The Message Will Find You

A longer read about a short Lenormand Tarot layout.

This blog and the YouTube channel are not monetized. Your message comes first with me, not an advertiser’s. Please support Sage Sips with virtual coffees, memberships and private readings on ko-fi.


It’s a little bit like that Blondie song “One Way Or Another.”

If you are willing to listen for it, to pay just a little bit of attention, to let yourself accept that a coincidence is as meaningful as it seems, then your guidance is all around you. Anything can reflect your own good intuition.

Two heads are still sometimes better than one.

Sometimes that intuitive guidance needs a little focus for you to see it or a little amplification for you to fully hear it.

That’s where things like Tarot cards, professional readers, tea leaves, crystals, runes and the whole woo-woo thing comes into play. They aren’t anything bad or anything special about any of those things. All of these things help our intuition in the same way glasses can help us read a book or an amplifier can help us listen to a concert.

Psychologist Carl Jung called it synchronicity (just like the Police song also from the ’80s) Some coincidences seem meaningful. If you allow them to be, they are.

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to “The Circle is Podcast” with Mat Auryn, Rachel True and a Lenorman Tarot expert whose name escapes me at the moment. The one thing that stuck with me from the episode was how they experienced Lenormand Tarot as being very verbal in the intuition it gives, while RWS style decks tend to be visual.

That is my experience in the short time I’ve used this Lenormand deck as well.

It’s typical for me to get a mix of mental images (clairvoyance) and words or music (clairaudience) in any given reading, the Lenormand deck seems to almost exclusively verbal. It speaks in full sentences more than just keywords.

The person on the podcast said she tended to use 2 or 3 card layouts for rapid daily guidance more than using the “grand tableau” where ALL of the cards are out on the table. When I was reading about how to do a grand tableau reading, it struck me as being over-engineered, far to complex to be useful as anything other than an enriched environment to spark a straight psychic reading, will the cards themselves contributing very little in that situation.

The Lenormand is very verbal. The simplest, most basic sentence is a noun and a verb – a thing and an action. It seems to me that is where Lenormand has its most simple, yet most elegant, use.

I’d like to explore two card layouts with two Lenormand cards, one to reflect the current situation…the thing that IS…and another to give you some idea what to do about it.

Beyond that, I’m leaving it fluid. Regardless of which card comes first, or which direction you read them, one is the thing and the other is the action and so far it seems fairly obvious which is which. As per their reputation, the Lenormand cards do not mess around in that respect.

For example today’s cards are a clear “stability is coming” The tower is carrying the thing message. It symbolizes stability. The Rider symbolizes something coming, a message or a messenger.

What that short sentence means to you as an individual can vary wildly. But that is, again, how your personal message always finds you. It’s an internal process as much as an external manifestation. It is how you see the world as it is reflected back to you through your individual lens of understanding.

Coming stability may for some be welcome relief from a time of chaos. For others “coming stability” might mean continued chaos, and more of the same. The important thing isn’t as much as the card as it is how you resonate with it.

You’ll know. No matter what I write or say to you in a reading, your heart and bones will know the right message. You’ll know your message when it comes to you through how right it feels to you. Sometimes your message finds you through you recognizing wrongness.

There is a comical scene in the 1960s classic The Addams Family where Morticia is telling an insurance adjuster that a pile of ash is the remains of their highly insured stuffed polar bear. When he objects, she calmly says something like “Does it look like a vulture? Does it look like ….” and seemingly goes on to ask if it looks like every conceivable animal, ending with something like “there you go! Then it MUST be a polar bear!”

Your message will find you even through a ridiculously long process of elimination. If you know in your heart and bones that a reading is off, then at least you know one thing that your message is not and can keep listening for whatever it is.

As someone with the privilege of doing readings for others (now as a hobby, as commissioned folk art) when I put this together with that meta-message that was coming through so much around the holidays of “change followed by a happy ending” I read the the Lenormand duo as being colored both ways: Stability is coming with steady “new normal” chaos in the near future AND stability is coming with relief from the chaos in a more distant future.

Again, 2026 steps forward. I have no idea why. I’ll leave that up to your lens of understanding to figure out.

Thank you so much for reading!

Want a free Tarot answer to your question? ‘Ask Me Anything’ for free using this contact form to get a public answer in the blog. I’ll be using these two card Lenormand layouts to answer AMA form questions for a while, starting in January 2025


Even though I am not operating as a business anymore, I still provide professional standards, an open policy page, and follow the same healthcare guided ethical standards for all of my readings. I do offer a ko-fi membership for fans and supporters that includes free Tarot readings and I ask for a contribution for private readings, all to help defray the costs of this website, for my time, and for my 30 years of Tarot experience.

The Week Ahead: More Please!

Contented? More please! Sage’s Short Sip is Tarot for your day in the time it take to sip from your coffee

In Tarot, we talk a lot about what to do when things get bad. What do you do when things get good?

Hello and welcome to the Sage Words Tarot blog and Short Sip podcast where it is all Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. I’m glad you are here.

