Weekend Substack: The Sun Tarot card, Lincoln, and Lau Tzu
He probably didn’t actually say it, but Abraham Lincoln is often quoted as saying “people are as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
I find it true, but more nuanced than it seems.
It isn’t about conjuring up pleasant feelings from nothing in a rose-glasses toxic positive kind of way.
Oh no, my friend. It is much worse than that.
Making up your mind to be happy is more likely about accepting your circumstances for what they are and allowing the natural contentment and happiness come out. Happiness is allowed, not created.
Time and again life points back to one painting for me. Not one painting but one allegorical theme in traditional Chinese paintings: The Vinegar Tasters.
The painting shows Buddha, Confucius and Lau Tzu (author of the Tao Te Ching, the originator of Taoist philosophy) Buddha and Confucius are making faces while Lao Tzu smiles. It’s been said that they think they vinegar tastes sour, bitter and sweet respectively.
That’s not quite it.
Lau Tzu isn’t just magically or delusionally conjuring up a sweet flavor without the help of any magic berries any more than we conjure up blissed-out happiness out of thin air. Lau Tzu is tasting the exact same thing as the other two. He’s just smiling because that sour and bitter vinegar tastes just exactly how vinegar is supposed to taste. He’s smiling because the vinegar is being true to its authentic nature. He’s smiling because life is what it is.
Lincoln’s making up your mind to be happy is similar. Making up your mind to be happy isn’t making happy out of thin air. Making up your mind to be happy is making friends with life and the people and the things in your life…even the parts are like a big old barrel of sour, bitter vinegar. Smile because they are being exactly what it their authentic true nature to be. Then smile because you, just maybe, can be that way too.
Sage Sips blog is Tarot in the time it takes to sip your coffee. Tune in tomorrow for a new Monday thing. See you at the next sip!
“The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn
Former MIT educator and author of Wherever You Go, There You Are (1994) – a title that I always assumed was a nod to one of my favorite movies, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension
“No matter where you go, there you are.” – Buckaroo Banzai (1984)
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I’ve said it many times. Other Tarot readers have been saying it lately too, so there must be something in the collective energy bringing it up.
There is magick in the mundane.
And by virtue of its ubiquitous everywhere-ness, magick IS mundane.
Magick is anywhere you are willing to shift your preconceived notions out of the way and allow yourself to experience it, to live it.
Western magickal tradition and Eastern philosophies like Taoism and Zen have tremendous overlap. They are all a way of going about your day to day, mundane life.
Sigmund Freud said “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” – sometimes things are just exactly what they seem to be.
Other times they are the magick in disguise.
Sometimes a yellow spot is a yellow spot, and sometimes it contains the sun.
Like Schrodinger’s Cat anything and everything holds the potential for either and both.
Whether a thing or experience is pure wonder or comfortably, delightfully commonplace is up to you. That same thing or experience might be the exact opposite for the next person who comes along.
The Magician card is about just this sort of thing. It is about the ability to manifest and transform. One of the magician’s most powerful tools is a shift in personal, internal perception.
The Magician was our growing energy card a few days ago. It still feels appropriate for this weekend. Whatever the weekend holds, may you be able to transform it into just the weekend you need.
On Monday we’ll draw another three week-ahead cards. See you at the next sip!
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Hello and welcome to the Energy Path reading for the week of September 4 – 11. I’m glad you are here.
Change and cycles are still a thing this week, but in a different way. It feels like it has moved from a general environment thing to being more personal advice. The lingering Moon card energy from the past few weeks feels like it has turned a corner, ebb is beginning to flow. The mental image here is outgoing tide, not at all the “slack water” energy from a few weeks ago.
At the same time there is emphasis on change. Now it has shifted to a more intense, personal, evolutionary change more than broad, gentle, slow, tectonic shift natural cycles.
Two other things come to mind, generally.
First, we are responsible for who we are now. Yes, life has been hard. Yes, you have experienced trauma of all sorts. Yet, you can heal, you can rise again, you can overcome. Destruction becomes disappointment becomes release.
It gets better when you get to the point where you can, at last, let it go.
“You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.” – Alan Watts
Second, as I listen to my favorite darkwave playlist-
If we choose who we are now, why do I and others choose dark, goth-ish, witchy, INTP, neon cyberpunk self-expression.
Yes, I said choose.
We could be all bright and karen and hot girl summer if we wanted to do that – but we don’t.
And we are doing right by ourselves and our souls and for society at large by doing so. I am reminded of the adage that religion is for people who want to avoid hell while spirituality is for those who have already been there. Perhaps the kindest people are the ones unafraid of the dark because they have walked there so often before.
