The most difficult and deepest healing
“Time heals all wounds”
Deep healing requires the tincture of time.
Time is often the bitterest pill to swallow in our emotional healing. The slow changes time brings are often the most bittersweet. Patience with ourselves and everyone else is necessary medicine, but often the most difficult to create.
The seven of coins calls us to be patient and let the most difficult medicine of all, time, work its healing magic.
Social Media Update: With the advent of Threads, I spend most of my scroll time there these days. Threads and Instagram is the best place to actually interact. You are welcome to stop by and say hello. I post on FB, Tumblr, and TikTok, but don’t interact there very much. I will warn you that the Threads account has become a combination of Tarot posts and my ex-birdsite political and religious voidscreaming. But you probably know by now that secular humanism, Taoism, witchcraft, progressive/liberal politics and lgbtdq ally-ship is a big part of who I am and influences what I do here. If any of those things offend you then we wouldn’t be a good match for a Tarot reading anyway. But rest assured, no matter what you see on the Threads feed, I can set all of that aside and channel in the right energy message for you no matter what it says. That is what 30 years of experience will get for you. There are some advantages to being genX years old.
So what does that have to do with today’s card or Tarot at all? That gnarly online energy IS very much today’s energy and card. The growing energy from Monday has arrived. The Three of Swords has to do with sorrow, heartbreak, loss, pain and betrayal. The keyword betrayal steps forward with the most energy today.
This isn’t a good day to be expansive or ebullient unless the feeling is so strong that your happy emotion bubble can withstand a field of needles. The collective energy today feels prickly like trying to hug a porcupine. You may have all good intentions, the porcupine may be filled with love and kindness, but things are what they are. Being true to yourself and being true to your own nature can also mean facing up to hard realities. Your true self and other people’s true self isn’t always going to blend well. You don’t have to like everybody and not everybody has to like you. Oil is a part of nature. So is vinegar. That doesn’t mean that life has to be salad dressing. To borrow a phrase from Joseph Campbell, follow your bliss. But follow it knowing that not everyone has the same bliss.
Some people by their nature are counter to your nature. Deliberate and malicious or not, intended or not, it can feel like a betrayal when you hoped for some sort of relationship, but nature makes that difficult if not impossible.
There may be good intentions all around, but oil and water, bubbles and porcupines still happen. Some days just aren’t made for trying to make square pegs fit round holes and vice versa. This feels like one of those days.
To paraphrase another writer, John Le Carre, betrayal can only exist in the presence of love. You can only betray – or be betrayed by – those whose opinion you care about. You can’t be jabbed by the porcupines that you don’t try to hug.
Here my mind turns to some of those social media threads I’ve been reading lately. With the evangelical support for right wing politicians and the christian nationalist & “dominion theology” growing in our national awareness (and, arguably, growing as a threat to those of us with interests in Tarot or ANY spiritual path other than theirs)
There can be family betrayals, community betrayals, literal danger to vulnerable groups like our lgbtq loved ones. Like the meme says – you can’t say you love me then vote for someone who hurts me.
The Three of Swords reminds us that protecting oneself from real danger is an act of loving kindness too.
Which brings us back to yet another paraphrase of yet another author, G. Chesterson, who said “a [warrior] fights not because he hates what is in front of him but because he loves what is behind him.”
When religion tears apart families and communities the prickly energy splatters everywhere.
It’s hard to hug a heart that deliberately surrounds itself with swords. It’s ok not to impale yourself on the sharp edges.
Thank you for reading. Heavy energy, heavy ideas today. Thanks for contemplating it all along with me.
Next time: Energy path reading for October 9-15.
The Blog and social media will be on a short hiatus October 14-17, 2023. Email readings are OPEN but may experience delivery delays on those days.
See you at the next sip!
New “Learn With Me” series begins
It worked for Benjamin Franklin.
Not Lenormand Tarot. As far as I know Ben wasn’t into Tarot. I mean being self taught. Benjamin Franklin was a voracious self-directed learner. I can’t recommend his autobiography highly enough. I may give it a quick re-re-re-read after writing this.
