Taroku: We Choose

Tarot inspired haiku for National Poetry Writing Month continues through April 30, 2025

The shackles we choose

Even those called religion

Devils in disguise

Sage Snow


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Week Ahead: Choose Your Card

Sage Sips is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip your coffee

Affordable private Tarot by email is available no appointment needed HERE.

Pause the video and think of your question or the week ahead. Choose your card, left or right. Restart the video to see the reveal and get your free tarot reading below.


7 of Cups: Choices are important and may feel stressful and overwhelming. Start with logic, but if all practical things seem equal, let your intuition and instincts lead the way. The up side of this is that multiple choices exist – at least you aren’t painted into a corner with few choices at all. When there are many options, especially when they all seem equal, it can all be very overwhelming. Sometimes being the one to have to make a hard choice alone is an overwhelming burdon, even when the choice seems clear. Choices and options can be intimidating in any combination of circumstances. If you are facing a big choice or have too many options, your head and heart have to work together. If logic fails, let your heart lead the way. In the end, clarity is crucial however your sort it out. Focus on the end. Choose your destination and the way to get there will become more clear.

King of Wands: Wands have to do with the fire element. King cards speak to leadership. Good leaders start with compassion and wisdom, but kings can’t rule without a kingdom. King cards often represent protecting and providing for the place where they rule. Wands can also symbolize your relationship with yourself. Remember your agency over your own life. Own it, mistakes and all. This is a good week to tap into as much main character energy as you can muster. Write your own story, lead your own inner kingdom. Combine wisdom and compassion with confidence and skill. Set boundaries and enforce them.

Thanks so much for reading! See you at the next sip!

A Sip of Tarot: nourish

Today’s card is the Lovers from the major arcana

Just like the Death card, The Lovers has a TV & movie reputation apart from the card’s actual, traditional meaning. Everyone loves the Lovers. But it isn’t always about finding the love of your life or a grand romance.

The Lovers card is about any deep down desire, not necessarily the torrid romance novel kind. Often in a reading this card will advise figuring out what you really want in order to take steps toward it. Choice is less popular as a card meaning, but it has been associated with the Lovers across many decks and references.

Not only do you choose who and what you love, you choose TO love at all.

There is a quote attributed to Sitting Bull*: “Inside of me there are two dogs. One is mean and evil and the other is good and they fight each other all the time. When asked which one wins I answer, the one I feed the most.”

Put that with today’s card and you get the message to, metaphorically speaking, choose the dog you feed.

If you have followed the blog over the past year or so, we’ve talked about general zeitgeist cultural energies, and how all those stresses had affected energy sensitive people. The fear surrounding the pandemic and political upheaval here in the U.S. had been ringing a lot of peoples bells so to speak.

That general energy resonance is still fairly strong, but it has changed. It’s been shifting for a while now. The resonant bell-ringing among clients seems a little less widespread. The focus has shifted from the collective to the individual, from external to the internal, from practical physical realm survival to internal emotional and spiritual quality of life. It is a time for choosing the dog we feed.

And I have to emphasize the part where Sitting Bull describes it as an internal struggle. If it is projected as anything but a personal internal choice, the adage can go entirely off the rails.

My mind is also drawn to the Tina Turner song “We Don’t Need Another Hero” from the 1980s movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome . We’ve survived the energy and emotional thunderdome of 2020-21.

We have a once in a lifetime chance to choose how we step out of the dome and move beyond it. Every moment of every day we have a chance to choose which parts of ourselves we nourish. Today’s card suggests that we choose love.

Because Your Choice Matters

If there is an overarching idea to all three cards together, it would be that your choice matters, which is the core essence of all of the YouChoose video posts. These readings are designed to cut through the noise of social media and let you personally touch your reading. As Mat Auryn said in Psychic Witch “What you touch, touches you” or something very akin to that.

If you like this personalized touch to the readings please let me know! If you tell me the kind of Tarot content you would like to see, I’ll do my best to create it. Talk to me! Ask me anything* and I’ll do a Tarot reading for it in the upcoming season of Clairvoyant Confessional podcast (new episode expected Sunday, September 26) Drop a comment below or email your questions to ClairvoyantConfessional@gmail.com.

Six of Swords: Go with the flow, but choose which current you float in. The dog you feed is the one that grows strong.

Page of Cups: find wisdom and inspiration in the absurd. Laugh your way into a better frame of mind.

King of Pentacles: Control what you can – but remember that control seldom occurs in the physical realm. Most of the time your only dominion is over yourself. How you react to things is where you greatest power and most impactful choice can be found.

*all the website disclaimers apply. you can read my policies and privacy statement HERE


Zombie Cat is back for Spooky Season. Get a yes/no Tarot reading by email for $5 off until 31 October 2021. Order HERE or HERE

YouChoose Interactive Tarot: Change Will Change

Pause the video if you need a moment to choose your card for today, then restart the video to see the reveal. You know what I wrote on the blog about Pentacle cards repeating? Scratch that…nothing has changed about the pandemic. It’s an eneregy shift today, NOT a physical realm one. More on that in another post. Meanwhile, we have to stay in Samuel L. Jackson mode…. STILL wash your hands, don’t touch your face, and stay the f*ck at home. New York City is still in the thick of it, so the worst is yet to come for the rest of us. Be safe, and take good care of yourselves as best as you can.

