Tag: quote

How Tarot Still Works

Behind the scenes peek: what Tarot *really* does for you.

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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.

Ordinary Days

The road to magick is lined with ordinary days.

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*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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Deep

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

Give As You Claim

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.

Advance – in an inward direction

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card: public domain, quote via brainyquote.com, photo by the author

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Psychic Tuning Forks

Several sips of intuition behind the scenes

If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration

Nikola Tesla

I’m not saying that tuning forks can be used in any sort of psychic way. I’m saying that psychics sorta work like tuning forks – sometimes. I’m not saying that this science explains psychics or that there is any kind of causal relationship here. I’m using this objective physics demonstration as an analogy to describe and communicate something a psychic or intuitive might experience.

K?

So all of you pedantic skeptics out there just listen for a minute. Science is the best method we have for figuring stuff out – especially physical world stuff. But in 500 plus years of years of screwing around and writing stuff down as Adam Savage put it, science hasn’t wrapped its head and arms entirely around everything, particularly when it comes to things like consciousness, philosophy, and other internal, subjective esoterica. But that, again, is a post for another day.

For now, for all of you wonderful, terrific people who have been following the main website blog, to you first and foremost, I want to thank you. I know everybody says it, but really I couldn’t do this without you. That goes triple for my private clients and ko-fi Tarot Table members. I really REALLY couldn’t do this without you. Thank you, and thank you again.

image: bitmoji

Second – sorry for all the repetition headed your way. I want to use the next week of free-for-all posts to introduce Sage Words Tarot (plus some faves from the Modern Oracle / TaoCraft Tarot archives) to the paid subscription part of the Ko-Fi blog and Substack newsletter.

Which explains why I’m back to talking about resonance again today.

Looking back to late 2019 and very early 2020, it really is remarkable how many similar questions came to Tarot readings. It seems like there was a whole cadre of people who felt like something was wrong but couldn’t quite figure out what. They felt disconnected and worried about the future for no real reason. Those were the advanced students. They were the perceptive folks who sensed the storm on the horizon that we all were about to face: pandemic lockdowns.

To no one’s surprise that pattern continued for a year or so.

Reading after reading combined with a healthy dose of my own experience, it became pretty clear what was going on. All of the collective fear, anger and anxiety about the pandemic combined with the political climate in the United State was creating a toxic energy brew that was ringing a lot of intuitive bells regardless of our awareness of it.

I like the word zeitgeist, that German word for the mood and spirit of a time, or in other words the energy of the time. Sometimes energy sensitive people will vibe with the energy around them so strongly it feels like it is coming from the inside. Outside energy makes their own tennis balls bounce so to speak.

Please, take a moment and watch the publicly available demonstration on YouTube with the tuning forks. When the conditions are just so, the untouched tuning fork vibrates from the air pressure – the sound – created from the other tuning fork of the same frequency. The second tuning fork is energy sensitive. The second tuning fork wasn’t being whacked by a mallet. It was only being whacked by the air pressure waves created by the OTHER tuning fork that was being whacked by the mallet. The tennis balls are only hanging around so you can see when the second tuning fork is moving or not.

To put it in woo woo terms instead of physics terms…the second tuning fork was reading the energy environment. The tennis balls are like Tarot cards helping to make the whole energy thing more visible and understandable.

Now imagine a whole bunch of tuning forks. Only a few have tennis balls to make the energy a little more visual. Imagine the crowd of tuning forks all have a wide range of sensitivity. Some vibrate to sound a little easier than others. Now imagine the tuning fork that is getting whacked with the mallet is bigger and much louder than usual. It puts out much stronger air pressure sound waves. The non-whacked (resonant) tuning forks all around are vibing stronger than usual, and the ones that usually don’t react to the environmental sound start to vibrate.

Like I said, this isn’t any sort of explanation, just a broad analogy. So it isn’t perfect, but it is telling that matching frequencies are needed for the resonant phenomenon to happen. Moods and emotions can be as contagious as a new virus. When the world tipped into pandemic, all of the fear and worry zipped around the globe right along with it. Because the frequency was one of fear, anger and anxiety, that is the emotions the energy sensitives felt. That’s how the vibe felt to them.

Psychic sensitives didn’t predict it – they just heard the sound at a lower volume and their tennis balls started bouncing before everyone else’s. They read the energy and picked up on the zeitgeist early in the process.

Go back to the video demonstration. Now imaging what would happen if you put a big bell jar over top of the resonant second tuning fork with the tennis balls. You would dampen the sound and possibly stop the second tuning fork from sounding at all.

