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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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Organized August?

How do you organize a rave?

I’m only writing this to get myself organized. Maybe. Everything here is subject to sudden, random, unannounced changes. Let the squirrel rave of life begin!

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  • All blog and social media content is intended for fun and personal enrichment only. These posts read general, zeitgeist, collective energies. If it resonates for you personally – great! If a post doesn’t resonate for you personally, please try a private reading or browse the archives with the search bar.
  • Monday: Three card energy path reading. This is the same format as a private “pathway” reading with me by email. EMAIL READINGS ARE MY SPECIALTY and I hope these readings 1. show you how useful email readings are and 2. gives you a good start to the new week.
  • Tuesday: day job day – private email readings only
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  • Friday: revisit the “growing energy” card from Monday’s reading to update for the weekend. Maybe. Might be other topics, might be a fresh one card draw or I may blow it off entirely depending on the day and intuition.
  • Saturday: posting on Sage’s Other Words about non-Tarot topics, if anything. Maybe nothing, depending on what’s going on.
  • Sunday: closed. (It’s not a religious thing…it just fits the schedule)

Squirrel phot0 is public domain as best as I can tell.

“I don’t have ducks. I don’t have rows. I have squirrels and they are hosting a pagan rave” – unknown

“The world around me has changed, and I have learned to adapt but not change. But I’m changing into the woman I am meant to be.” – Aurora

Stay Frosty

The energy week ahead: Stay frosty, cooler heads will prevail.

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Hello and welcome to the Energy Path reading for July 24-31, 2023. If you are reading this at another time, chances are it is a more personal reading of the path ahead just by virtue of you finding it when you did.

Apologies for the technical glitches last week. It looks like some important edits didn’t make it to the final posts, like the growing energy card. OOPS. No point correcting now that we have moved on to new cards. Like that river we can’t step in twice, energy keeps flowing. So let’s move on to this week’s cards

  • Fading energy: The Hanged Man
  • Current energy: Strength
  • Growing energy: Three of Swords

The Hanged man is back as our fading energy. The hanged man has been hanging around in a number of readings I’ve done lately. I forget exactly when it was or what card it was associated with, but there was a reading here in the blog that gave the feeling and mental image of a plane that had come in for a night time landing on its last flight for the day and was powering down for the night. It even gave the mental image of a stewardess saying goodnight to the final passengers to leave as the pilot was going through a close-down checklist of some sort.

I thought it was a wonderful feeling. Whenever it was a little powering down was just what I needed. Other people I’ve talked to lately are feeling a little frustrated with the pace of things. That powered-down feeling has been around for a while now. So if Hanged Man is fading, that is good news for them. Even for those of us who welcomed a much needed respite, a new influx of energy isn’t necessarily bad. To continue with that airplane image, it feels like the sun is coming up. Even though the rest is over, it feels like a return to routine, nothing overwhelming. “A good day of flying” so to speak.

“Strong silent type” comes to mind with the current energy Strength card. That meme of baby Yoda – Grogu – calmly sipping his soup as an absolutely chaotic battle rages around him comes to mind. Very Zen. Or, like a meditating Samurai, very focused strength. Save your energy for the important things. Work smarter, not harder. Cooler heads prevail this week. Head over heart this week. If you are into 1980s movies, think about the first Top Gun movie. Be Iceman, not Maverick this week.

Which is a pretty good trick when half the world is enduring health-compromising potentially lethal heat.

Sweltering temperatures have always gotten on humanity’s last remaining nerve. As the dog days drag on, there is potentially a LOT of irritability out there. over the next couple of weeks, potentially until mid August. I’m not saying be a doormat. I’m not saying to excuse the BS. The advice here is to just not add to the stinking heap of irritability if you can help it. This vibe is starting a little early this year it seems. I wouldn’t be surprised if things didn’t really break until mid-August or so. Until then the three of swords might be stabbing at everyone’s patience and goading our pettiness.

Thanks for reading!

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Thanks again. Stay chill and I’ll see you at the next sip!

Alleyman’s Tarot Deck used with permission Publishing Goblin LLC. End image: Bitmogi free app

Looking Forward to the Weekend

Two of Wands Tarot: Liminal space helps us look forward

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Earlier this week, we looked at three cards for the week. The growing energy was…and is…the two of wands.

The collective energy is a little bit of a tough read this morning. It is a swirl of collective individualism. It feels a little like an abstract pointillist painting – any patterns or pictures that are made of uncountable individual dots. I’m also getting mental images of other abstract art: Jackson Pollack, acrylic paint pours or water marbled crafts. Even in social gatherings it feels like each individual is an island unto themselves with a inner focus, contemplative, day-dreaming quality.

For some, it might feel really lonely and isolated. I get a tinge of regrets, and looking back.

That might be where the two of wands comes in.

It is advice leaning even more today than it was 5 days ago. There is a sense that we are being asked to deliberately look forward, find hope, and hang in there with every claw on our little kitten paws, just like the meme.

More than that, my attention is even more strongly drawn to the idea of liminal space and the “standing on the threshold” quality of the figure between the two staffs, the two wands.