Left: 3 of Cups. Even the introverts are starting to catch a little cabin fever…until we listen to the news or scroll social media. Forget mass media. Take a loooong break from your socials. The human spirit is thirsting for real, genuine one to one conversation. We can’t feed our need for physical interaction so it is all the more important to feed our need for genuine conversation and a meeting of the minds. Use technology for genuine conversation and connection, not mass broadcast. Leave that for the professional journalists. Write a letter. Make a phone call. Text. Zoom if that’s your thing. It is a two for one offer. The conversation just might lift the whole group’s spirits.

Middle: The Moon. The physical moon moves through cycles in its appearance to us on earth, so this card is often associated with the natural cycles of things. That daisy-chains to effect of the moon on the tides, connecting the card to water and intuition. The energies today are right to experiment with your own intuition. Listen with your heart, extend your feelings. What shifts in mood and energy do you sense? What is in your energy environment right now that needs your attention? Is it within you, hinting at a need for self-care or is it outside of you calling you to help others?

Right: The Wheel. Freud was right. Sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar. Sometimes the message from a card is just as obvious, simple and straight forward as it seems. This will all change. Life changed from normal to pandemic mode and will change again in time. It will never go back to what once was because this will always have happened…this time and this experience will always exist. Time will move on, things will change. It will become our choice whether we let this time scar us, strengthen us, empower us or haunt us. Change is inevitable, but the choice is yours about how…and if…you embrace it.

12 Second Tarot: The Wheel

 

Every change requires a choice, and every choice results in change.

Change and choice are two sides of the same coin in both subtle and obvious ways. If we choose something radically different from what we have been doing, the change is obvious. Once again I’m reminded of what Chris Chibnall wrote for Doctor Who

“The future pivots around you, here, now. So do good.”

But what about the future when no choice is made, nothing is done. What is the change there? No choice, no change, right? Not entirely.

A physician I used to work with often said that the decision not to decide is still a decision. In that case, the change comes in mindset rather than external circumstances. If you decide to decide later it relieves stress in the present moment, which in turn can help us see clearer, get more information, and you guessed it…make a better decision later on. Not deciding makes for less stress and better judgement….both of which are a change from the initial mental state. 

Deliberately deciding to stay the course, and persist is a choice. Only time will tell if it was a wise one or not. Deliberately deciding to NOT change externally still has internal impacts. One possibility is that choosing to stay on a path changes your level of confidence and courage and persistence for the better.

Even in the most passive, oblivious scenario possible, where no choice is made, time changes. Don’t choose, and by default things will still change around you, like or not. 
Load the change side of the wheel with enough time and external change, it will eventually force a choice. At some point or another, we all wind up choosing if we are happy with our circumstances or not. Once that question is answered, we must choose if we are going to do anything about it or not. If we choose stagnation, we change relative to the world around us that is not stagnant.

Like two sides of a moving wheel, choice and change are very much connected. If you want a change, it requires a choice. Make a choice, even if that choice is to do nothing, some sort of change will still come in time.

You Choose Tarot for 22 Jan 20

Right: 6 of wands. Sometimes you have to fight the war to find the peace on the other side. Protect your boundaries.

Left: 5 of Pentacles. No need to deny how difficult it is. If times are tough, face up to the fact that they are. That doesn’t mean you have given up hope. Admitting you are cold doesn’t stop the first spring flower from blooming through the snow.

Middle: 7 of Cups. A good time to choose. This present moment is the axel around which the wheel of the future spins. This is where you make the choices that steer your path where you want it to go.

Today’s Tarot: Eight of Wands (25 July 2019)

Most of the time we don’t have total control, but we always have choice. Once a series of events is lauched, we might not be able to change things any more than an arrow can turn mid flight of its own accord. Choice is always with us, however. We can choose how we react to any given moment and the conditions that exist at that moment. An arrow in flight can’t control the wind but it adapts to the wind, either overcoming the breeze to land where it was aimed, or by turning to land in a different place than intended. Like the arrow, we deal with the present moment be it during the aim, during the flight or after the landing.

Alice Got It Right, Twilight Tells the Future

First Published 17 January 2010

I’m scheduled to work at a couple of Twilight themed events (2019 me: they were a lot of fun! Grateful!) so I’m reading the books and just watched the movie to see what all the buzz is about.

As an aspiring writer of sorts, I’m impressed with Stephanie Myers skill. I full on expected to hate the books. I thought it was going to be some superficial. bubble-gum popping teen angst romance. In some respects, it is. But I was sincerely impressed with her skill at using the first person. It creates enormous empathy with Bella, you experience everything intensely through her eyes. And the sudden shift to Jacob’s point of view has all the more impact because of it. Well done!!

Of course, being in the Tarot business, Alice is one of my favorite characters. Alice is a vampire with special vampire super psychic future seeing powers. She has it exactly right. Her visions change in response to choice and decision. What she sees now, might become totally wrong if someone changes their mind or actions later. Her visions shift and change as people’s actions and choices shift and change. She sees along the path of greatest probability, not some sort of fated certainty.

That is exactly how it works in my experience. Asking Alice to see something isn’t a lock. Asking a psychic or tarot reader is even less of a certainty. The web of choice, decision, intention and change is even more complex, wavering and unstable than in the fictional world of Twilight.

So hats off to Stephanie Myers for putting that idea into the mainstream. It’s going to make my life easier explaining how Tarot really works to a client who has seen the movie. It is true that fiction can sometimes tell more truth than reality. I can talk until blue in the face about how choice impacts future, how you can create your own future through the choices you make, but people will absorb the idea in an instant from the movie. The visual experience of the movie makes the concept real, and understandable.

Plus,  it is just a well crafted, entertaining story start to finish. And it predicts the future – the right way.