That’s great if you want to shut out an uncomfortable sound or metaphoric emotion, but the problem is that it would also shut out all of the sounds, all of the frequencies, all the vibes and all of the feelings. That’s generally not an emotionally healthy thing. If it’s your job to read energy and turn it into helpful communication, not being able to read the vibe is a straight up problem.

So what do you do?

A big scary thing is hammering away at a really big tuning fork set to the fear, isolation and anxiety frequency and it feels for all the world like YOU are afraid, isolated and anxious.

Here is what works for me.

Go shields up (or bell jar down) but just briefly.

My intuition is predominantly visual. We call that clairvoyant. I get a fair amount of mental words, sound or music to go with the mental images. That’s called clairaudient. Intuition can come as smells, tastes or physical sensations too, but that seems to be much less common.

If I ever wonder if a particular emotion is welling up for a reason or if it is just the collective zeitgeist making itself known, I tend to use a visualization technique. I use imagination, which is a valid and powerful thing. Imagination may be play for children, but it can be a powerful tool for emotional health when it is wielded by a thoughtful adult.

Try this and see what you think….

The next time you feel a strong emotion or a random mood hits or find yourself in a funk “for no reason” try a little self check.

Imagine something that protects you. Imagine something around you like a protective bubble. Something bigger like that big bell jar from before or a science fiction force field or that real force field that makes same-pole magnets repel each other. If it feels better imagine yourself in a cloak that protects you. Or literally put on a jacket or wrap yourself in a blanket. Whatever you choose, use your imagination to infuse that image or that thing with the ability to shield you from any outside influence. Use your imagination to set the intention that what you feel while you are thus protected is an true and clear insight into your own emotions. It is a fair amount of mental gyration just to simply focus on you and allow yourself to feel whatever you yourself genuinely feel…but we need that sometimes.

Sometimes we need some little bit of ritual or imagination to disrupt our mundane, everyday patterns and shake us out of our mental habits in order to face our emotions for what they are.

Most of the time, I’m pleasantly surprised.

I’ll go a little starship captain and give the “shields up” order and suddenly it is all “HEY! It’s kinda nice and happy in here!” Or, to continue the Sci Fi reference, if there are Klingons off the starboard bow, I can take action to handle it.

Once you know what is internal response and what is outside sensitivity, then you can do something to help the situation.

Setting owning your emotions and healthy emotional boundaries is doing something.

Thank you so much for reading and listening.

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Next up, pathway through the week reading tomorrow morning. See you at the next sip!

Portal to the New

Sometimes the best way to is through – don’t give up!sag

In his classic science fiction novel, Dune, Frank Herbert famously wrote

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Hello and welcome to the Sage Words Tarot blog and Sage’s Short Sip Tarot podcast. I don’t have much to add to Frank Herbert’s famous quote because that essentially sums up the reading for this week.

That, and I also intuitively hear that “the best way around is through.”

The quiet, introspective, introverted, wait, watch, listen energy from last couple of weeks is still lingering for the collective zeitgeist if you are reading or listening to this close to the time when its posted. If you are coming across this at a later time, The Queen of Cups is validating any emotional fatigue or philosophical, thinking, introspective feelings you may have experienced recently. The 1909 Pamela Smith artwork we see in today’s card draw video shows the queen of cups near water, gazing into a cup. Sometimes that has intuition connections and you might resonate with the idea of fortune telling. The stories of Nostradamus gazing into a bowl of water to make his predictions come to mind. I don’t know if that was an inspiration for the artist or not. My sense is that the connection for this week is to the idea of water representing the depths of the human psyche and the queen is gazing to understand deep emotions and subconscious motives more than some superficial, shallow movie style prediction.

This energy is in the fading position, so the time is coming soon when we need to ease up on plumbing our psychological and emotional depths. Knock it off with the emo for a little bit. We need to go heads up and eyes open for a little bit.

There is a certain practicality to the Devil Card. This week it is asking us to take up the terrifying task of staring reality in the eye. There are things in this world we can’t control. There are terrible people making terrible decisions. Malicious intent exists. Putting it on the line to stand up for yourself and stand up for what is right is a fearful thing.

Which takes us back to the Litany Against Fear. Sometimes the only way around is through.

Here I am reminded of a scene from the pulp fiction based 1985 movie Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. Granted, we aren’t talking about super brainy high class cinema here, but it is a fun movie. One of my favorite parts is where Chun, the martial arts master tells student Remo “Fear is just a feeling. You feel hot. You feel hungry. You feel angry. You feel afraid. Fear can never kill you.”

Which also reminds us of the very real life quote from President Franklin Roosevelt that “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.“

Whenever we confront external danger we are confronting our own fear as well.

Sometimes the demons we most need to slay are the internal ones.