Mr. Franklin is proof that being self-taught isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It isn’t the right approach fo everything. He was an apprentice, he learned from others – but I’m pretty sure he figured out the electricity thing on his own. When you are self-taught, you just might be the fresh eyes that see something brand new. It’s as Terry Pratchett wrote in his book Equal Rites: “It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done.”
The same holds true in Tarot. Many, if not all, aspects of intuition and magick cannot be fully taught and must be experienced for oneself, . I forget whether it was Mat Auryn or Marshall WSL who wrote about this being the essence of “mystery” or occult traditions. It’s not so much that the information is secret as it is that the experience of it is entirely subjective and can only known to you as an individual. In the “mystery” traditions the teacher can give you theory and information. A teacher can take you right up to the threshold of experience, but only you can take that last step through the doorway to deep knowing. That step through the doorway can only be experienced first hand, thus remaining a mystery to those without that first hand experience.
Initiation, it seems to me, is a matter of taking a solo step through the doorway and joining others on the other side who have taken their own solitary step before you.
That’s what these “Learn With Me” posts do…
I show you the path I took to get to this place. It’s still down to you to decide if that path is right for you, if you want to take other steps, or whatever. Even when I read Tarot for you as an individual, the goal is to amplify your connection to energy, to amplify you intuition and help you to connect to your own message – not to be a substitute for any of that. But that’s another story for another day. Back to Lenormand Tarot.
I’m largely self-taught, but a big piece of self-directed learning is selecting and finding the right teachers and classes. I’ve had classes in intuition development, aura reading, psychometry, and full training and certification in Reiki. I’m grateful and privileged to have met Ted Andrews at his.”Animal Speak” workshop in Sewickley PA at the old Open Mind bookstore back in the 1990s, just before his Animal Wise Tarot was released. I’ve read reams of books and consider those authors to be teachers, too. But when it came to finding, curating, synthesizing, internalizing, applying, living all of that, it was up to me and me alone. The same is true of your learning path. If you aren’t self taught at the very least you choose who else teaches you.
In the middle of the biggest and best Ivy League university, you are still self-taught to some extent because it is entirely up to you what you do with that ocean of information. It is up to you which thresholds you actually step across.
After stepping across some thresholds and crossing a fair few bridges too far, the “Learn With Me” posts on the Sage Sips blog are about how to find the doorway. Regardless of whether I’m translating spirit/energy into English for a private individual reading, peeking at the collective energy for the blog, teaching a specific oracle or teaching an intuition building process, the final steps are ones only you can take.
Mistakes creep in both when you are self-taught and when you are tutored. Finding your own way through the forest makes you a little more vulnerable to making honest mistakes. It also empowers you because you don’t know what is impossible, Terry Pratchett style. To my way of thinking, that easily balances the extra trial, error and experimentation a solitary self-learning path entails.
So – I could be wrong.
Over the years, with the information I’ve found, Lenormand Tarot has given the impression of being separate and distinct, an oracle tool unto itself. Lenormand Tarot is not the familiar format or symbolism we all know so well from other Tarot decks like the Visconti-Sforza from 1425, the Marseille deck from the 1500s or the ubiquitous Rider Waite Smith deck from 1909.
Perhaps because it is older, ostensibly from the late 1700s to middle 1800s, the Lenormand Tarot stands apart from modern oracle cards, too, both in symbolism and emotional tone.
Lenormand has never really captured my attention until recently. I was chatting with fellow reader and energy healer extraordinaire Pip Miller who reads both RWS and Lenormand Tarot. She described them as largely similar in concept, but the Lenormand had a more direct, succinct, no holds barred, smack-in-the-face sort of personality (as far as card decks have personality, but we’ll put a pin in that for another day, too)
Until that conversation, I had a vague (possibly unfair and inaccurate) impression of Lenormand Tarot and its community being a little bit stand-offish, guarded, perhaps a smidgen elitist. Lenormand always felt like a gated community while RWS style Tarot readers felt more like a fandom, like a contemporary, dynamic collective of individuals with a shared interest and varied skill sets. I had the impression that Lenormand deck was staid, quaint and archaic like some sort of wealthy widow in a mansion in a Nancy Drew mystery book.
But, like I said, I could be wrong.
Let’s find out together.
The Learn With Me: Lenormand Tarot series will post on Wednesdays.
