night – Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot

Weekend Oracle: At home in the dark

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Whenever you read ‘weekend oracle’ posts, it basically is a vibe check for the next 2-3 days that give you an idea how to make the most of the energy flows around you.

THE NIGHT’S PITY: Seven Dane Asmund, author of the deck, describes this card as “finding dark comfort in hard times.”

On one hand, I’m getting that this can be a literal thing. Honor you natural diurnal / nocturnal cycles. If you are a morning person, honor that and get some sleep as you need. If you are a natural night owl, indulge your dark loving inner nature. This is a time of resonance and power for the night owls. Embrace your inner goth if you have one. Day people, nap all you want, we got this.

On the other hand, this is also psychological. Very Jungian, really. This is a good time for everyone to explore their darker side. Not suggesting you do anything harmful to anyone. It’s a thought experiment. This is talking about a touch of cynicism and dark humor in the face of all of the real violence and tragedy that so many people are facing these days.

The idea for everyone is to sit with your dark side, deal with your demons by understanding them – even befriending them. It’s a radical form of self-love to find beauty in the flaws and downfalls, and accept yourself as-is, in whole, right here, right now. Allow yourself to feel at home in the literal or metaphoric night. The dark side might just bring you a warm blanket and cookie.

Weekend Oracle: Dreaming

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General Weekend vibe check:

This is the Oracle of Secrets from the Alleyway Oracles by Seven Dane Asmund, used with permission of Publishing Goblin LLC

The Luna Moth symbolizes coming night time dreams and seeking light amid the darkness.

I ‘hear’ (meaning the intuition comes as words, music or sounds rather than mental images) that “the night time is potent” Mystery and magic is in the nighttime darkness. Pay attention to your dreams. The answers often find you there, without you seeking them.

Understanding or “interpreting” dreams is a tricky thing. They are personal and personalized in the extreme. Whatever YOU think it means IS what it means. Dream dictionaries, books, even a professional psychic’s interpretation is only secondary help.

It’s not something I offer professionally, but when it comes to understanding dreams for myself or for coaching someone else with their dream interpretation, I take a hybrid approach.

The first step is deciding if you want to understand it at all. Are dreams just a random function of REM sleep, or can they hold meaning and significance? Is dream interpretation crackpot nonsense or something that is actually, psychologically helpful?

I’m not a huge fan of Sylvia Browne, her writing is way to0 Christianized to be helpful to me. But I did read her Book of Dreams and thought her approach was paradigm shifting and revolutionary. Instead of trying to understand the symbolism for each granular little detail, first understand the type of category of the dream: Stress release, processing the day, hopes and aspirations, sudden insights and so on – or the rarest of them all, the psychic or prophetic predictive kind of dream.

I don’t think prophetic type dreams are really possible. I see it as our mind being freed from preconceived assumptions and social constraints and then being freed to connect small, previously un-noticed details that are really big road signs to the direction events are headed. So-called ‘prophetic’ dreams are really just reading the room, seeing the direction things are headed in a preternaturally clear way that only sleeping intuition can give us.

Once you decide dreams can be meaningful, and which category a particular dream falls into, then you can decide if the individual elements of a dream are literal, or symbolic in a personal way or in a dream-dictionary -ish Jungian collective unconscious sort of way.

If you would like to learn more about dreams and their symbolism, my favorite reads are:

Sylvia Browne’s Book of Dreams by Sylvia Browne
Dream Alchemy by Ted Andrews
Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LeBerge

Thanks for reading! Throughout April I will be primarily posting Tarot inspired Haiku for National Poetry Writing Month. Happy NaPoWriMo everyone!

Some of the usual readings will be sprinkled in too, so please follow the blog so you don’t miss a thing!

See you at the next sip!

Spark in the Dark

We all see the sky together, even when we stand alone in the night

Ah, intuition. Bundle of contradictions, that.

On one hand, I just got finished saying I’m done preaching to the masses. On the other hand, here I am posting a daily meditation for the masses.

On one hand this blog is direct, personal, for YOU. On the other hand, this is given in the hope of helping someone, somewhere. I have no idea who. I have no idea how, where or when. But here it is.

The thing that keeps it all from being contradictory to the point of hypocrisy is the convincing part of it. When I say no more preaching to the masses, I mean no more tryint to convince the general public how helpful Tarot is or try to entice them to Tarot with jump-on-the-bandwagon stuff like doing yearly predictions. Instead of some kind of infomercial, this is a cozy little workshop. I hope this helps….helps YOU. If it spreads the word about Tarot or puts my contact in front of eyeballs, great. But that’s not the core intent. It was creeping too much toward that kind of feeling before. As Scott Cunningham said, “the feeling is the power”. So it is here. It FEELS different, more powerful, to write these posts like I’m talking one to one with a client, not publishing for a wider audience. I hope you can feel the difference too. This card is for you.

The Hermit wants our attention tonight. He turned up in a client reading earlier today, and when I did a random draw for the blog tonight, here he is again.

This kind of repetition happens sometimes. This time I used an entirely different deck than I used for the reading earlier. Sometimes, when I am reading for a Tarot party, a particular card will keep turning up time and again, despite shuffling, let the client choose the cards, all sorts of randomizing. It is an experience in synchronicity, that’s for sure. If a card keeps turning up like that, it is meaningful and worth paying attention.

Some say that means the card is trying to get a message through to the reader. Sometimes that is true. Other times, it just doesn’t resonate personally, so I chalk it up to the vibe of the group. I let it ride as symbolic of the evening as a whole. It is endlessly fascinating when that happens. When you combine the shades of meaning, times the layout positions raised to the power of all the various meanings for the card itself…even with the same card, each person get an intensely personal message.

That seems to be what is happening with the hermit tonight. It is indeed a message for me – reminding me of that party phenomena. Reminding me that it is possible to be direct and personal … one to one as a hermit would teach…even in a blog like this. There is one person on the other end of this post. Even if there are a lot of one persons in a lot of places reading at various times….it is still just one other person. The message may not be for your eyes only, but if you are still here reading this, then this blog is, indeed for your eyes.

By the same token, I’ve subscribed to some newsletters that take the chummy one to one thing too far and computer insert a first name just a bit much. I don’t want TaoCraft to sound like Dale Carnegie seminar threw up in a Diagon Alley tarot shop. So if I start to annoy you with this personalized tone, for the love of Plato, please email me with the feedback. The addy is over there in the right column –>

Best