you are doing is paying attention to your own mind and your own awareness?

Try it with the video. After you choose your card and see the reveal, pause the video and look at the card again. Of all the rich detail this deck has to offer, what part of your chosen card grabs your attention first? What detail grabs your attention and holds it the longest? What connections do you make with that specific thing? Even if it something general instead of granular detail, like for example, the color GREEN. What does green mean to you in this moment? What pops to mind or what feelings bubble up as you look at this particular shade of green? Does it related to the meaning of the card or is it purely intuitive?

Wandering attention is sometimes hard to catch. When it is captured, it is worth a little consideration, no matter what modern psychology calls it.

Dressed for work

“It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Page cards in Tarot are about learning. Swords can denote several things: the element of air, taking action, our relationship with culture, society and authority, or they can symbolize the mind and intellect. My attention is drawn to a combination of intellect and action. It reminds me of that quote where Emerson describes common sense as “genius dressed in its working clothes.”

Genius at work is our learning mode, which can apply to anyone, anywhere, in any stage of life. Learning is a lifelong thing whether we are running particle accelerators or poking something with a stick to see what happens. Mind and body are one whole, so learning and action are an integrated whole as well. Even if big genius ideas drop into our head seemingly out of nowhere, something triggered it or some unique set of material experiences hit critical mass and turned on the proverbial light bulb over our head. However they happen, genius insight doesn’t help us much unless we do something with them. Physical realm interacts with the intellectual realm which prompts action in the physical world and so on in an unending dance of learning and experience gathering. It is about figuring out a method and trying something, admitting failures and trying again. That applies to all sorts of learning. Science is a way of learning about the outer, tangible world. Tarot is one method of learning about the inner, intangible one. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, far from it. If anything they are bound together as intimately as space and time, locked in the complex dance of our humanity.

Today’s card is asking us to use what we know, and fearlessly learn what we don’t.

In the spirit of learning and doing, I have a quick announcement.

As you know, I don’t keep an office or any sort of brick and mortar location, primarily to cut my overhead and keep my prices lower than they otherwise would be.

Since that means bringing people out into the public sphere for an in-person session I’ve decided to use CDC reported community transmission rates for Allegheny county as the guide for in-person sessions. The rate is on the rise, and we have been upgraded from low to moderate. Due to that, starting Sunday July 25 in-person services are on temporary hold again until community transmission rates drop back to low.

Distance Tarot is my specialty

I say that because I’m just as good at writing and doing readings by email as I am doing them in person. I know a lot of psychics and Tarot readers who do both in-person and distance readings equally well, but several of them have commented to me that they don’t enjoy working by email as much as they do in person or by phone. I do both equally well and I enjoy both too.

So PLEASE – while we all endure these last hills, bumps and turns of this roller coaster ride of a pandemic, don’t hesitate to make use of the email version if you are interested in getting a reading. I promise you will get the same information as you would if we were meeting face to masked up face.

Plus don’t forget the cutesy pants promotional $1 TAROT SALE where 7 card email readings are $1 for each year of Tarot reading experience that I bring to your reading (AKA – $10 off the usual price). Offer ends 20 September 2021

Order email readings 24/7 on the home page or HERE

Today’s Tarot: It’s a Brisket

Time is a thing, and it takes a lot of it to make a good brisket.

If you compare references and card decks, the Hanged Man is one of those cards that has widely disparate interpretations. Based on the energy around it today, I would guess it is because the card is one of those zeitgeist sensitive time sponges. Here’s what I mean by that:

Some cards are anchors. They are – almost – timeless, with deep roots in the fabric of everything. Their meanings and interpretations seem relatively steady over time and throughout multiple decks and references. Or so it seems in the world of Marseille / Waite-Smith based Tarot. I can’t speak for Lenormand style Tarot, but I suspect it is similar. Three of swords and the Moon are examples.

Other cards, like today’s, are more fluid. They adapt and lend themselves to intuitive needs of the moment like water taking the shape of its container. I’ve seen the card interpreted as meaning stagnation, self-sacrifice, transition, new perspectives, new perceptions, surrender, release, and initiation. Today’s energy would add deliberate waiting and a little well-placed patience. It has a slightly different tenor from the ‘wait and watch for the right time and opportunity’ message that might come from the two of wands or the more meditative quality of the four of cups or the resignation of the eight of cups.

The Hanged Man, for today anyway, is about cooling your jets while in full active engaged realization that it takes as long as it takes. Let the planted seeds grow. You can’t hurry love.

It’s like making a really good brisket.

I’m not the carnivore I used to be, but I’m not vegan by any means. True to my love of Taoist philosophy, I prefer the middle way. Thanks to that and my husband’s family reunion, I have had genuine Texas brisket. It had been smoked for something crazy like 24 hours. It was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever stuffed in my food hole. It wouldn’t have been that way without that one critical ingredient: time.

That old margarine commercial might have said that it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature, but the truth is that you CAN’T. Low and slow meat smoking is just that…slow. You can’t make it go faster and get the same result. You can’t shove a frozen turkey into a 1000 degree oven and get anything other than a burned blob with botulism sauce.

All food cravings aside, the message isn’t a goodie two shoes entreaty to be blissfully patient. Who in human history has ever been calmed by being told to calm down? This is more about a deliberate, knowing, intentional well-placed taking of time.

It takes as long as it takes. Let it. Your brisket will be better in the end.