four of swords – Page 2 – Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot

Today’s Accomplishment

TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. Today is a day. Having one is an accomplishment!

Welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.

Today’s card is the four of swords.

There are reasons for all of the lore around Tarot decks.

Bottom line, they are bits of heavy paper with pictures on them. Full stop.

It’s not the cards, it’s the person using them and how they are used. They are the big theater screen where we can project our intuition and make it easier to see. They are a giant mirror that reflects ourselves so we can see that better too.

The genius in Pamela Smiths treatment of the minor arcana number cards is that she hits on very archetypal, foundational, core ideas. It’s hard to improve them. So, so many decks are rightfully derived from that body of work. Before Smith’s work, as I understand it, most decks had pips…a grouping of the suit’s symbols…instead of fully fledged images like the ones she created.

Some of the cards are fairly consistent across all of he derived decks. The three of swords is a good example. Almost every three of swords that I’ve seen has some iteration of heart and swords and something getting stabbed. The four of swords has much more variation. In the RWS deck, you see a knight in repose, taking a lil’ nap with all of his favorite pointy objects, no stabbing in sight. Mark Evans, artist for the Witches Tarot, depicts a grumpy looking lady with one sword in hand, dress swirling to denote movement and activity, with the other three swords close by. It’s not a particularly restful image. Here Lenny Magner give us four disembodied heads stabbed with swords for the Alleyman’s Tarot. The faces look sleepy, possibly dead, and winds up being more disconcerting than restful. Seven Dane Asmund’s interpretation of the card resonates with this image. The Alleyman’s Notebook interprets it as having to do with self-doubt, where he writes “nothing sticks like the daggers we put in ourselves.”

As disparate as it all seems, all of these different images fit together like pieces of a bigger picture.

Think of the ubiquitous and sometime slightly annoying email courtesy of telling people to “have a great day.”

Not every day is great. Some days are a hot mess. Other times you need to turn down the wattage and have just a day. Any day. A no big deal, kinda routine, go make the donuts day. Those days are as great as any other. When we expect perfection from ourselves, it is all too easy to slip into stabbing ourselves in the head with self-doubt. A little rest and repose from self-imposed expectations can be a wonderful thing. Even the Witches Tarot sword swinging grumpy girl has a part to play. External activity, working and adulting still has to happen which covers the action aspect of the swords cards in general. Sometimes you have to, as the shoe commercials used to say, just do it. Swords are also associated with intellect and the mind. That is the kind of rest and repose the four of swords talks about today.

Give being your own worst critic a rest.

Nevermind great. Sometimes just having a day is an accomplishment.

Thanks so much for reading and listening! I’ll see you at the next sip!

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The deck pictured is the Alleyman’s Tarot by Seven Dane Asmund, used with permission.

YouChoose Interactive Tarot: Rest and Contemplate

Cut through the noise of social media and the static of online Tarot posts to get something a little more personal. You choose your card and get it’s interpretation.

https://youtu.be/OHkR9YXdeNQ

Welcome to YouChoose Interactive Tarot on the TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.

This post works just like the name says: you choose. You choose your card and you choose how to apply it. It’s Monday morning where I am right now, so my mind is drawn to the flow of energy for the week ahead. Overall it feels like a time to rest and contemplate. This feels like a time to gather your energy and regroup, recover from recent efforts or as “Bob the Writing Cat” on instagram often says – to “gird your loins” because it is Monday and the week is coming.

But, of course, it could be something entirely different for you.

If you are listening to audio only on the podcast, there is a link in the description to the blog post where you can watch the youtube video and see how all this is playing out with the real-world card draw. I’ve added the shape cards as a reference to make it easier to imagine and to pick a card from the audio only, but if seeing it would help, the visual is here for you.

First things first. Let’s choose. I’ve shuffled the Tarot deck and picked three random cards out of the five shape cards. Today we have square, triangle and wavy lines.

Choose a shape. Take a minute, take a deep breath. If you are watching the video, pause if you need more time then restart to see the card reveal. If you are listening, imagine the shapes. Choose the one that feels right for today; square, wavy lines or triangle.

Square gets the Four of Cups

Triangle get the Ace of Pentacles or Coins

Wavy Lines gets the Four of Swords

Four of Cups feels like validation. People are closed as it seems. Lines of communication are not flowing well, but it is temporary and it’s ok. It just isn’t a time to push on the giving or receiving in. If others are up in your grill but you need them to step back and wait a little, honor that feeling. If you are the one trying to get the message through and other people just can’t get the message or seemingly won’t listen honor that too. It just isn’t the time. Let them have their moment. There is no sense in beating your head against the wall. This isn’t a good time to push or be too assertive any more than it is a good time to be imposed upon.

