Tag: homecoming

Homecoming

TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot contemplation for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee.

There is something to be said for comfort zones.

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

It’s been a deeply weird couple of weeks. The hiatus I had hoped to take this week is pushed back until probably mid-September, because of life and stuff. We are back to the usual pattern for a little while, and we are back to the Alleyman’s Tarot. I know I keep saying this, but this card, “The Alley” by deck creator Seven Dane Asmund, truly is my favorite right now. This may be my cue to set aside the deck for daily short sip posts and write a proper, deep-dive review. I wanted to live with the deck and use it and post with it for a while before writing about it to any extent. This is something special, and deserves more than the usual hot take unboxing first look review. I could rant a paragraph about the visual of this card, all night and neon and cyberpunk and Neuromancer. Good book,that. I highly recommend it.

This card in particular landed right in my personal wheelhouse. I hope it speaks to you, too, but it is saying a lot to me. I hope you forgive this little bit of personal indulgence and a post that pays no attention to the outward, zeitgeist energy landscape.

Landscape is a good word here. The Alley card is important to the lore and backstory of the deck. The Alley is where the Alleyman lives out his life’s calling, where he finds his raison d’etre, so wrapped in his comfort zone that it becomes an extension of self more than mere solace. It speaks of our native landscape. By native I mean our most natural, most authentic environment, not necessarily the one of our biological birth.

I’m enjoying that music is available to put on YouTube shorts, TikTok videos and Instagram Reels. For once you get to “hear” what I intuitively heard with this card.

When I say the word “hear” in the context of a Tarot reading, I mean clairaudience. You’ve heard the word clairvoyant, right? That means clear seeing, and it talks about intuitive mental images. Clairaudience is “clear hearing” and it the word for when intuition comes as sounds, music or words instead of mental images. It uses auditory imagination to the same purpose as visual imagination in a reading. It is like ear worming a favorite song, except that it isn’t your song. It is meant for your client or as something you’ve both heard before to help you find a mutual point of reference as you talk through the Tarot reading. In this case it is a bit of both. “You Belong to the City” by Glen Frey came through intuitively and it was also one of my favorites back in the day.

It was inspiration to challenge my comfort zone and find my homecoming.

Seven Dane Asmund writes of the card as quote “my community” and “where everything belongs if there is nowhere else to be or go.” End Quote.

Another song came to mind. It is from the same era, “A Sort of Homecoming” by U2. Put all of this together and I think we get the essential message that we each define our home and homecoming. Just like the old adage that home is where the heart is.

It is a card of finding your natural habitat, whatever it may be. I floundered and felt profoundly misfit in the place where I was raised. It was a bath in itching powder. Suburbia was a warm sunset. Even for an introvert, there is life and light and energy to be found. I belong to the city at its edge.

For some, a foray into a city at night is an exciting adventure. For some – like my rural evangelical birth family – it would be intimidating, or even terrifying. More importantly, for many others, it is every night, it is life, it is home.

To state the overly obvious, a lot of people are born in cities. Being at home there would be the norm. The Alley card is outside of that ordinary. It speaks to me of found family and a found home, a liminal space even within a familiar urban environment. It is a place to belong when you’ve walked away from the places where you don’t.

I wonder if the Alley here can also hint at our shadow side, the unclaimed self. If you feel drawn to this card today, what alleyway lurks within? What dark and liminal space within you is calling to you to befriend it. What dark alley is inviting you home? Is your inner alleyway one that others fear but you know to be filled with shelter and neon light and other wandering spiritual orphans just like you? Urban neon may frighten some, but it is homecoming for others.

Seek your unique kind of light, the kind that makes the dark night into your own neon homecoming.

Today’s Tarot: Homecoming

In numerology they do this thing where they add the individual digits of higher numbers to reduce them to a single digit equivalent. Why, I don’t know, but they do. But it is an interesting concept when applied to the 10 cards of the minor arcana suits. Not only is it the largest of the numbered cards, the threshold to the court cards, but 1+0 = 1 which hints at a full circle, satisfying completion, a return to origens, a homecoming.

On the surface, the Ten of Cups has always been the ‘happy family’ card, akin to the Ten of Coins/Pentacles that we’ve seen in recent days. Instead of reminding us that relationships and loved ones are our most valuable treasure, this card lifts 10 cups in pure celebration of them. Homecomings of all sorts are celebrations.

Not all homecomings are the literal with all of those people, food, home and hearth goodnesses. There is a thread here connecting today’s card to the past two cards.

The Devil card reminds us that there are still storms on the horizon and that there are, in reality, some legit bad stuff out there. The Two of Wands reminds us that within any journey or project, a planned detour is possible. You can steer around the storms and get where you were originally wanting to go if you are heads up, eyes open, and plan on the fly. New phases, new plans, new turns don’t have to be stumbling blocks. Fluid, effective adaptation is very possible.

We’ve also seen a turn in energy that was outside of the cards and their artwork. That shift connects the other two cards to today’s Ten of Cups. While the first half of the year was focused on the physical realm and doing what needs done (even when what needs DONE is to stay home, wear face masks and wash your hands.  Now that we are in the dog day doldrums of summer, the energy has turned toward spirituality and introspection. Now the time has come for spa retreat, soul searching, growing, deciding, planning for the Fall and Winter ahead. That is where the homecoming comes in.

Author Richard Bach is known for saying “The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.” The same is true of our internal philosophy-home. It is time for a spiritual homecoming. It is time to celebrate whatever path embues life with the most respect and joy possible. It need not be the path you started on.

Bad things happen, steering away from those things can happen. Taking your place among people and ideas that give you respect and joy can happen – and must. For me that comes through the lens of Taoist and Buddhist philosphies paired with Tarot and other magickal things. Whatever it is that you respect, that respects who you truely are, and brings you happiness – that – I hope that for you. If you have an iota of inclination, the energies are right to celebrate the esoterica that makes you happy.

If you have tried new ideas and new ways of doing things and find they are off course after all, then it is perfectly fine to change back. Going back to a spiritual path that brings good things is wonderful sort of homecoming. If you seek out new spiritual ideas and find something that perfectly fits you, then that is your homecoming too. Just as family is defined by respect and joy and love, spirituality is defined the same way. No matter whether you are going back to the old, or taking up residence with the newly discovered, the energies are flowing toward homecoming.