I’ve only started reading Laura Tempest Zarkof’s book Weaving The Liminal. I’m taking this as a hint to pick that up again this weekend.

For the collective, think of terms like liminal, terminal (like an airport terminal or travel hub with changes and connections) portal, gateway…

Places like that are intensely present-moment. It makes sense out of the natural retrospective energy combined with the advice to look ahead in hope…

It makes sense.

Evaluating where we are and understanding how we got here is essential to getting where we want to go next. They are necessary to calling what we need to us.

Pay attention to your connection to the universe on its largest scale. In that large, cosmic perspective you are never alone and there is always hope.

If you are part of the majority who has the weekend off from work, the energy now is a good chance to spend some quality time with yourself to think about the path that has brought you here and what is your next step.

If you are one of those at work – thank you. Whatever your next days off may be has a good chance of giving you this same opportunity for contemplation.

In short, find a mental and emotional sanctuary that helps you to transition from the past, however hard, to a more hopeful view of the future.

Meanwhile, I’m going to go read more of that book.

Next up, the energy path reading for next week. See you at the next sip!

Brighter Horizon

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Today’s cards:

  • Fading Energy: Three of Swords
  • Current Energy: The Fool
  • Growing Energy:

I’ve been asked before why it is that different readers readers give different readings for the same card.

There are a variety of reasons, and any one or any combination of them could factor into it when you get very different readings about the same identical card.

First is the passage of time. As ancient Greek philosopher Hericlitus put it, a man can’t cross the same river twice because it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Time passes and your situation changes just like water flows through a river so it is different water each time you step in.

Past readings have an effect on you. Time passes and you grow and change. You are a different person than you were the last time that card was read for you.

Different time, different water, different person: you can’t cross the same Tarot card twice. If you do it is pretty astounding and you should definitely pay attention to what intuition / spirit is trying to tell you.

Three days ago we talked about the Page of Cups and last week’s end-of-week vibe. Things have shifted again already.

Sometimes the river current is faster than others.

Apparently it is flowing fairly quickly here. I expect this week will step through the three cards fairly quickly, too. It will be interesting to see if that proves true by the time we get to Friday’s “weekend update” post.

Because of that pace, I think the “fading energy” layout position of the three of swords is significant, to the point of giving a “don’t” or “kick this energy to the curb” sort of message.

The three of sword’s nature is cautioning anyway. Heads up, watch your back – don’t. I ‘hear’ “tiny heartbreak” When I put this card & energy into the context of the whole reading, I get “don’t make little disappointments into big heartbreaks.”

The Fool card is, of course, about beginnings.

In most RWS based Tarot decks, a human figure is shown posed between two poles, the two wands. This draws my attention to the “threshold” key word associated with the card. It looks like a doorway. This card hints at magickal, liminal space, a gateway to something important or a portal where we can draw in what is wanted and needed. Whatever your thoughts about attraction and manifestation, this card can be read as something new on the horizon.

The “new beginning” big major arcana energy from the Fool card combined with the liminal, doorway, portal, energy from the Two of Wands weights the whole layout on the side of forward thinking hopefullness.

Bring it all together and we get a week that starts off a little off kilter, on edge, on the lookout for who-knows-what kind of funky mojo, but rapidly moves to something new and more hopeful.

Today feels a little weird, but at the same time it feels like something brighter is on the horizon.

Hang in there.

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

Learn with Me: Oracle Dice, Act With Justice

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 think the universe is telling me to stop screwing around and get back to Taijiquan and Qi Gong practice. Maybe not right this second, but you know, more often than lately. In addition to all of the physical and mental health benefits, martial arts is a spiritual happy place for me. I’ve only ever studied Chinese styles. It’s chicken or egg which came first: affinity for Taoist thought or Tai Chi classes, but they both are my happy place. When I’m not in yin magician mode, Yang warrior mode is the place to be. And I’ve noticed a fair bit of warrior archetype energy around lately.

First it was the Ace of Wands over the weekend:

(I really appreciate it when you follow the sage sips blog, follow the socials, like, share etc so you don’t miss any incidental stuff like this…Thanks!)

There is the obvious connection with today’s dice – the action die under the Knight of Action lord card.

The “judgement” face first turned up when we were rolling to find the 7 learning dice out of the 22 dice in the whole set. This die as a whole combined with the lord card is very much a blend of the Knight of Swords card blended with the major arcana Judgement card from the Tarot deck.

The card and the dice truly is active, and spurs action on our part but not movement for its own sake.

Think about kendo and kenjutsu martial arts. In the movies, we see master swordsmen begin utterly motionless as they seem to assess the situation and read their opponent. Even in action -packed movie choriography were we don’t see that element portrayed, things like Star Wars for example, thought is still part of the lore. Jedi knights listen to and follow the Force, even if that part seems to happen instantaneously with the blaster’s bolt.

This is very much the warrior’s discipline.

This isn’t action for action’s sake, doing something, anything just to avoid the feeling of doing nothing.

Don’t forget, listening, thinking, reasoning, judging, feeling are all things to do. Doing those things IS doing something.