The Ace of Pentacles feels like a good news is on the horizon card. It feels consistent with the physical world, money and career vibe that is traditionally associated with pentacles. It’s no wonder some decks call them coins instead. This feels like payday in a small way. It feels like getting a return on work already done, time already invested. Time transforms. Things are coming back around, but it feels like it is in unexpected but valuable ways. It feels like a transformation toward something very different but more valuable to this moment. The mental image is a diamond. Diamonds are made of carbon, but elemental carbon is a very different thing when it isn’t in the high pressure crystal lattic form we call diamonds. Don’t overlook the diamond that is coming back from the carbon you gave a long time ago. If you gave grape juice, don’t walk around looking for more grape juice when you are being handed a glass of wine.

The Four of Swords really captures the essence of that rest, repair, regroup energy we were talking about earlier. Swords cards and knight cards carry a sense of activity and motion and doing. This card balances that. It is the yin to the knight of swords yang. This card is all about rest, but rest with an active purpose. This is resting deliberately so you can be at your best during the next battle, the next active time that is going to come. For those of you who picked this card, rest and contemplate fast. I have a hunch the restful, contemplative mode will shift for you before it does for everyone else.

Thank you for reading, watching and listening to TaoCraft Tarot blog, you tube channel and podcast.

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See you at the next sip!

Microwavable Enlightenment

There is no substitute for time. You can’t fool Mother Nature – or gluten. There is no such thing as microwavable enlightenment.

Even if enlightenment seems to happen in a flash it took some amount of time to build the lightbulb that come on over your head. It takes some amount of time to build up to the tipping point, or reach critical mass or any of a dozen analogies you could use here.

Personal growth and our spiritual journey is like a good brisket – it takes time. Microwaving the same cut of meat just isn’t the same no matter how much liquid smoke you use.

No-knead bread is just another name for biscuits. You can’t shortcut a good knead and rising time on a warm kitchen counter.

This card is reminding us that you can’t rush repose. Some things unfold in their own time. The best things take as long as they take.

Stay tuned for one more “equinox” announcement later today.

Having An Idea

Inspiration is a funny thing.

I’m a TED talk junkie. Not that I watch a lot. I’m an encouragble multitasker and tend to let TV be audio wallpaper. But not TED talks. Those get my full attention, so I don’t watch them as often as I’d might otherwise.

One of my favorites is by author Elizabeth Gilbert speaking about creativity:

And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So stay with me, because it does circle around and back. But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome — people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity “daemons.” Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. 06:44

The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist’s studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work. 07:14

So brilliant — there it is, right there, that distance that I’m talking about — that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work was brilliant, you couldn’t take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame.
Elizabeth Gilbert

I don’t claim to be a creative genius, but some rare sometimes ideas will drop in that feel like they have been tossed there from from some outside source. It’s different than deliberately doing a reading or listening to intuition on someone else’s behalf. It’s random, unexpected, otherworldly-feeling and worthy of attention. It’s closer to the Tower card than the Four of Swords in that respect. Ideas like that feel especially important when they are sparked by one source but seem to connect to something wildly different. This morning, for example, connected an online article by Christopher Penzack about the symbolism of mountains with the memory of a 1970s TV commercial.

Most of you are probably too young to remember the lifesavers candy commercial where a guy climbs a frozen, isolated mountain to ask the guru on top to define the meaning of life, which of course, is pepp-o-mint lifesavers. It is like the part of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series where the most advanced super computer Deep Thought calculates the answer to the ultimate meaning to life, the universe and everything is actually 42. There was a snapple commercial with the same sort of trope where a guy goes to a farm, seemingly in remote China, to ask an elderly man how white tea is made…”you find the small young leaves, and you pluck them” … or something like that.

Climbing a mountain or traveling to somewhere remote and exotic is the classic symbol for spiritual growth and development. Both are really hard work. Outside of the comedic and marketing value, there is a real grain of truth to ‘climbing the mountain’ only to find that the mystic guru sitting on top is simple, pragmatic, and just like the rest of us.

Does that mean it wasn’t worth the climb?

No. Not at all.

THAT realization, the understanding that mystical gurus are like us and that we are like mystical gurus is in itself a great treasure. It’s worth the climb to discover the magic in the mundane. It’s worth the climb to realize that you can be your own mystical magical wise guru teacher person.

Green tea and peppermint candies are pretty good things to find too.

