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Choose Your Tarot Card 21-2-25

Thanks for watching and reading! Sage Sips is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip your coffee. Your virtual coffee donations and private Tarot reading purchases all support this always free to read blog.

Heirophant: The energy still lingers from this card’s message earlier this week. Live your own truth, listen to your higher self and your inner wisdom. Use critical thinking and a healthy dose of intuition before taking outside authority at face value.

Death (reversed) The change that is causing you pain may not be as bad or irreversible as you might think in this moment. But this is the death card just the same. The changes cut deep, and your feelings in this moment are valid regardless of the ultimate outcome. Give them – and the outcome their due each in their own time.

See you at the next sip!

Choice and compassion (17 Feb 25)

Sage Sips is Tarot in the time it takes to sip your coffee

Pause the video if you need time to think of your question or time to decide which card feels right for you. Restart to see the reveal.

Ten of Swords: Persistence comes from doing something, not from doing the same thing over and over. Taking a minute – or a month – or several – to collect yourself and process the big things that have happened is not a defeat. Healing IS doing something. Healing IS moving forward. Changing directions IS persisting.

Hierophant (Pope in some decks) NOW is the time for spirituality, not religion. Now is the time to follow your own inner wisdom and your personal connection to the universe or the devine, not what outside influences dictate. Follow your conscience to a path of compassion toward others AND toward yourself.

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Choose Your Tarot Card 11 Feb 24

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THE FOOL: Sometimes a new beginning is a thousand mile journey that starts with a single step. Other times it’s a thousand foot drop that starts with being shoved off the edge of a cliff. Either way, adaptability is a survival skill.

SEVEN OF PENTACLES: Focus on what you have, not what you don’t.

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The Theme Continues

Sage Sips is Tarot in the time it takes to sip your coffee.

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Think of a question, a topic, or just the next few days to get general guidance. Choose your card. Pause the video if you need time, then restart to see the reveal. Pick a card and get it’s message for you below.

The theme, the “meta-message” that came through repeating cards over the course of multiple readings during the holiday season seems to continue. The calendar may have turned to February, but the energy hasn’t turned in a new direction quite yet.

Dire things are still happening in the US. That is a dark, stressful energy that is like low lying dense dark smoke underneath all of the rest. There is still a sense of chaos continuing as the ‘new normal’ for a while, which explains why the Hanged Man major arcana card is still, ahem, hanging around. The Page, generally speaking, resonates with the bizzarre-feeling, surreal nature of it all.

But if you pull away, focus on a higher level above the blanketing clouds of fear, there are glimmers of a more hopeful individual message:

PAGE OF CUPS: There are deep lessons to be comprehended. From the weird to the sublime, life is trying to tell you something that is ordinarily hidden or very “out of the box” Be patient, be good to yourself. There is a hard lesson to learn here, but give yourself whatever measure of grace that you need to learn what life has to show you and to deal with the emotional fallout of whatever comes to light.

HANGED MAN: Buckle up and settle in. Things are going to hang this way for a while. Expectations and attachments can make things that are outside of your control feel worse.

In The Tao of Pooh Benjamin Hoff writes about busy-ness and constant striving. We are very conditioned to that in the modern world. Not everything has to be constant movement. It is important to be still and incorporate things we’ve already done, things we’ve already learned. It may seem like stagnation to the “Busy Backsons” as Hoffman call it, but life and the universe may still the journey until old lessons are fully set. You can’t walk on a new sidewalk until the cement is dry.

The Message Will Find You

A longer read about a short Lenormand Tarot layout.

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It’s a little bit like that Blondie song “One Way Or Another.”

If you are willing to listen for it, to pay just a little bit of attention, to let yourself accept that a coincidence is as meaningful as it seems, then your guidance is all around you. Anything can reflect your own good intuition.

Two heads are still sometimes better than one.

Sometimes that intuitive guidance needs a little focus for you to see it or a little amplification for you to fully hear it.

