Tag: chop wood carry water

Short Sip Tarot: Wood & Water

Thank you for reading, watching and listening to Short Sip Tarot on the TaoCraft Tarot Blog, the TaoCraft Tarot youtube channel and shorts, and the Clairvoyant Confessional podcast. The Short Sip posts are a Tarot reading and thought for the day in the time it takes to sip from your morning coffee.

Today’s card is the Knight of Pentacles.

Knight cards are associated with action, and pentacles are associated with the element of earth.

Earth – as in grounded, rooted, solid energy.

Some days are like that. When you work with Tarot most days, you can see the ebb and flow of energy. Even if you do just quick daily one card meditations over time you see the larger patterns of energy. Patterns is a little bit of a misleading word in this context. It isn’t as if there is anything predictable or regular about it. It isn’t to say there is a set pattern like day and night or the progression of the seasons. It’s more like observation over years teaches you the kinds of clouds that roll in the with the weather for the day.

The Zen proverb “Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water” captures this particular energy very well. The idea idea isn’t necessarily attached to any one particular Tarot card, but it does come through Pentacle cards more often than the others. Both the suit of cards and the proverb are grounded and practical. Both remind us how important it is to balance mind, spirit AND body. Physical health supports mental and emotional health and mental while mind and spirit support the body as well. It is no better to be overly occupied with spirituality than it is to be wrapped up the the physical realm and ignore the spiritual altogether.

With the focus on balance, you would expect this energy and message to be attached to the TWO of pentacles. Often, it is. In this case there is a little extra message behind the mind – body – spirit balance idea.

Sometimes you have to DO something to achieve that balance.

Exercise. Eat well. Take a nap if you need it. Change the shelf paper. Do some mundane task that you’ve been putting off.

The spiritual is still there. There is magic in the mundane, but there is also a little mundane in the magic. To paraphrase the poet Duane Toops … a miracle is still a miracle even if it doesn’t feel like one.

A day is still a miracle even when it feels and needs to be ordinary.

Today’s Tarot: The woo isn’t everything

Gremlins

Some people blame these things on Mercury retrograde. My genX brain calls technical glitches that I can’t figure out gremlins. I still kinda want to be a computer geek when I grow up.

Just spent two attempts and more time than I wanted to spend trying to get today’s youtube tarot short to upload. I think the problem is in the processing on YouTubes end, actually. Either way, enough bashing against a road block.

In fact, that is the message this last attempt gave: put it down and come back later.

It’s a good general message. The woo isn’t everything. No every minute of every day has to be a spiritual success. Not every moment has to be some grand enlightenment. When the energy is wrong for spiritual things, and you run into one wall after another, it is perfectly OK to set aside the spritual and spend some quality time in the practical physical realm.

It’s more of the meatspace energy we’ve talked about lately.

If you want some woo…today is a good day for grounding, balancing, centering. Get your head out of the clouds and your feet planted on the ground.

It’s a good day for the Zen proverb: Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

Or the Alan Watts quote “Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”

So chop your water, carry your potatoes and peel your wood, set aside the gremlins and have a good day in spite of it all.

12 Second Tarot: Three of Pentacles (19 Nov 10)

Not every day is mystical, spiritual or blissful. Some days being immersed in the utterly mundane is a sacred act unto itself. “Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water” – proverb.