Tag: creativity

Mid-card Mid-week: Flame On

Second look at this week’s “current energy” card

1909 RWS Tarot, public domain

It’s Wednesday! Let’s revisit the middle card (current energy) from our look-ahead reading from Monday and see how the energy is unfolding for this week.

It’s an interesting phenomenon in professional Tarot reading.

Sometimes the cards will piggyback a message or energy for me along with the collective message for the blog or the specific message for a private client. Sometimes it feels sort of disconnected, like being the pizza delivery person with no connection to the party going on inside the house.

Today it’s a little bit of both.

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Readings for readers

Tarot readings for readers

I read AND write.

I’ve been told that my email readings but especially the handwritten, hand illustrated private Tarot readings appeal to book lovers.*

I’m a reader’s reader. My written content is my best work.

I know it. You know it.

Writing is my niche and my talent and my strength.

I’m not going to water that down just for the sake of having a podcast.

Some people learn better from listening. Some people just plain prefer audio.

I know it. You know it.

I just received word that Spotify for podcasters and WordPress are ending the text to speech integration.

Unless and until I find another text to speech option, it is with some regret that I am ending the Sage Sips podcast. I have too much respect for audio learners and audiophiles to give you a second rate Tarot product. I’m not going to half-ass a spoken word recording when I KNOW I can give you significantly better quality content with text-to-speech technology.

If I can find a workable text to speech option, I’ll resume the audio blog. Until then you can find my free week-ahead pathway readings on Mondays on the Sage Words Tarot dot com website, on the Sage Words Tarot blog on ko-fi dot com and on the Sage Sips newsletter on Substack.

All three of those platforms will continue to have a mix of free and premium subscriptioncontent, because none of this is advertising monetized. The blogs and Substack are all reader supported. With me, your Tarot message comes first, not an advertiser’s message. Premium content and private readings are what makes the free blog Tarot readings possible. Private readings are still always available in both email and live formats through the website. No appointments are needed for the email version, by the way.

I am always so grateful for your support. Your purchases help fund the practical part of creating all of this, but your time reading (or until now, listening) to the blog, your likes, your shares, your follows and free subscriptions are why ten or more years worth of Tarot inspiration exists in the world. All of you are why I do this in the first place. Together, we have created a giant pile of ideas, inspiration, art, entertainment and wisdom. Now let’s go create some more.

Podcast people, thank you for this opportunity. Thank you for listening in as the podcast changed from Clairvoyant Confessional to TaoCraft Tarot and most recently to Sage Sips. I hope audio will be back, but in the meantime please join us on the blogs for more Tarot readings, behind the scenes and ask me anything.

Blog people – I’ll see you at the next sip.

*I’ve read for other intuitives and professional Tarot readers before. It is always the biggest compliment to be trusted by a colleague like that. “Readings for readers” works for that kind of reader too.

Rain

If you want to catch lighting in a bottle you have to stand in the rain.

Hello and welcome to TaoCraft Short Sip: a Tarot contemplation for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee.

Today’s card is Lightning in a Bottle, one of the expansion pack cards created for the Alleyman’s Tarot deck by Seven Dane Asmund. It’s one of two lightning in a bottle cards. It is interesting to compare the two. You can see the other in the April 2022 blog post “The Makings of Magic” The other card is more ethereal while this one has almost a steampunk, industrial feel. The other card emphasizes the luck aspect of success, this one emphasizes the action part of it.

This card is akin to the famous Thomas Edison quote that “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” Anything is possible but not everything is remotely probable. Tarot is a little like that. It doesn’t predict – it inspires us with the possibility and guides us with practical probabilities, but never exact certainties. You can’t predict exactly where lightning will strike. But you can read the weather report to see where the rain will be.

According to the national weather service, lightning can strike 10 miles or a little more away from a storm. So sure, it’s theoretically possible to be hit by a bolt of lightning while you are sitting in your back yard on a sunny afternoon, but it is far more likely to happen if you climb a tall tree in the middle of a thunderstorm.

If we think of this metaphoric lightning as creative inspiration, you can just sit around waiting for an idea to hit. Especially if just sitting around is part of your personal creative process. But that’s the trick isn’t it? That’s the climbing a tree in the rain part. That’s the perspiration part. It isn’t the sitting around in and of itself that sparks the genius. It comes from knowing what inspires you. It comes from thinking about and understanding your creative process, whatever your creative process might be. When you know yourself and know your process then you can put yourself in circumstances where the lighting will find you instead of you constantly chasing it.

So now you have your spark in a jug. What are you going to do about it? Anything? Or is just knowing you captured it enough?

It might be. Happy is the person who defines success in their own terms and achieves that instead of striving for other people’s expectations.

