push the envelope – Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot

Introvert hard

The Four of Swords gives us permission for a little self care – or to introvert hard.

Hello and welcome to TaoCraft Short Sip: Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee.

Today’s card if the four of swords.

The 1909 public domain Waite Smith card is pictured in the blog because following this advice was well underway when I sat down to write this. It’s been one of those days for about a few weeks now.

It’s been yang, so now it’s time to be yin. What goes up must come down. When you push the envelope, you have to haul it back in.

Or to paraphrase somebody on Twitter, if you’re down, stay down there for a minute, look around and recover. You just might find those keys you lost under the sofa last week.

In the Pamela Smith card, the reclined figure has their palm pressed together. Like any good sage or mirror, this reflects whatever we the viewer project onto it. Some might see it at prayerful, but it strikes me as more thought full, with a “things that make you go hmmm” vibe.

Here I am reminded of Benedict Cumberbatches portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, and the similar hand gesture he made when Sherlock entered his “mind palace” memory technique.

Folded hands can hint at outward directed thinking at a diety, or it can be deep inward contemplation, but either way the body rests and the mind is slowed. Either way it fits the four of swords card at least in today’s energy context.

Do you bristle at catchphrases and platitudes about this sort of thing, like rest, self-care or nurturing your inner cranky child who really really needs a nap right now? If you want something that feels a little more gritty & persistent with a can-do attitude, try this: introvert HARD for a little while. Think of napping as an endurance sport. Pretend that finding an excuse to stay in and give yourself a break as a mental acuity exercise. Who says finding and wearing your comfiest clothes isn’t making an extreme fashion statement?

The four of swords and I both wish you a great weekend. Get some rest – or if you prefer, introvert HARD.

Thanks for reading and listening. Your likes, subs, follows I’ll see you at the next sip!

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Attention Span

TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee which is good if that is all the attention span we have on a … what day is it?

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

Today’s card is the Chariot in reverse.

This is one of those times where changing a card’s meaning into its opposite like the old school Tarot readers and taking the reversal to mean blocked, turbulent or complicated energy both take you to pretty much the same place. Both speak to having decreased attention. No insult to goldfish and hamsters, but they shouldn’t fly supersonic aircraft.

Neither should humans, metaphorically speaking, when they are tired, sick or otherwise have no attention span to speak of. I’m not a pilot or flight surgeon so I can’t really say what the parameters for safe flying really are. Again it’s a metaphor. It’s an interesting, attention-getting way to talk about knowing your boundaries, knowing your limits and working with them intelligently.

Brace yourself for all of the Tom Wolfe, Right stuff analogies that I love to bring to Chariot card readings. The difference is that today’s energy isn’t about being in the moment, focus, pushing the envelope or hauling it back in.

Today’s energy is about being in no fit mind space to do any of that stuff.

No one can be one hundred percent one hundred percent of the time. It’s just not how the human species is hard wired. If you look at it from the cosmic perspective it is a wonder we have any attention span at all. It is a huge wonder that we exist at all much less pay full attention to that existence.

Instead of pushing the envelope, sometimes you need to reinforce it.

Or at the very least know where your envelope is.

Socrates advised to “know thyself.” Part of knowing thyself is knowing thine limits.

It might be upside down, but it is, after all, still the Chariot card. Pay attention but this time pay attention to your fork limit. Know when you are done. Pay attention to where and when you need to hand the command seat off to a co-pilot. Know when to bring things in for a landing.

Know when to push the envelope and know when to turn tail and run from it.

You are doing everyone a favor when you do that, really. Not only do you keep yourself in good working order to fly another day, you spare other people from cleaning up the mess of your crash site.

Take care of yourself. We need you. Together we are stronger.

Thank you so much for reading and listening! I really appreciate your support, likes, subs, shares, follows, questions and comments.

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Thanks again, and see you at the next sip!

Clairvoyant Confessional #9: Sipping the Right Stuff

This is why the podcast is going cyberpunk. Put so much time into doing a self-narrated podcast that I need to skip this week’s Sunday Tarot Turnover.

Instead, I give you….Confession #9, Sipping the Right Stuff.

Transcript:

I’m a clairvoyant and I have a confession: my stuff ain’t right

Hi everyone. My name is Ronda. I read tarot, write stuff and make things.

The idea of “pushing the envelope” was made popular by Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff and the movie by the same name back in the 80s. It’s still part of the American vernacular. We’ve all heard of pushing the envelope, although it has come to mean challenging ourselves and stepping outside of our individual comfort zone rather than putting lives on the line to test the physical limits of a new aircraft.

In the movie Dennis Quaid as Gordon Cooper talks about the pilots still “out there somewhere…pushing back the outside of that envelope and hauling it back in.”

Everybody loves to talk about pushing the envelope. Nobody ever seems to talk about hauling it back in.

That’s an important part too. As I understand it a SUCCESSFUL test program is one that ends with a live pilot, an intact airplane and usable data, not a hollywood style fireball.

Which in a way, begs the question of how you define success? Success isn’t always expansive. Sometimes quality really is more important than quantity.

Which brings me back to the stuff I’m putting into this podcast. I’m not so sure it has been the right stuff.

It’s been a stretch. Starting a podcast at all was way outside of my comfort envelope. A rambling pirate radio persona like the movie Pump Up The Volume was more fun in theory than in practice. It pushed the envelope to give Clairvoyant Confessional a try. But it is time to haul the envelope back in. I’m not pulling the plug on the podcast, but I am making a change in style and aesthetics.

One thing I’ve learned from this test flight is that podcasts are valuable and fun BUT it really is about the conversation and chemistry like we had on Menage a Tarot, which, btw, is still available on itunes if you’d like to give it a listen.

I still want to offer something to the podcasting environment for anyone who is interested in Tarot and Tarot readings. BUT I also learned that vocal performance is not my strong suit. So here is the deal: the pirates and test pilots are going cyberpunk.

Thanks to the brilliant text to speech conversion available through wordpress and anchor fm for better or worse I’m letting technology take over the narration.

Clairvoyant Confessional is now the TaoCraft Tarot podcast and serves as the audio edition of the TaoCraft Tarot blog.

By letting Siri’s second cousin Remy take over the speaking part, I can put my energy into the writing part so I can give all of you the best of me and my actual clairvoyance.

Thank you for listening to Clairvoyant Confessional and its new incarnation as TaoCraft Tarot podcast. I hope you’ll stay tuned for the short sip nano-episodes that give you Tarot guidance for your day in the time it takes to sip from your morning coffee as well as the slightly longer episodes like the YouChoose Interactive readings.

As always, thank you for any likes, subs, shares, or follows that you can spare. As always, helpful links are in the episode description.

Also a special thank you to dinosoul for giving permission to use their song dimension as an outro for the past several confessional episodes.

Thanks again for listening. I’ll see you on the print side and see you at the next sip.