Only then are we free to begin and begin and begin again if we need to do that. The Fool reminds us that we can begin again as many times as we need. Moment by moment if necessary. Sometimes the only way to that new moment is through the fear we feel in this one.

Thank you so much for reading and listening!

This free to access Tarot blog and podcast is supported by your purchases, memberships and virtual coffees on the Sage Words Tarot ko-fi page. Please visit the links below and in the podcast episode description. Any likes, follows or shares you can spare are greatly appreciated. Private readings are still open, with no appointment needed for email.

Thanks again. See you at the next sip!

Let Your Brain Abide

“Let your brain abide” is advice from the Nine of Swords that is easier said than done.

Hello Sippers!

One of these days, I’ll come up with a creative, fun way to begin and end these things. In the meantime, hello! And welcome to the Daily Sip membership on ki-fi, Sage’s Sip of Tarot podcast and the Sage Words Tarot Blog.

The Daily Sip will sometimes share a card with my posts on other platforms, but the Daily Sip gets it first – sometimes by a lot. The Daily Sip is the one and only place where I post every single weekday. The free blog is the only place for long reads and weekend posts. The podcast, the YouTube channel and the socials are not on any schedule whatsoever. Following both blogs is the only way to get absolutely everything if you are at all interested in doing that, and believe me I am grateful if you are. Member or not, you might as well follow the free blog on my main website because it is, you know…free.

As much as we might not want to admit it, Friday is technically a weekday, so here we are. Weekdays I focus on the “short sip” one card format where we get a Tarot contemplation for our day in the time it takes to sip from our coffee. Or tea. Or adult beverage. Or whatever it is that you sip at the time of day when you read (or hear) this.

The nine of swords is one of those cards where the interpretation seems to strongly rely on the artwork of the particular deck you are using. The Three of Swords, for example, always seems to give the same vibe regardless of the deck or image. This nine gets some interesting refinements in the way it connects with the image on the card. The classic Pamela Smith artwork prompts key words like regrets, worry, anxiety – anything that keeps running through your mind and keeping you awake at night. Corrin McCullough’s Nine of Swords from the Alleyman’s Tarot deck hints at genuine terror, and any overwhelming dark emotion.

The Witches Tarot with artwork by Mark Evans is one of my favorites all around, but particularly for the nine of swords. It hints at a whiff of self-sabotage and the guidebook author Ellen Dugan nails it with the phrase “drama queen.”

Underneath it all, however factually serious the objective, external situation may (or may not) be, the subjective, emotional, internal situation is dark, intense and dire.

So what do we do about that. My philosophy about Tarot has always been that Tarot (or any psychic reading or divination method for that matter) does not tell you what will happen in life, it helps you figure out what to do when life happens. So what do you do when you life over-runs you with intense dark emotions?

Oddly enough – nothing. This totally falls into the “easier said than done” category of advice.

Actually it’s not nothing … it is more like allow the emotions to run their course. When it comes to something as painful as this level of so called negative emotion, allowing is not nothing. The hard part is convincing your brain to abide with profoundly uncomfortable emotions for a while. The crushing and terrifying moments are as much a part of a normal human existence as the joyous and euphoric moments.

This is where life’s inevitable change is your friend. Where there is capacity for change, yes, there is the possibility of things getting worse, but there is equal capacity for change toward the better, too.

When it is the darkest night, dawn follows. When a tide of emotions wash over you know that they will, eventually, recede.

I’m a science fiction fan. The famous litany against fear from 1965 classic novel Dune actually works. In its full version, it talks about exactly the same strategy in the face of strong emotion that the nine of swords card points toward today. In the words of Frank Herbert:

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Thank you all for reading the blog and listening to the podcast! I’ll see you all Monday for the big sip, for the whole cuppa Tarot when we do a full three card pathway reading for the week ahead.

See you at the next sip!

From the sublime to the strange

Alrighty then.

Hello and welcome to Sage Words Tarot blog and the audio podcast version Sage’s Short Sip Tarot.

Merry Monday everyone!

This is what I call a Pathway layout for our reading that is intended to look ahead at the week coming up. I’m writing this on February 20 for the week from now until the 27th, but you can apply it anytime that you watch it if it feels right to you. The way I read Tarot isn’t tied to time any more than it is tied to physical space. That’s how and why that Tarot over distance by email, phone, zoom meeting, blogs and podcasts all work. That’s why they are as valid of an art form and as valid of a source of inspiration as any other Tarot reading.

A private reading with this layout will have a slightly different focus, intensity and level of detail compared to these general energy reading that we do here, but they function the same way at the core. The focus is the energy environment. This is a read of the zeitgeist to give you ideas how to best navigate the energies and situations at hand. Like have said for years – Tarot isn’t about predicting what will happen in life, it is about figuring out what to do when life happens.