And they are key somethings that set the warrior apart from a bar-room brawler. Discipline, thought, training, and self-control are all key. And they are all reflected in this die and card.

I am reminded of the G.K. Chesterson quote “a {warrior} fights not because he hates what is in front of him but because he loves what is behind him.”

In Tarot, swords are associated with mind and intellect as well as action. They represent authority and relationship with society and in doing so connect with compassion. Like the “fierce compassion” in Doctor Who’s “The Witches Familiar” episode.

The art on the card also reminds me of Bismouth Gem in Steven Universe, but I don’t remember the show well enough to make the connection here. I’ll leave that with you to decide if it brings anything to mind or resonates for you. Cool character as I remember, though.

“Actions begin within.”

It can be with the Samuri style stillness before acting in a sword fight. It could be a heart and emotion driven clarity about why you are fighting in the first place (as with the Chesterson quote) or it may be a vague feeling of discontent or a desire for change. Whatever the impetus is, change, action begins within. The brain has to initiate the neural inputs to the muscle if you want to be literal about it.

This die and card is a call to action but also a caution to act well. Act thoughtfully not blind willy-nilly do something for the sake of doing anything. The die-face we first saw looks like the scales of justice and is named judgement and those scales are made of a sword – a very potent combination calling us to thoughtful action and fierce compassion all in one.

Thanks for reading. Next time we’ll revisit this week’s energy path cards and update for the weekend. See you at the next sip!

Comfort on the surface and underneath

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Hi! Thanks for reading! I’m glad you are here.

This reading symbolizes our energy patterns through the week ahead. This particular layout is read right to left, opposite of how I turned the cards in the video. The first card shows energy that is drifting away, the middle card is the closest, largest energy around right now, while the left card shows the energy that is growing in influence. This kind of reading is closer to a weather report about the general energies right now. No predictions here. This gives you an idea of the energies ahead. It’s up to us to make the most of it, for better or worse.

The energies this week are pretty simple. Down to earth, grounded and balanced are always key words around pentacles. That is the suit in the majority today. It’s not so much a matter of head over heart. Practicality takes the lead over either one of those.

June is vacation season for families, with the kids fresh out of school. We are just past the July 4th holiday. Summer always seems to start off with frenetic hurry up and have vacation energy followed by hot doldrums. It feels a little like the doldrums are definitely setting in. It feels a little early compared to other years, but fitting for this year somehow. Sit in the shade, drink lemonade, and don’t push or pressure anything at the moment.

“Take comfort” steps forward as a the carry away message, at least for the first part of the week. After the vacations and picnics and typical flurry of activity, things are settling into a summertime routine. Take comfort in routine, in work, in something ANYTHING familiar that doesn’t ask much of you mentally or emotionally. The Zen spirituality of just peeling the potatoes comes to mind here in the spirit of my favorite Alan Watts quote. The eight of pentacles reflects this get down to business and do the thing energy.

Energies have been a little woo woo and ethereal with last week’s high priestess and memento mori vibes. The current energy brings that back into balance with two of pentacles. Just like the ace of swords yesterday…the current energy today also points to mind-body-spirit balance being a source of strength, and contentment.

The pendulum swings back later in the week from grounded and external to a little more esoteric and emotional. The page of cups reflects a return to fousing on feelings and emotions. The Page, gazing at a cup and the little fish that is said to be secrets or truths from the deep water, from the human psyche, reminds us to look for the hidden spirit behind the physical, the magic within the mundane.

Here’s the routine I’m aiming to take refuge in this week:

  • Tuesday: day job day – no blog or socials. Email readings are always OPEN no appointment needed.
  • Wednesday: Learn with Me – oracle dice and “lord cards” continues
  • Thursday – wild card (will post something if I have time)
  • Friday – weekend update. We’ll revisit these cards and see if and how they are unfolding and progressing.

Thanks again for reading. See you at the next sip.

“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one peels the potatoes. Zen spirituality is to just peel the potatoes

Alan Watts

Momento Mori

Today: The Death card and lofi chill

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The August blahs are starting early this year.

I blame the hot, humid weather and suppressed rage at anyone who doesn’t care about global warming. Republicans and oil companies are going to get us all killed at this rate.

But I digress. Sort of.

It’s interesting how the collective energy sometimes is reflected in private readings or vice versa. It’s a little chicken and egg. People who come to me as clients contribute to the collective energy, which would explain some threads of similarity. At the same time these perceptive folks may be drawn to a reading because of the collective energy, which also explains similarities. Either way it always feels validating as a reader to see the collective show up in a private session or cards from private sessions repeat a time or two in collective readings.

The energy has shifted from death card to death card. It feels like the resistance to change from earlier has shifted to a sort of weary acceptance. It feels like instead of resisting the inevitable, we’ve slipped into a semi-comfortable expectation of a certain degree of upheaval. It feels like time to take a sippy sip of our soupy soup and calmly watch the mayhem unfold.

I like to think that is the essence of Sage Sips. Calm. Reassuring. If my Tarot style was described in music terms, I like to think it is LoFi Chill.

Stay safe, stay chill and stay hydrated. See you Monday for next week’s energy path reading.