This week’s energy has a lot of the Zen and Taoist philosophy influence that I wanted to honor in my previous blog name, TaoCraft Tarot. To be clear, I don’t mean any of this as any sort of cultural appropriation. When I was in my twenties, at a time when I was running for my life from a toxic subculture, I finally found a safe space and indulged in all of the Tarot, Taoism, Zen and magick reading I could get my hands on. Those ideas and philosophies helped me to grow into a much better person and made my life magnitudes better. Taoist principles like simplicity, honesty and authenticity are the foundation of my Tarot work to this day. The foundation of everything, really.

This week’s cards weave together around that core. The three cards together bring to mind the idea of suffering and satisfaction.

When you say it that way, it reminds me of the scene from Harry Potter where they are learning to read tea leaves and Ron reads Harry’s as something along the lines of “you are going to suffer, but you’ll be happy about it.”

The energy today brings to mind the opposite and begs the question:

Are you happy but suffering about it?

I follow a lot of artists on social media. Bruce Brackett is as fierce and fearless in his self-expression as you would expect a professional artist to be. The fan snaps, cups of love, and “negativity be gone” catchphrase is brilliant. I forget the main point of what he was saying the other day on TikTok. A side comment captured my attention so much I don’t remember the rest of it or even exactly when it posted.

It was about how he was able to take an accomplishment in stride, and wasn’t feeling overjoyed about it, “just” content. I’m paraphrasing heavily, but he said something along the lines of “I suppose I’m not supposed to be overjoyed at everything.”

No, no you’re not. None of us are as far as I can tell.

Where there is yin, there must be yang. Where there is light there must also be dark. Where there is overjoyed, there is also sorrow. Where there is lasting, there is also fleeting. Given the big picture and broad spectrum of all that life can be, content is a pretty darn good thing.

Buddhism talks about suffering. Set illness, aging, injury and physical suffering aside for a moment and let’s think about the mental and emotional side of things. No, not really set it aside – just make it the second domino in our cascading line of thought. Mind affects body and vice versa, so all of this can get around to the physical benefits of stress reduction and so on…but I’ll leave that to the holistic health folks to think about.

Suffering in the philosophical Buddhist sense can be thought of as dissatisfaction, or in other words a lack of that precious content feeling Mr. Beckett described. Suffering can be, and often is totally subjective and completely within our frame of mind.

It’s like that pastina recipe that has been popular lately. Being hungry is a physical suffering . Among those who are well fed, however, a bowl of humble pasta might leave one person comforted and content while a meal at the best restaurant in town might leave another person dissatisfied and secretly filling up later at the fast food joint down the street.

Things are good.

There is a pretty, floaty, quiet little snow happening outside my window right now. I have a private Tarot client this afternoon as tasty leftovers in the ‘fridge for lunch between now and then.

Right here, right now, in this precious moment life is good and I am content. I want to take this opportunity to tell the universe how deeply grateful I am. More of the same please. I wish contentment for us all.

For this week, the two of pentacles is the fading energy card. I don’t think that means things are becoming unbalanced. The two of pentacles hints at a dynamic kind of equilibrium. I think this means the need to pay active attention to our life balance may be fading a bit. It feels like things may be settling into a new normal.

Three years ago this week the world was tossed into the global pandemic. I’m not saying that’s over. That is outside of anything Tarot and way outside of my expertise. But wearing a mask on occasion and keeping up with new vaccine boosters is a new normal that is easy enough to live with. Things are striking a new balance that is solid enough to let us turn our emotions to other places.

Current energy is the nine of cups. The suit of cups symbolizes our emotions, which is why they are so closely tied to romance and relationship issues. This reflects the subjective nature of contentment. Nine symbolizes fulfillment, or a good outcome to something. When is enough ever enough? This hints at that feeling of contentment were just talking about.

Growing energy is back to the practical pentacles. The seven reminds us that you reap what you sow, so might as well sow good things.

That there will be a harvest at all is a magical, comforting thing.

All in all, these cards are reminding us of all the changes we’ve been through. It may have been a struggle to find balance, but we are at a place where we can find new balance points and find a new normal. This new balance (the energy, not the shoes) has brought new good things with it, but it is up to us to realize the good things about here and now. Dwelling on the changes robs us of a new sense of contentment. We may not be overjoyed at life, but neither do we have to despair. Like that old adage says, people are as happy as they make up their minds to be.

What are the good parts of our new normal that we can seed for the future and hopefully hang on to for a while?

Sage’s Short Sip blog posts and podcast episode are a Tarot contemplation for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. Thank you so much for reading and listening. I appreciate each of you.

Just a quick reminder about the links in the episode description. Nothing I do is advertising monetized, so I can put your Tarot message absolutely first. Private readings by email along with the paid subscription blog “The Daily Sip” supports the free Tarot readings here and across the socials. Please visit the links and support the blog and podcast if you can.

Thanks again. See you at the next sip!