Next up: Weekend Update where we take a closer looks at this week’s “growing energy” card from Monday’s Energy Path reading for this week, the Five of Cups.
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Odinsday? Odin (Woden) is the source of our name for Wednesday. Plus I have an irrational like for alliteration. On Wednesday (generally speaking, barring last minute squirrel rave changes) I’ll post a reading from an oracle card, or in this case, one of the unconventional or expansion pack cards from the Alleyman’s Tarot. I plan to combine the Alleyway Oracle cards when they arrive with this portion of the Alleyman’s deck. That will give me one huge Alley based RWS -ish Tarot deck and one huge oracle-ish deck. You’ll probably see both a lot because the Alley aesthetic that Publishing Goblin has created with all of the “alley” cards to day remain my favorite to date.
“Learn With Me” posts will take the place of oracle posts on Wednesdays if one of those series are in progress.
Next Wednesday, September 20th, we’ll start a new series featuring the Healing Light Lenormand by Christopher Butler copyright 2021 © year Lo Scarabeo srl, via Cigna 110, 10155 Torino, Italy. All rights reserved, used by permission.
See you at the next sip!
The Wheel turns into the weekend.
Yesterday was quite a week as they say. I personally am very glad to see the weekend get here. I’m also still into the idea of revisiting the energy path reading from Monday to see if and how anything has unfolded now that it is, thankfully, Friday. Four days is nothing so the changes won’t be dramatic, ever.
Time does keep turning, just like the Wheel major arcana card. “Churning” comes to mind as well as an active old-fashioned water wheel or the paddle wheel of an old Mississppi River steam boat.
On Monday, the “growing energy” card in the pathway layout was the Wheel. It is by nature a churning, changing, dynamic kind of energy. I think the Wheel’s energy has increased a bit over the past few days. My sense of it for the next few days life will be on the energetic side. This is a major arcana card, after all. I hear (‘hear’ meaning the intuition comes as words instead of mental images) “dating” “social” – in other words it is a good time to get out and around and be social if you are feeling it.
Spirit, energy, life, the universe and everything doesn’t care about our expectations much less our calendars and schedules. In the bigger picture of it all, four days really is next to nothing in the flow of time and energy. Let’s look at a bigger pattern that we’ve seen over the past few weeks of readings (August 21-28, August 28-September 9)
First there was Moon card energy both up front and underlying these current cards. There were a series of water and tide images. Tides are literally associated with the actual moon, so that certainly fits the card. First we were given the image of “slack water” that wasn’t moving much, then the tide turned and flowed inward, and now I get the image of an outward flowing tide, which would match that social, outward, dating and fun energy that came through a moment ago.
This week we have the Wheel card, which is a card of change. That part of the Wheel connects with the “natural cycles” meaning of the Moon card. The cycles meaning has been the dominant moon card meaning this whole time, and the wheel card is validating that. The wheel card is all about change, but also luck, good fortune, taking action so it gives an even stronger “the tide has turned” feeling. The Wheel takes the softer, gentler ‘natural cycles’ Moon energy and makes it much more active, energetic, churning. The tide not only has turned, but it is picking up speed.
Continuing with the water and ocean analogy, the idea of “undercurrent” comes through here. I get the feeling that a subset of us is still flowing inward, with an energy of deep introspection and a need for alone time to sit with difficult emotions and circumstances still exists. In my mind’s eye I see the Five of Cups again and now also the Hermit card.
So as always, follow and trust your own instincts. Allow what your emotions and body is telling you it needs. If you feel pulled to be out and about and are in the mood for a light, fun weekend then by all means indulge if you can. By the same token, if you feel gloomy and introspective, don’t fight it. Sitting with that side of things helps us to acknowledge, process and let go in a healthy way.
Weirdly, I get a sense that this won’t break along the expected introvert/extrovert personality lines or along any sort of pop culture stereotypical lines. It feels very individual with a mental image of mixed grains of salt and pepper. The best way I can describe the feeling is that this weekend may be a good chance of each individual of us to make friends with our inner opposite. Channel your inner Barbie – or inner Wednesday Addams – as the case may be.
No matter which side of the yin yang symbol you are feeling the most, have a good weekend! Next up: a new Energy Path reading for the week of September 11-18 will post on Monday.
See you at the next sip!
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Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot 
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