That’s where things like Tarot cards, professional readers, tea leaves, crystals, runes and the whole woo-woo thing comes into play. They aren’t anything bad or anything special about any of those things. All of these things help our intuition in the same way glasses can help us read a book or an amplifier can help us listen to a concert.

Psychologist Carl Jung called it synchronicity (just like the Police song also from the ’80s) Some coincidences seem meaningful. If you allow them to be, they are.

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to “The Circle is Podcast” with Mat Auryn, Rachel True and a Lenorman Tarot expert whose name escapes me at the moment. The one thing that stuck with me from the episode was how they experienced Lenormand Tarot as being very verbal in the intuition it gives, while RWS style decks tend to be visual.

That is my experience in the short time I’ve used this Lenormand deck as well.

It’s typical for me to get a mix of mental images (clairvoyance) and words or music (clairaudience) in any given reading, the Lenormand deck seems to almost exclusively verbal. It speaks in full sentences more than just keywords.

The person on the podcast said she tended to use 2 or 3 card layouts for rapid daily guidance more than using the “grand tableau” where ALL of the cards are out on the table. When I was reading about how to do a grand tableau reading, it struck me as being over-engineered, far to complex to be useful as anything other than an enriched environment to spark a straight psychic reading, will the cards themselves contributing very little in that situation.

The Lenormand is very verbal. The simplest, most basic sentence is a noun and a verb – a thing and an action. It seems to me that is where Lenormand has its most simple, yet most elegant, use.

I’d like to explore two card layouts with two Lenormand cards, one to reflect the current situation…the thing that IS…and another to give you some idea what to do about it.

Beyond that, I’m leaving it fluid. Regardless of which card comes first, or which direction you read them, one is the thing and the other is the action and so far it seems fairly obvious which is which. As per their reputation, the Lenormand cards do not mess around in that respect.

For example today’s cards are a clear “stability is coming” The tower is carrying the thing message. It symbolizes stability. The Rider symbolizes something coming, a message or a messenger.

What that short sentence means to you as an individual can vary wildly. But that is, again, how your personal message always finds you. It’s an internal process as much as an external manifestation. It is how you see the world as it is reflected back to you through your individual lens of understanding.

Coming stability may for some be welcome relief from a time of chaos. For others “coming stability” might mean continued chaos, and more of the same. The important thing isn’t as much as the card as it is how you resonate with it.

You’ll know. No matter what I write or say to you in a reading, your heart and bones will know the right message. You’ll know your message when it comes to you through how right it feels to you. Sometimes your message finds you through you recognizing wrongness.

There is a comical scene in the 1960s classic The Addams Family where Morticia is telling an insurance adjuster that a pile of ash is the remains of their highly insured stuffed polar bear. When he objects, she calmly says something like “Does it look like a vulture? Does it look like ….” and seemingly goes on to ask if it looks like every conceivable animal, ending with something like “there you go! Then it MUST be a polar bear!”

Your message will find you even through a ridiculously long process of elimination. If you know in your heart and bones that a reading is off, then at least you know one thing that your message is not and can keep listening for whatever it is.

As someone with the privilege of doing readings for others (now as a hobby, as commissioned folk art) when I put this together with that meta-message that was coming through so much around the holidays of “change followed by a happy ending” I read the the Lenormand duo as being colored both ways: Stability is coming with steady “new normal” chaos in the near future AND stability is coming with relief from the chaos in a more distant future.

Again, 2026 steps forward. I have no idea why. I’ll leave that up to your lens of understanding to figure out.

Thank you so much for reading!

Want a free Tarot answer to your question? ‘Ask Me Anything’ for free using this contact form to get a public answer in the blog. I’ll be using these two card Lenormand layouts to answer AMA form questions for a while, starting in January 2025

Even though I am not operating as a business anymore, I still provide professional standards, an open policy page, and follow the same healthcare guided ethical standards for all of my readings. I do offer a ko-fi membership for fans and supporters that includes free Tarot readings and I ask for a contribution for private readings, all to help defray the costs of this website, for my time, and for my 30 years of Tarot experience.