But let’s suppose that your success includes other people. What if you want to show or share the lightning? That’s when the work starts. That’s when climbing out of our imaginary tree and doing something with the bottle comes into play. This is the part of the process where the makers are going to make and Thomas Edison starts to sweat.

It takes work to do anything else but sit in a tree with your lighting bottle. If abiding with your lighting bottle what you want and need, by all means do that. There is a great deal of light and satisfaction in doing that and it is 1,000 percent enough. In this scenario, I think of the lightning bolt as being a metaphor for Zen style enlightenment. It is for you alone. It is for you to take home, make a part of your life, and let it light your way from now on.

If the lightning represents creative inspiration, then there might be more that needs done, a different tree to climb so to speak. Catching the idea is the first stroke of luck, making it exist in physical reality is another tree climb. If the thing you create is popular with other people, then that becomes another lucky lightning strike altogether.

Both bolts require us to spend time out in the rain.

Thank you so much for reading and listening. Your likes, subs, follows, shares, questions and comments are always appreciated!

Neither the blog nor the podcast are monetized so your Tarot message comes first, not the advertisers. Please visit the TaoCraft Tarot page on ko-fi (link in the episode description.) The memberships, commissions, shop and virtual coffees all support the creation of this unique, (almost) daily Tarot content.

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Thanks again. See you at the next sip!

Having an Idea

TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot inspiration in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. Today: The Ace of Wands and creative inspiration.

Hello and welcome to TaoCraft Short Sip: Tarot inspiration in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. I’m glad you are here.

Today’s card is the Ace of Wands.

Wands are associated with the element of fire, inner fire, inner passions and in the case of the ace, creativity, new projects and inspiration.

Young Einstein is one of my favorite movies. It’s a comedy. It’s fun. It’s timeless. It’s about the time space contiuum. The Ace of Wands tends to remind me of one scene where one character accidentally makes a bomb and Marie is telling Albert to do something. He calmly eats an apple and asks for a moment because he’s having an idea. If you watch this clip from YouTube, keep in mind the movie was made in the late 80s before the end of the cold war and before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The part about nuclear bombs is chilling, given current world events. It’s funny the things you can forget in thirty years.

But back to the Ace of Wands. Albert may seem to be just standing there eating an apple, but he’s thinking. He IS doing something.

The same thing applies to creativity and inspiration. Taking a break from one project to pursue something else for a little while is a perfectly legitimate part of the overall creative process. James Bach makes a similar point in his book Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar. I really enjoyed the book and would highly recommend it to anyone who is in or is thinking about a creative career.

I’ve heard that creativity isn’t really making anything new, but rather putting existing things together in a new way or finding deeper connections between things that on the surface seem unconnected. When you are creating a physical object, you just can’t magic it up out of nothing. You have to have the right supplies. Ideas and inspiration work the same way. Whether you making something or having an idea you have to have the raw materials to work with. To make connections, you have to have stuff to connect.

Live a little. Go experience or pay attention to something, anything. Make your magpie collection of life experiences that you can use for inspiration later on. It counts. Looking for inspiration IS doing something.

Thank you so much for watching, reading, and listening to TaoCraft Short Sip Tarot. Email Tarot Readings purchased through this website are secured by Papal and contribute to producing this unique, freely available and (almost) daily Tarot inspiration. Tarot Table memberships and “buy me a coffee” donation support this project as well. Of course, your likes, subs, shares and follows are always, always appreciated too.

See you at the next sip!

Whacked with the Cosmic Shillelagh

Sifu Gracenin told us that the best way to train for a thing is to do a thing.

The same is true of creative work – or anything really.

Creativity, new ideas, or enthusiasm for a project are all mercurial, wispy, unpredictable aspects of the human psyche. No wonder ancient Greeks and modern creatives alike blame the whole thing on a bunch of capricious Muses. You never know when you are going to get whacked with the cosmic shillelagh of creativity.

Which begs the question of what to do in the times in between, when your capricious Muses are missing in action and you are hit with an equally unpredictable time of uninspired apathy. To borrow a phrase from the sneaker people, just do it. “The best way to train for a thing is to DO a thing.”

Here is an analogy for the “My Hero Acedemia” and superhero fans out there…if you can only bring your superpower up to 5% today, OK, but DO that. But by doing that, you might be able to dial up the full cowling to 8% another day. If you persist at 5% power today and 8% later and so on, then you’ll be more ready and in a better place when time for full power comes along.

Or in other words, if you are feeling uninspired today, take it easy on yourself – on the inside – but still do what you need to do. The inspired feeling will come in its time. “Fake it until you make it” has its moments of utility. Work within your limits but don’t stop altogether. Continue to act within your ability, and in time your capability will increase whether you feel enthusiastic about it or not. Then you can be in a better, bigger place to act on creative inspiration whenever it does hit. That’s the sweaty part of the Thomas Edison quote “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” but an important part just the same. Hiking along with your ordinary walking stick is as important as getting whacked with the cosmic inspiration stick we see on the Ace of Wands.