Sometimes, the most revolutionary thing you can do for your shadow side is to admit it exists.
Why revel in what some call darkness? Consider the alternative: false, toxic positivism.
The Ten of Swords truthfully and directly acknowledges our injuries and our circumstances. The figure stays face down and flat to allow the profound change of either death or healing to begin.
This phase is fading. We’ve been down, so to speak, but the tide is turning. It is time to once again rise.
We rise, not fully transformed, but with lingering disappointment. Traces of old experience can cling. Now is a time of contemplation, of coming to understand what happened and is happening. Swords may be intellect and action, with a certain physicality to it all, if not from our physical person then from our social environment. The Five of Cups is about the emotional aftermath of whatever the Ten of Swords represents for you.
Growing energies are the Wheel. This is the change of the death card plus the cyclic nature of the Moon card plus the transformation energy of the Magician card all rolled into one. We are coming to a potent time of change, and a potent time of choosing the person we will be five minutes from now.
We are under no obligation to be the person we were before but we are under every obligation to choose who we will become five minutes from now.
Lightly edited reprise from Thanksgiving season last year:
You are just perfectly enough just exactly as you are.
Right here. Right now. You already are all you need to be in this moment. Take a deep breath. Are you in any real danger right this very second? If you are, what in the living heck are you doing reading a blog? Take care of yourself for goodness sake!
But if you are reading this, chances are things are OK enough to allow for a little screen time. Even if things are fantastic, take a little time off from that emotional energy and let the time it takes to read this be a bubble of emotional rest for you.
Today’s card is the King of Cups, in reverse. Like we’ve talked about before, I read inversions pretty much the same as upright cards, taking all of the keywords and meanings into consideration all of the time anyway. If the card turns over upside down relative to the person doing the reading, or “reversed” as we call it, it looks right side up to a person on the other side of the table. In three dimensional space, a card can be upright or reversed literally depending on your point of view. Considering the big picture is key in this kind of work. Abstractions, ideas, archetypes, and intuitive nudges all make a tiny bit more sense when you keep it all in perspective in mind during the whole card reading process. When you think big picture, the orientation of the card on the table matters less.
In any reading, public collective or private, a reversal speaks more to the position in the layout than the individual card. Layout position plus a reversed card is a clue to an area of life that may be conflicted, slowed, problematic or blocked. In a one card reading, a reversal can mean a broadly applicable slowing or turbulence in the person’s energies or in the collective, zeitgeist energy
Or not.
Freud once said that “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Sometimes a reversed card is just a random happenstance from shuffling the deck.
Except today. Today the King of Cups came up reversed and it feels like it means it.
The reversed King of Cups is about emotional maturity. It connects to the feeling of defeat and brokenness that the Ten of Swords spoke about in “The Lemonade” post recently.
Clairaudience (intuitive hearing) gives the words “Own what you feel.”
2022 may be more bittersweet in retrospect than we realized. (Which is what brought this old post to mind. It resonates a little with yesterdays reading and that trace of melancholy and bittersweet remembrance.)
My mind again goes to those lost to gun violence, or as one newscaster put it to all the chairs that will be tragically empty this holiday season. It is perfectly understandable how grief of this magnitude can leave its mark on the collective energy, both on a conscious and unconscious level. Emotions of every kind tend to run high during the holiday season.
Whatever the emotion, whatever the intensity, whatever the reason, you have to own them and validate them even if no one else will. The emotions exist. They are valid and they are real and, more importantly, they are yours. How you express them and how you act upon them are your responsibility just like a kingdom is the responsibility of the king.
Once acknowledged, emotions can be let go. Once understood, they are less likely to resurface in disruptive ways. It’s not magic. It’s social science. It’s human psychology.
And it’s how Tarot works. Tarot works, not to accurately predict the future, but to help us own and understand our emotions. Psychologist Carl Jung taught that “Until the unconscious is made conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Tarot helps us find exactly that kind of insight.
It’s not my intention to equate Tarot readings with qualified clinical therapy, or a cure for any sort of mental health issue. It is, however, a great tool for stress management and personal growth for a healthy individual. I say that based on hundreds of readings over the course of twenty years of doing public professional Tarot readings and thirty years of using Tarot for myself. Time and time and time over again I would see people relax as a reading progressed. As we talked about new ideas, explored possibilities and validated their own intuitive hunches, shoulders would go down, foreheads would smooth. As readings go on, people would sit back in their chairs and the tone of their voice would soften. The easing of emotional tension was obvious, even to someone with no formal psychology or body language training.
Tarot works by helping us all own our emotions, understand our situations and create a more reasoned way forward.
Tarot doesn’t predict our fate, it frees us from it.