Choose Your Tarot Card: Calm after the storm.

Sage Sips is Tarot in the time it takes to sip your coffee.

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The Hermit: Energies have been intense lately. Take time to deliberately dial down, slow down, and be alone if needs be. Find one shining light, one guiding trustworthy source of information, and let the rest go as background noise.

Six of Wands: The tumult we feel now is the price of admission to a more peaceful future IF we have the courage to create create it. In the words of the Affordable Floors…”there is no calm without a storm.” Hang in there. There is something better on the other side of it all.

Choose Your Tarot : Card for the coming weekend

Right or Left: choose whichever card feels like the right one for you, then get the reading for your chosen card below.

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PAGE OF CUPS: Roll with it. Plans might go all to heck, but it doesn’t make the weekend wasted time. Go where life steers you and Monday will come soon enough.

HIGH PRIESTESS: Let sleeping mysteries lie. It’s a mystery for a reason. If you want to dig for details, be prepared to deal with whatever you might find.

Thanks for watching! Sage Sips is Tarot in the time it takes to sip your coffee. Stay tuned for more contemplations this weekend.

Sage Sips is Tarot in the time it takes to sip your coffee. Thanks for watching! See you at the next sip!

How Do I Get Through Today?

Go with your first impulse or pause the video to think about which card feels right to you. Restart the video to see the reveal and get your reading below.

Sometimes ‘one day at a time’ becomes one minute at a time, one breath, one moment at a time. Step by step, moment by moment, wherever there is life, there is hope. Even the smallest light can make the darkness step back. Shine your light or at least try to borrow some light from the words of others and darkness retreats – always.

PAGE OF CUPS: Find your comfort. Embrace the thing that gives you whatever tiny bit of comfort that you can, now matter how small or seemingly silly. Emotional support corn chips? Stanley-style comfort bucket? Knit a blanket? Stare at a fish in a cup? Whatever it is that gives a moment of respite is the thing that is needed now.

Cups cards are tied to emotions, intuition and the element of water. There is an element of “let the heart lead” if you felt drawn to this card. Whatever your emotions are today, they are valid and natural. As they bubble up, identify them, accept them, deal with them and release them at your own pace and in your own time. A key emotion today is compassion for yourself, just as much as everyone else.

THREE OF SWORDS: It is just as bad as it seems, but remember that action dilutes anxiety. Formulate a clear-headed plan. Just having a plan about what to do next can help, even if that isn’t what actually happens. Taking action and doing something, anything productive can help. Every little bit counts. Take a deep breath. There. You have it. That’s a win right there.

Swords are about both intellect and action. If you feel drawn to this card, it is a hint to let your head rule your heart for the moment. Emotions are raw, nerves are on edge. Setting and protecting your boundaries is important. Swords protect as well as attack – protect your peace.

Sage Sips blog and YouTube channel are not monetized. Support these public readings through memberships and private readings on Ko-fi. Thanks for reading! See you at the next sip!

Welcome Back 2025 (part 2)

Sometimes you have to retreat a little bit in order to walk forward again on a better path.

Some years feel like more of the same. This is not one of those years.

2025 is still a welcome back of sorts – a welcome back to inevitable, unending change and a welcome back to TaoCraft. There is nothing wrong with retreating to familiar or comforting things in unprecedented times like these. It’s the right thing to do when mistakes have been made. Sometimes you have to retreat a little bit in order to change direction and walk forward again on a better path.

A pattern emerged from all of the readings I’ve been doing since mid November or so. The details were different and the message was unique to the individual but at the same time there was a similar thread of energy running through all of them. The series of readings taken as a whole was giving background context and clues to our shared energy environment.