Today’s Tarot R & R

Maybe it’s a message for me as much as anyone else. But that’s how these things often work. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? My intent is that the blog will help somebody out there somewhere at some time or another, whenever they happen to see this. At risk of sounding like Prince lyrics, the whole point of Tarot is to help any and all of us get through this thing called life

The Four of Swords ties in to several energies that have already stepped forward lately. I still get a strong mental image of the different color flecks in stones from this weeks interactive reading Speckles. It feels like we are at long last getting a respite from the communal, zeitgeist energies that have so strong for the past year or so. It isn’t so much that we are being asked to stay in our lane and stick to our knitting – but rather the communal energy has disengaged and left us to our own devices. It is almost as if the universe has given us a day off to have a play date with ourselves. We are a collective of individuals. There is beauty in diversity. In a very gentle way, today feels like permission to get down with your bad self in a sense, whatever level of frenetic or zen energy that may be for you.

There is also the idea of lifelong learning (Growing Ogres) It is a mark of excellence in any profession. It seems the best of the best are always learning, evolving, growing new onion layers and letting old ones fall away. That’s what a sabbatical is; an opportunity for professors to study more stuff.

It doesn’t have to be forever. A break in the energetic action is a very different thing from being stuck or stagnant or lazy. It certainly isn’t a sign of failure. In Reiki, the five core precepts (letting go of worry, letting go of anger, working honestly, being grateful, being kind) are focused on the present moment. “Just for today” is a liberating, enabling, empowering thought. Just for today, take the Four of Sword’s advice. Just for today, get some rest. Just for today, give yourself a break and work on something else. “Respite”and “Sabbatical” doesn’t mean be unproductive. You can rest one thing while doing something else. Or not.

“Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted”
John Lennon

My Tarot Valentine: Don’t Romance Hangry

It’s a reflex.

It’s so easy that it is almost impossible to stop yourself from snapping at loved ones when you are stressed, cranky, tired, hangry or pushed to the limit by whatever. It’s proximity, just like the nerve reflexes your doctor checks with the little rubber hammer thingy. Particular nerve reflexes are wired so that they basically short out across the spinal cord and bypass the brain entirely. Your leg moves with the hammer boink without you thinking about it or willing it to do it…or not do it. It’s the same brain-bypass that lets you snap your hand back from a hot pan so you don’t get burned.

Reflexes bypass language editing centers. I don’t know about you, but when one of those injury avoiding ‘ouch’ reflexes happen, it is usually accompanied by at least “OW” and usually a swear or two. Reflexes happen faster than cognitive processing, they don’t go all the way to the brain and have a shorter distance for the nerve impulse to travel, for a simplified way to look at it.

The same is true when we are under stress. It is quick and easy to take it out on loved ones because, with any kind of luck, they are relatively close at hand. The stress has a short distance to travel. If you are the stressed one, it is hard to stop yourself from doing that. If you are the one in the splash zone of your loved one’s stress, it is hard to stop yourself from getting reflexively defensive and splashing a little bit too.

I’ve learned this from my spouse who is a freaking saint to put up with me my crankies, but taking care of yourself is an act of love for the ones you are closest to. Get a nap, have a snack, whatever it is that works to manage your stress…DO it. You’ll be doing a favor for your own mental health as well as giving a token of affection to those who you love…and who love you.

YouChoose Interactive Tarot: The Moment (that got away)

Whelp, that was unexpected.

Sorry for the delay. We were out of some staple basics, and silly me thought I could mask up, go grab a few things from the grocery store, heave something in the oven for supper and type this baby right up.

I forgot: It’s a Saturday, right before Christmas. So here I go right into one of our worst traffic areas in the worst traffic time of the year. One thing led to another including putting some cucumbers into start a dill pickle ferment and feeding George the Second, my latest sourdough starter, and here we are. *sips hot cuppa and sits it down* Now, *rubs hands together* where were we?

Left: Four of Swords. I love the Witches Tarot. It’s probably my favorite deck. The Four of Swords is the one and only card where the artwork is dissonant with the message. Energetically, I get the typical rest, respite, repose message that is more evident in other decks if they are based on the RWS originals. Take this public domain image of Pamela Smith’s artwork on a a circa 1910 deck for example.

See the difference? Sometimes a feeling of readiness or fierceness akin to the Mark Evans artwork will come through. My feeling today is more with the Smith artwork and the respite interpretations.

If you selected this card, this is a week to be in the moment with your thoughts and plans. Don’t exhaust yourself with worry or regret. It is the intellectual, emotional, stress management equivalent of a quick catnap. Your not being asked to shirk responsibility, be in denial, or put off urgent action. The energy this week, or at least today is taking a breath compared to how it has been during 2020 to date. Allow your mind and emotions to rest in the present moment, and set aside worry and regret just for a little while. The present moment is very restful to the part of our mind that worries.