Hang in there. One way or another, you got this.

Q&A: Change or Persist?

yes or no career tarot reading with behind the scenes explanation

Yes or no questions seem predictive: Will X happen, yes or no?

Yes/no readings are a fun to play with. I could sit here, play Zombie Cat* and make predictions all day just as long as everyone realizes that it is all really coin-toss random-ass probabilities and not really a serious “prediction.”

Yes/no Tarot readings can be much more than a magic black ball entertainment prediction. They can give legit, genuinely helpful, short term guidance. It is all a matter of focus and application.

Tarot’s greatest value is overarching, big-picture, life path guidance. It is all about spiritual enrichment, spiritual expression, personal cultivation….you know – generally trying to be a better person and live a good life. Tarot readings, especially the bigger 3, 5 and 7 card layouts, are all about understanding the current situation, making better choices and moving ahead in the best way possible. Big readings are like GPS directions to where you ultimately want to go.

Instead of long term GPS, a yes/no reading is like a single sonar ping of any given moment. It gives a very helpful, but short term, close range nudge in the right direction when you are choosing between two seemingly equal things or want a quick follow up to a previous big reading. Yes/no readings help you deal with right here and right now, but not much else.

Today’s question is a little bit of both. It is one of those all-else-equal things, and also follows up a longer reading from a few weeks ago. It is about a fine tuning a current solo project, nothing to do with long term plans or that would affect other people. Considering all of that, a yes/no reading is ideal for this question.

Q: Should I switch _____ back to _____ or should I continue as it is?

Ok, to start with, a yes-or-no layout can’t answer a this-or-that question. I don’t mean for that to sound harsh. I get it. It is hard to distill things down to a yes-or-no question when you have all sorts of options and resources and different possibilities all swirling around in your head. If you could focus things down to a clear yes or no question, chances are you wouldn’t need a Tarot reading to help make up your mind.

In the early days of my professional practice, I would ask the questioner/sitter to rephrase the question, thinking that it was important for them to put the question into yes/no format in order to properly connect to their spirit message. Learning from experience, I don’t do it that way anymore. They’ve got enough on their mind. That’s why they are here. I convert the question into yes/no format and then proceed with their consent.

Today’s question has two main components; changing and continuing, which begs the question of which part do you ask yes or no about?

After all these years of experience, I’m totally comfortable with just following intuition, and focusing on the component part that seems to carry the greatest energy signature….in other words, which part seems to step forward to carry the weight of the question. If you are reading for yourself I suggest doing the same. If you don’t feel comfortable with shoot from the hip pure intuition, there are lots of different randomizing strategies you could use to help you pick between “Should I change yes or no?” and “Should I persist, yes or no?”

In a two option question like this one, it really doesn’t matter which you choose. A no on one automatically gives you a yes on the other and vice versa. If it is a multiple componant question, things get a lot more complicated. You could do a series of yes/no readings on each of the components, but that gets muddy, convoluted, contradictory and very confusing super fast.

Don’t.

Trust me, just don’t. Write down the components and pick them out of a hat. Triage, and take the most time critical piece first. Do eenie meenie miny moe….anything. Just don’t do strings of of yes/no readings in a row. If the question is too complex, either use a larger, more nuanced layout OR simplify the question and focus on one key part.

The process of dealing into 3 stacks until you either get an to an ace or to 13 cards (whichever comes first) is an old, common knowledge, nobody knows where it came Tarot reading. I like to take it one step further and interpret the final three cards together as if they were a pathway reading in order to get more guidance from the whole process than just a yes or no answer alone.

If that seems like a big, complicated, pain in the ass process to get a good result from a simple yes-or-no question…it is. If you don’t want to yes/no read for yourself, please, order a yes/no reading from me. It’s affordable and I could sort the whole thing out in half the time it took me to explain it all just now.

New Q: Should I change?

A: Maybe but lean yes. Probably yes, actually.

The Fool card speaks to the fresh start and a new infusion of energy and enthusiasm that the new direction would bring to the project. Being a major arcana card, the Fool lends an extra push in the “yes” direction.

The Ace of Swords speaks to the creative and intellectual energy a change could bring. There is a very upward, uplifting quality to the energy.

Of course, seeing the Ace of Pentacles is always a good sigh in any kind of work or career related reading, even a quick yes/no like this one.