Basically, the meta-message was 2025 was going to be a storm of turbulent energy followed by “a happy ending” with better times in 2026. Sure, that sounds like wishful thinking. Life has been ups and downs, good times and bad times since time immemorial. Even though it is only the first half of January, a better 2026 is a teeny-tiny glimmer of optimism so I’ll take it, wishful or not.

Change is key. Things can get worse if they change but by the same token things can only get better if they change. Imagine a bright colored dot on the side of a bicycle wheel. As the wheel turns, metaphorically moving forward through time, first the dot appears to move down toward the ground, but then it moves up again and the cycle repeats. It all goes back to Taoist philosophy which has always been a tremendous comfort and makes sense out of life for me. Hence the name TaoCraft. But we’ve already talked about that back in 2018 when I took up the name the first time.

There are a few other minor changes for 2025. This will be the first full year of reverting back to the TaoCraft Tarot name for the website, commissioned readings, and hopefully, for a Tarot how-to eBook. All things “Sage Words Tarot” have been allowed to expire. The best way to contact me is TaoCraftTarot@gmail.com or the contact form on the Ask Me Anything page. Members can add ko-fi DM to the list.

“A thought is powerful. The spoken word is more powerful, but the written word is the most powerful of all”
Sallie Christensen, author of “The Highest And Best”

The next change is putting live readings on hiatus. I’m a writer at heart. I want to focus on email readings, which are my specialty. Email lets me do my absolute best readings for you. #kofigoalchallenge

Recorded video readings are also available if you prefer to listen rather than read (random unrelated opinion: audio books count the same as reading physical paper books.) Speaking of books: email & recorded video Tarot readings are perfect for book lovers of every type. My Tarot is a reader’s reading.

The email / recorded format has a ton of advantages:

Convenient: no appointment needed, the reading comes to you instead of you going to it. Easy, secure PayPal checkout is just like ordering anything online.
Eco friendly: no travel, no gasoline used, we are using electricity that we would be using anyway for other email. This kind of reading has essential zero carbon footprint.
AFFORDABLE: my email Tarot prices haven’t changed in years. No physical location = cost savings that I pass along to you.
Private: You open the email in a place and time best for you. No one sees you travel to a psychic.

But to get back to the task at hand: here is a quick introduction to all things TaoCraft. After that, I’m dropping all the “marketing best practices” and crazy pants promotions, just as I’ve threatened to do in the past. I’m going to do what I do best – email readings and blog readings. If that doesn’t work – welp, I tried. We can leave these recommended “re-introduce yourself” posts for New Years.

On the other hand, if you like what you see and want a reading with me, great! Bring it! Let’s work together and make some magic!

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Albert Einstein

Let’s start at the beginning and try to keep it all simple. My pen name is Sage. I read Tarot, write stuff and knit things. I’ve been working with Tarot, Oracle cards and intuition development since 1993. At first I read for myself & friends. In 2003 – ish a friend suggested that I read online, for which I am forever grateful. I did email Tarot readings for Keen, Advice Trader and AllExperts in the early 2000s. I’ve done literally hundreds of email readings. I stopped counting at 400 and that was around 2003. After that, I started professional Tarot readings with my own website Modern Oracle Tarot, with its Tarotbytes blog and the now defunct Quirk & Flotsam Etsy shop.

In 2018 I re-branded the whole thing to TaoCraft Tarot. In 2023 I wanted unleash the coffee lover in me and make full use of ko-fi’s “buy me a coffee” metaphor for support donations. So I switched again to Sage Words Tarot and the whole Sage Sips blog is Tarot in the time it takes to sip your coffee thing.

That, as it turns out, was a miscalculation.

So Welcome Back. 2025 is a year of change; a change back to TaoCraft Tarot for private readings and book titles while keeping Sage Sips for the blog and ko-fi page.

To that end, the blogs will post 2-3 times per week and you can order a private email or video Tarot reading with me anytime, 24/7 – no appointment required.