Center: Ace of Pentacles. This is a very sunny, upbeat positive feeling card. I associate it more with inspiration and solutions that physical benefit or money luck, although if your inspiration helps your work, then it could daisy chain or chain-of-events into money luck. The mental image that came with the card was a baseball catcher behind the plate with their glove up and ready. The word hurtling seemed important and strong, as in something good is hurtling toward you so be ready to catch it. Be in the moment, ready to embrace it when a good thing comes. It may be unexpected, but it feels more like it is coming in fast. As I typed “embrace” the mental image was of a baseball glove with a fast pitch hitting hard and the glove snapping shut around it.

If you selected this card, be in the moment but be alert so you can grab stuff when it comes your way on short notice. Be alert, be quick.

Right: Three of Coins. This is very physical realm, very work and task related. I get a little bit of “stick to your knitting” plus a little bit of Luke Skywalker and the Death Star “stay on target”. I am also reminded of a lyric from an old Kate Bush song “press execute” If memory serves, at the time (maybe it is still this way) British computer keyboards used “execute” instead of “enter” I could be wrong. But “execute” is the feeling here. Maybe the Nike slogan. But DO-ing is front and center. “Task at hand” comes through as well. Planning is great. Revisiting and revising are helpful. This week is all about productivity in this moment.

If you selected this card, energies are wind at your back. This week is all about getting stuff done. It is a good week to go beast mode on your to-do list.

Today’s Tarot: Sightline

“Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there’s got to be a way through it.” – Micheal J. Fox

Taraffirmation #14: I see things as they really are, and work for the best with the resources at hand.

Don’t let old experiences or expectations for the future cloud your vision. Solving a problem requires that you see the problem for what it really is. Sometimes when accept things as they are for what they are, there aren’t as many obstacles in your line of sight after all.

REpeat not RETROpeat

A few days ago, we looked at the question of why cards sometimes turn up repeatedly in readings, regardless of whether you are getting readings or giving them. As I was uploading the post, I could almost hear a chorus of “It’s Mercury Retrograde” coming from social media as a hot take explanation of why life lessons are hard to learn; why messages aren’t being heard well and why cards have repeating lately.

I disagree. Understanding and enacting an important life lesson often takes much longer than any given Mercury retrograde. It takes more than a Mercury year. It can take multiple Earth years. Any retrograde of any planet in any solar system is no more than a trick of forced perspective. It is the relative movement of a very close planet compared to very distant stars. It is a little like those photos where it looks like someone is holding up the leaning tower of Pisa or holding the setting sun in the palm of their hand. As the animation above shows us, shift your point of view, and POOF! no retrograde. Only normal cycles of planets – and of nature – remain.

I have seen, however, a connection between repeating Tarot cards and one particular planet’s orbit. It isn’t Mercury; It’s Earth. The Wheel card in particular speaks to these cycles. When the Wheel shows up, think about natural cycles that may be moving through your life. There is also a subtext of adaptation. We must move with the wheel of time and natural cycles, or be crushed beneath it. This is a good example of a difficult life lesson that takes time to learn, don’t you think?

Seasons of the year are an obvious natural cycle. Over time, I’ve seen several cards cluster around summer and winter. They seem to capture the essence of the season. I often see cards like the 9 of cups, the 4 of wands or the 3 of cups turn up frequently around the Winter holidays. It fits Those holidays are akin to the cards with celebrations, traditions, family foundations and social connections all at top of mind that time of year.

Summer cards are a bit more subtle.

We think of summer as an active time, and it is. Yet it needs balance. In the winter, we balance the seasonal cold with warm things: woolly clothes, fires in fireplaces, spices, warm drinks, candles, lights. Summer needs balanced with cool drinks, sitting in the shade, loose cool clothing, going barefoot. Again, there are cards that hint at this seasonal balance, with quiet introspective cards like the 4 of swords, 3 of wands, 5 of cups or The Hermit. Admittedly, I’ve seen this pattern emerge more as a reader than as an individual. It think of it as being part of the entrainment phnomenon we talked about last time. Cards may repeat in a party (or in a season) as a resonance with the time and place (or time of year.)

If a card keeps turning up time and again, yes, it is significance. Yes, that repetition in and of itself is a message. If a card keeps repeating, it could be for multiple different reasons. As always, it is usltimately up to your feeling and your intuition to decide which reason best fits..or if it is something else entirely. It might be:

an important message or lesson you are misunderstanding, failing to hear, or failing to enact
a significator, a stand-in for you in the reading to show how Tarot and spiritual growth in general fits in with you as individual and with your self-image of the time.
a validation, a signal from spirit the card’s message is important, real, authentically for you
resonating with places you go …. parties and so on
resonating with the season of the year

Tag: four of swords