*Po-tay-toes!* Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew… Lovely big golden chips with a nice piece of fried fish.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (movie 2001)
Some days don’t feel magical. Some days you just have to peel the damn potatoes.
But if you can do that, when you get through the ordinary, there is magic at the end. Or at least a meal full of filling, satisfying, starchy comfort.
Today is a little like potatoes for me. It is utterly, delightfully, magically ordinary. It is a day off from the day job – but no pressing errands, no frenzy of summer recreation. Just simple household things to do.
This is where the magic lives.
We talk about attracting and manifesting and living our dreams. But where will the dream live? Where are we attracting TO? Manifested dreams live in our ordinary world, regardless of whether you attracted them there – or if they were there all along just waiting to be seen. Either way, the path to magick is lined with ordinary days.
You may not think it takes courage to live an ordinary day. For some, an ordinary day is a monumental task, made large and seemingly insurmountable by every type and kind of human challenge. For others an ordinary day is a precious commodity made rare by stress and circumstance.
You never know when ordinary will make you a dashing hero or when the potatoes you peeled will light a child’s smile for the golden chips that they made.
Have courage, do the ordinary, and look for the magic that hides there every day.
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Bringing the week in for a landing with a look back at the Page of Cups
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Some weeks, energies linger. Some weeks they grow and fade slowly or by small amounts.
This morning feels like one of those 90 degree lightcycle turns from the movie Tron.
Last weekend and earlier this week there was a very active, warrior archetype energy. Today “spooling down” comes to mind. It feels like we’ve just landed a plane and are going through the power-down checklist. It feels like the end of a cycle much bigger than a day or a week. The cycle may even be something that has been brewing in the background for you for the past 12 to 18 months. I read somewhere that this is the time of year that the Maori people celebrate new year…a thread from Neil DeGrasse Tyson maybe? Something about the New Year for them being tied to the rising of Pleiades during southern hemisphere winter. Anyway – even though we are in the middle of the “dog days” of summer here, cycles of nature within cycles of nature can be found anywhere, almost anytime.
It makes sense that the Page of Cups energy is stepping forward today.
Usually the Page of Cups, the “growing energy” card from Monday’s Energy Path reading, has a playful feel, acting as a reminder of life’s absurdities. It has a much different tone today. All of the cup’s court cards have an element of emotional depth to them. Instead of the absurd, the fish is resonating with its classic symbolism representing the human psyche. Today instead of looking life’s absurdities in the eye, we are being asked to look ourselves in the eye and know our own depths.
When I’m reverse engineering a collective energy reading into a previously chosen card like this, sometimes I’ll browse quote sources like BrainyQuotes.com or Goodreads.com for inspiration. That’s how I found “I want you to be everything you feel is you, deep in the center of your being.” It is attributed to Confucius. I’m no expert on the Analects or Chinese translation, but it doesn’t strike me as something Confucius would say. It sounds vastly more contemporary.
Confucius or not, it does resonate with Socrates’ famous “Know thyself.” You have to have some idea about what is deep within in order to live it, to be it.
I connect this to today’s Page of Cups two ways.
First is just that. Look deep. Know thyself so you can be and live thyself fully and authentically.
Second I want to go back to the idea of resonance that we’ve talked about before.
When you are reading Tarot (for yourself or for others) you want to know what is internal and what is external – know what is really your mood and what is you vibrating along with the overall, general, zeitgeist sort of energies. That is as true for energies that are winding down as when they are starting up.
A helpful way to sort that out is to focus on your energy boundaries. Sometimes that is put into words as “strengthening your aura” or “Closing your energy field”.
Try this: Lace your fingers together, then close your eyes and imagine you are surrounded by a colorful soap bubble. How does it feel. What do you sense as the difference (if any) between ‘in here’ and ‘out there’? If your shielded energy is the same as before, the sense of things is coming from the inside – its you. If it is different – it is still you, but a you that is strongly vibing to external conditions.
Today ‘in here’ is jamming to Stanton Moore and feeling pretty nominal in the mission control sense of the word – everything is in normal limits, no alarms.
Out there is that end of cycle, coming in for an uneventful landing shift in energy.
Either way, this weekend is a good time for ‘normal’ not to push, shift into yin from a long time of yang
Either way, I wish you a good weekend. See you Monday for the next Energy Path for next week!
Thanks for reading! See you at the next sip! – Sage
Six of Pentacles and quote from freethinker Rober Ingersoll
Quote via goodreads.com
Robert Ingersoll was a nineteenth century writer, speaker and lawyer famous at that time as an agnostic and freethought advocate.
The Six of Pentacles is about the flow of abundance and generosity. It often speaks about generosity of spirit as much as it talks about money or physical things.
Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot 
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