The email reading comes to your mailbox as a .pdf or .docx attachment, usually within 24 hours . There might be some delays if you order on a US holiday, nights (US eastern time) or weekends. Video files are still too big for email attachments. If you order a video reading, you’ll get an email with a private link to your recording.

All of my readings generally have the same basic structure:

Photo or video of your real world cards
general pattern (the card layout as a whole, any initial psychic / intuitive impressions
Card-by-card discussion
Summary that recaps the layout as a whole plus adds in any other purely intuitive impressions. That often includes things like crystals, colors, aromatherapy – any random helpful detail.

There is some variation. One card readings are purely intuitive. Yes/no readings tend to have a more unstructured, tongue in cheek, lighthearted style.

For 2025 I am offering 4 layouts all of the time, no specials or seasonal changes except for Sage Sip Members (more on that later)

“Seasons” 5 card year ahead Tarot reading: ($30 non-memebers, $25 members) Start at any point in the year – birthdays, anniversary, holiday, new year – get one card guidance for each of the upcoming seasons plus one theme card for the entire year.
“TaoCraft” 5 card Tarot reading: ($30 non-members, $25 members) This is the updated version of the old Modern Oracle layout that I wrote in 2003. Cards show influences from the past, current energy environment, advice and cautions, best path ahead, alternative path if you so choose.
“Zombie Cat” 3 card yes or no: ($15 non-members, $10 members) Get a concise yes or no answer plus advice and intuitive impressions based on the individual three cards.
“Sage’s Sip” 1 card meditation: general intuitive advice or a focused follow-up to a recent larger layout ($5 non-members, FREE for members)

Sage Sips membership on Ko-fi is $5 per month and includes FREE 1 card email Tarot up to three per calendar month, discounts on larger layouts, exclusive content on the ko-fi members-only blog and random special offers.

This blog, social media, the YouTube channel, the public portion of the ko-fi blog are all free and non-monetized. Your Tarot message comes first, not an advertisers. Any ads you see benefit the platform and makes it free for me to use (a savings I pass along to you) All of this is supported by readers / listeners through the memberships, private readings and shop purchases.

All of my readings are commissioned, ephemeral folk art that is intended to inspire, empower, facilitate understanding, help creative problem solving, and boost your connection to your own spirituality & inner wisdom.

All of my policies are listed HERE.

“Tarot isn’t about what will happen in life. Tarot helps you figure out what to do when life happens.”
Sage Snow

Please note that these readings are about predicting the future, reading other people, medical or legal questions. Tarot doesn’t do these things very well. I don’t want to waste my time or your money when we can focus on the more helpful, uplifting stuff that Tarot is great at doing. This artwork is a hobby for me, not a business. I am as open and transparent with you as humanly possible, which is why I wrote the policies page. I only ask for compensation for my time and to help defray web hosting costs.

Thank you for hanging in with the longest post in a long time. I appreciate you! See you at the next sip!

Oracle Wednesday: Human About The House

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Last year, we did a “learn with me” series about the Lenormand style of Tarot .

Please feel free to read that series and explore all of the post archives. There is a search bar in the right column on PC/laptop or scroll to the bottom on mobile. On the way to the search bar, why not enter your email to follow the blog and get all of the new posts direct to your inbox? Easy, opt in, no spam and totally free!

Yesterday, I was listening to “The Circle is Podcast” with Mat Auryn and Rachel True. The topic as Lenormand and it reminded me of the deck and the old series. They had similar impressions about how Lenormand is very sentence-like. I’d like to revisit Lenormand for a few weeks but this time under the auspices of “Oracle Wednesday” posts even though it isn’t really an “Oracle deck” in the way we usually use the term.

Today: “House” and “The Lady” in reverse. In short, our desire for stability is being turned upside down by someone who may or may not be acting with intention. It is easier said than done, but do what you can to cultivate, protect and preserve your inner peace.

Please stay tuned for more about Lenormand and for “Welcome Back 2025” part 2 coming soon!