All things considered, this hints that making the change in the project is a good idea. Intuitively I feel very positive about it. My attention is drawn to the gold color on the Pentacles card. It isn’t so much about the precious metal as it is the color psychology and the resonance with the solar plexus chakra which in turn has to do with confidence and optimism and personal power. Wear gold or gold tone jewelry if you can. Pyrite or Tiger Eye are also good crystal energies here. It feels temporary…not a long term alliance between you and the tiger eye, however. Again the gold tone feels like a better fit. Grounding, centering woody scents seem important, like sandalwood in particular comes to mind. Pretty standard kinds of recommendations. After a time, I get the sense the tiger eye energy will drift back to the light blue and blue lace agate for communication that we talked about before, but for now the sun / yang energy and warmth of the brown and gold feels more forward.

Thanks again for your permission to do your reading as an example. I’m pulling for you and hope this works out really well, especially for a financial and name recognition boost.

Best Wishes – Ronda

*AZCA is still a thing . You can ask Zombie Cat Anything for free. Use the contact form HERE to ask anything, even for a prediction. Your answer will come in a redacted-for-privacy blog post (like this one, but without the video.) All Zombie Cat answers are for entertainment only, 100% guaranteed to contain words, and have a 50% chance of being dead wrong.

Imagine, execute, balance

Here is how the interactive Tarot posts work:

  1. Pick a card, any card. Actually, you get to choose between left, center or right.
  2. Pick on impulse or, if you want a little time to ponder or get a feel for which card is right for you, pause the video and restart when you are ready to see the reveal.
  3. Listen to the video interpretation and/or read the guidance for this week for the card you chose below.
  4. Any likes, youtube subs, blog or video shares, blog follows or reading orders you can spare are always, always appreciated!

You know how it goes…a journey of 1,000 miles begins with one step, and you have to have a plan before life and random circumstances can blow it to bits, so here is the main 2021 plan (she said as she puts on eye protection and readies the catcher’s mitt for the inevitable plan-schraphnel)

“YouChoose” interactive Tarot will post on the YouTube channel and here on the blog sometime between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning inclusive

Today’s Tarot with video will post both place on Wednesday morning. Ish.

Other days will have print-only content: Zombie Cat Answers (ask your free question HERE for Z.C. to answer in the blog) My Side of the Table, and other topics. Most other days. Some of them. I’m really hoping to be busy doing readings and/or selling stuff in the Etsy shop in addition to blogging.

The comments are OPEN so please feel free to send any non-spam questions or feedback. Tell me the Tarot content you would like to see, and I will do my best to try and create it!

When all the cards are taken together, there is a lot of active, creative energy and movement. The card you chose might be a hint where in the creative or project process is best for your attention because that is where the energy is flowing. The cards feel more aligned with their traditional element associations than with traditional meanings or the more contemporary ‘relationship with…’ meanings.

Left: Ace of Cups. Think water meets creativity. The energy here are raw creative flow. Imagine. Innovate. This is the early phase of creativity. This is the “dream it” part of “dream it and then do it.”

Center: Nine of Wands. This is fire and energy. This is the mid point of the creative process that moves from create to make. This is the part where you stop obsessing over planning and get up and do the thing. Execute. If you chose this card it is time to go all 80s movie montage on this – kick the tires and light the fires, baby!

Right: Two of Pentacles. The most balance-y card this side of the major arcana and Temperance. This is all fine points and fine tuning. Again I get three rotating points, like a juggler or a triquetra sort of shape. It may not be a literal three, but rather symbolic of many moving parts. If you chose this card, you might find yourself with a lot of moving parts to track. Earth is the element here, so stay grounded, centered…be the center of gravity around which all those moving parts move instead of letting them pull and drag you in every which direction. Spirit (energy, the collective unconscious – whatever you like to call it) has been into music the past couple of days. Here I’m getting “Loves Me Like a Rock” by Paul Simon. I guess it is oldies day in the spirit realm. But that is the energy of the card….earth energy, solid, centered rooted energy to keep your balance, not matter how many moving parts are whirling around this week.

Thanks for reading and watching! Best wishes to you for this and every week.

You Choose on YouTube

Tarot reading for today

Left: Eight of Pentacles – Almost there. Energies are right to see things through. Don’t sabotage yourself by giving up too soon.

Middle: Ten of Swords – Not everything is a big spiritual experience. Sometimes reality pins you down. Stare the dirt in the face and see reality as it is. THEN get up and make the most of the lemons life hands you.

Right: Eight of swords – Your creativity can save you. Close your eyes, be very quiet and physically still. Listen to the wind and hear the truth within.

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Today’s Tarot 29 June 2019: Ace of Wands

That creative idea that has been niggling at the back of your mind? Plan it. Draw it. Do it. That hobby project you’ve been putting off? Do it. That new recipe that sounds so tasty? Cook it. Are you a ? Grab those needles. The energies are wind at your back to bring something awsome into the world.