The Pathway layout parallels the old style past, present, future layout that inspired it, but it is more about the flow of energy rather than the flow of time. It can help us navigate the near future, but the near future for the collective energy can mean hours, days or weeks for an individual. It really is up to you to consider, accept or reject, and then apply any given intuitive information no matter whether the reading is in person or at a distance, individual or collective.

In my version of the pathway layout, instead of past, present and future the cards symbolize energies that are fading, the strongest energy around right now and energies that are growing in strength or influence. It is very much like a weather report. There are no inevitable warnings in Tarot like there is with weather, but it can hint at what is possible, even probable. It’s the personal enrichment version of take your coat because a cold front is coming.

When I do a private reading, I start with a paragraph I call the “general pattern.” That part looks at the layout as a whole and considers things like repeating numbers, the ratio of major to minor arcana, and in the longer readings, the proportions of the various minor arcana suits. This is also a good time to talk about any purely intuitive impressions that pop up right off the bat.

If you have followed the blog or listened to the podcast for any amount of time you already know about the see, hear and feel thing.

When I say “see” it means the intuitive impression comes in the form of a mental image. “Hear” means it is an impression of words or music. “Feel” most often a vague hunch, one of those “I don’t know why but…” sort of things. It almost never means a physical sensation, so that gets special mention if it happens. Don’t hold your breath for that one.

In this case, three cards aren’t really enough to comment about minor arcana ratios. The flow reads from right to left. I’m an English speaker, so it helps the connection to intuition to disconnect it from the way language reading flows. Here we see two minor arcana cards flowing into a major arcana card which hints at building energies just ahead. Things are heading in a direction of more energy, more change, and a faster pace. I also intuitively hear the song “People Are Strange” by The Doors. I’m guessing this means there is a chance of things sliding off the rails, going a little pear shaped or just plain getting weird. Remember, it is easier to put out a small fire than a big one. Forewarned is forearmed as the old adage goes. This isn’t predicting that something bad is going to happen. This saying that there is potential for strange days – like the weather analogy. Bring a jacket because it might be chilly this evening – that sort of thing.

The diminishing energies are represented by the Ace of Wands. Wands cards are connected to the element of fire and our inner passions. This connects to some one card readings I’ve been doing the past several days. Not all of them were public, so no details, but the basic vibe of it all was plant your seeds now. The energy is right for new projects to have good outcomes.

The window for that is closing…so don’t wait. Plant those seeds, follow those passions so you can move on to the business ahead and also protect those delicate beginnings you just planted so to speak.

The Page of Cups is one of my personal favorite cards. For it I ‘hear’ “embrace the strange” which is another way of saying roll with it. The more adaptable and fluid you are, the better the week will go for you. It fits that this message comes through a cups card, since cups are associated with the element water. Here I am reminded of the famous Bruce Lee quote “Be water my friend.” It might be weird, but go with it. This is the vibe that is strongest right now and will be the greatest help in the transition from the diminishing Ace of Wands energy to the growing Tower energy.

The Tower is the surprise, big, sudden game changer of an event or energy shift. Some associate The Tower with chaos, and the opportunities that can lie within chaos. I like to think it can also be a world changing shift in perception. It can represent a sudden insight, the brain wave, the AH-HA moment that changes everything, especially if you are able to put it into action. Here I am also reminded of the “Lighting in a Bottle” card from Dane Asmund’s excellent Alleyman’s Tarot deck. Not all sudden change is bad. It can hold opportunity like the classic meaning for the card and the old proverb says.

Making the most of those kind of bolt-from-the-blue situations is seldom fun or easy, but worth the effort in the long run. Like we talked about in the “The Makings of Magic” post and podcast episode, if you are going to catch lighting in a bottle you have to stand in some thunderstorms.

At this point in private readings, I talk about any crystals, aromatherapy or other intuitive impressions that may come through. Those are far to individual to put in a general audience reading like this. The best advice I can give at this point is to use whatever supports your adaptability. Use whatever healthy coping you knows help you stand strong in a sudden storm. This is a chance draw from your experience…or maybe learn some new things for later…but now is the time for rolling with any lightning strikes so you can catch it in that proverbial bottle.

Thank you so much for reading and listening. Any likes, subs, follows, shares or virtual coffees you can spare are always gratefully appreciated. Podcast folks can, as always, find the related links in the episode description.

Tune in next Monday for our next look at the next week ahead. Daily Sip members, tune in every weekday for a Tarot contemplation in the time it takes to sip from your coffee every weekday.

See you at the next sip!