I start my day with coffee and contemplation. It’s not as Zen spiritual as you might think. It definitely has more of a Sheriff Hopper (from the Stranger Things series) and doom scroll until the static from just waking up clears kind of vibe.
Was taking my morning scroll when I came across a Instagram post about some minor detail about the hand of the figure in the 10 of swords being in the same position as the Hierophant card and how that was the reference to the assassination of some historical pope or another or something. My response was bah…too pedantic…and kept rolling.
While the Pope seems like a nice enough little grampa guy these days, Papal history is not something that typically flies on my radar, but the post and the notion of hand detail sunk through the static enough to make a couple of points.
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The Four of Swords gives us permission for a little self care – or to introvert hard.
Hello and welcome to TaoCraft Short Sip: Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee.
Today’s card if the four of swords.
The 1909 public domain Waite Smith card is pictured in the blog because following this advice was well underway when I sat down to write this. It’s been one of those days for about a few weeks now.
It’s been yang, so now it’s time to be yin. What goes up must come down. When you push the envelope, you have to haul it back in.
Or to paraphrase somebody on Twitter, if you’re down, stay down there for a minute, look around and recover. You just might find those keys you lost under the sofa last week.
In the Pamela Smith card, the reclined figure has their palm pressed together. Like any good sage or mirror, this reflects whatever we the viewer project onto it. Some might see it at prayerful, but it strikes me as more thought full, with a “things that make you go hmmm” vibe.
Here I am reminded of Benedict Cumberbatches portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, and the similar hand gesture he made when Sherlock entered his “mind palace” memory technique.
BBC image via screenrant.com
Folded hands can hint at outward directed thinking at a diety, or it can be deep inward contemplation, but either way the body rests and the mind is slowed. Either way it fits the four of swords card at least in today’s energy context.
Do you bristle at catchphrases and platitudes about this sort of thing, like rest, self-care or nurturing your inner cranky child who really really needs a nap right now? If you want something that feels a little more gritty & persistent with a can-do attitude, try this: introvert HARD for a little while. Think of napping as an endurance sport. Pretend that finding an excuse to stay in and give yourself a break as a mental acuity exercise. Who says finding and wearing your comfiest clothes isn’t making an extreme fashion statement?
The four of swords and I both wish you a great weekend. Get some rest – or if you prefer, introvert HARD.
Thanks for reading and listening. Your likes, subs, follows I’ll see you at the next sip!
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Hi and welcome to TaoCraft Short Sip, Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. I’m glad you are here.
Today’s card is the Queen of Pentacles. Today the card is bringing the earth element energy just shy of the major arcana Empress card. The card screams practical. It’s a refreshing change from the angst, the sense of warning from the US holiday events. The queen of pentacles is offering a refuge of sorts.
The video above (in the blog) features the Heart of Stars Tarot deck 3rd edition with original art by Thom Pham. I love this deck both for its color palette and the pop culture, movie and TV references that Mr. Pham uses in his images. My intuition has always peppered readings with those kinds of references. Movies, TV, and music is, in many ways, the psychic message to plain language Rosetta Stone. If we’ve both seen the same movie or heard the same song, it lets me communicate a great deal of nonverbal information to you. Mood and aesthetics unspool over time the first time you see the movie or hear the song, but can become a condensed, shorthand way to communicate that mood and aesthetic to you later in a reading.
Today is a good example. The card brought a crate full of reference. More than direct meaning, actually.
The old nike ad, saying “just do it”
The ladies from an old BBC show “How Clean is Your House” saying “tuck in”
The Zen proverb “Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.”
Surfrider ads and plastic free July ads on social media.
How-to mend and repair videos on YouTube.
And, of course, Will Smith’s song “Get Jiggy With It” for the active feel of it, not any double entendre with the lyrics.
Today is a big “reduce, reuse, recycle” energy. Find creative solutions. Fix things rather than replace them. Think. Act. Engage with life actively and tangibly. It feeds your soul and conserves resources both at the same time.
Today is a day for our inner bohemian hippie. For some of us, every day is earth day. If that isn’t your style, do one small tiny thing today that is as green as you can manage. I’d say recycle, but you should be doing that all the time. Maybe repair something, grow something from the food seeds you usually toss, buy a plastic-free option the next time you replace a thing.
Interesting. Maybe it’s from the article about microplastics that I read recently, or the Surf Rider ad reference, but I get the mental impression of aqua blue, upcycled ocean plastic products, ocean or beach scented blue jar candles, and that salt spray smell when there is a breeze at the beach, one of my personal favorite experiences. One good beach day is enough to make anyone want to protect the environment.
It’s a good day to take a break from the big feels lately, roll up your queenly sleeves, and tuck in to it. Repair. Reuse. Upcycle. Recycle. Do it with royal style, but do it.
Thank you so much for listening! I really appreciate any likes, follows, shares, questions or comments that you can spare.
If you would like more than a sip of Tarot, full size email Tarot readings are available on the blog website. Please also visit the TaoCraft Tarot page on ko-fi. The shop, commissions, memberships and virtual coffees all support this non-monetized blog and podcast.
TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. Three of Swords: the easiest wound to heal is the one that never happens
Welcome to the TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.
Good news! The turbulent energy from the past few weeks has settles just the tiniest bit, just in time to draw…
The three of swords.
Hoo boy. It never stops, does it? On the other hand stopping isn’t good either. Change and turbulence, peace and calm are all different facets of the same big gemstone we call life and any day above ground, as they say, is a good one. With life comes change. With life comes risk. With life comes all sorts of fears and feels.
Classically, the three of swords is a pretty dire looking card. The image of a pierced heart. It is a card of hurt and heartbreak.
It is a reminder to guard your heart. The easiest wound to heal is the one that never happens. Healthy boundaries is key, emphasis on the healthy. Prickly, guarded, disconnected and unapproachable is no better way to live than being an unappreciated doormat. The middle way is, once again, best.
Not to go all Nancy Reagan on it -ewww- but it is ok to just say no. Know your limits. It’s important that those limits aren’t crossed by other people, but it is important that you don’t stomp on them either. That is an easy part to forget in a world of social media and normalized extreme oversharing.
It doesn’t matter so much if the potential harm is from the outside or accidentally self-inflicted, but good old Ben Franklin nailed it again. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” The easiest wound to heal is the one that never happens. Mind your boundaries both incoming and outgoing.
Healthy boundaries means keeping the right things out, but it also means allowing the right things in. Sometimes the harm is in the lack. Without the challenge of exercise, bodies become weak. The over-sheltered plant dies from lack of sun and water. Saying yes is as important as saying no. The three of swords is also a reminder to mind your boundaries to make sure they aren’t over guarded causing you to live, act, intend and energize from a place of fear.
Cue Yoda and that thing about fear and anger leading to the dark side.
Ben Franklin and Yoda. Those two will get us through just about anything don’t you think?
Thanks for reading and listening! Your likes, subs, follows, shares, questions and comments are always appreciated.
Please support this non-monetized blog and podcast on the TaoCraft Tarot page on ko-fi. The shop, memberships, commissions and virtual coffees all contribute to the web hosting and other costs to create this free to access, (almost) daily Tarot content.
Welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.
Usually Short Sip is Tarot contemplation for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. You might want to pour yourself a full mug for this one. Possibly a full mug of something stronger than coffee. Or maybe not. I don’t know – let’s jump in and see where this takes us.
This is the joker card from the Alleyman’s Tarot deck. The thing I love about exploring this outsized deck with you is the way it pushes me to the edge of my comfort zone. It also lets me interact with cards, decks and art I wouldn’t have otherwise.. This card is a little bit of both of those things.
As always, I read the card as-is before looking at the deck creators intentions and was rewarded for that pattern with this card. Intuitive reading is the whole intended point of the card which was originally drawn by Christian Ellingstad for the Arcadia playing cards. All of the cards in the Alleyman’s Tarot were either created by its author, created specifically for the deck, or used with direct permission. The author in me respects the work it took to make that level of permission and scholarship happen.
Here, the Joker card and its lovely line drawing pulls in two directions. The lighter, easier of the two talks about cartomancy. Technically, cartomancy means divination or an intuitive reading with any cards. Lenormand Tarot, Marseille style Tarot, oracle decks, playing cards – reading with all of those fall under the term cartomancy. You could use old maid cards if you really wanted to. Just as often, if not more so, when you hear the word cartomancy, it usually refers to using playing cards for the reading.
How do you do that, you might ask? The coffee mug isn’t big enough for that this morning. More on that some other day.
Long story short, readings with playing cards are at the same time the easiest and the hardest readings you can do. There are no details or complicated symbolism on playing cards. There isn’t much to memorize, so playing cards are a good way to start learning cartomancy in its largest sense.
Which is precisely why playing cards are the most difficult to use. There aren’t established meanings. There aren’t a lot of details or images for your intuition to use as fuel to find the right message. You have to read playing cards intuitively or you are screwed. Unless you add a big dose of pure intuition, playing cards are only good for playing games. But, on the other hand, if you are willing to take that chance and make the leap into intuitive reading, then playing cards are as good as any other deck for finding the insight and guidance you need.
OK, great. But what else is the Joker telling us about today?
After working with the Alleyman’s deck, I’m starting to take reversals more seriously. But even if we stick with my usual practice of deciding with pure intuition whether a reversal is indicating a slowing or blockage of energy or just happenstance, my hunch today is this card rightfully should stay upside down. So much so that this is in the old-school flip the meaning territory, which is rare in my experience.
This joker is serious.
Period. Underline. Exclamation point.
Ok, fine. But what is this joker so serious about?
I live in America. I’ll let you decide if that is a good thing or a bad thing because after the past 6 or 7 years, I’m honestly of two minds about it. Especially after the past couple of weeks.
99.999% of the time I avoid religion and politics in readings. My job is to try to bring clarity, not stir up muck. Despite that deliberate effort, sometimes intuition steps in, yoinks the good intentions right out of your hands and spits the real talk. Most of the time if it comes up, it is encouragement to get literally involved in civics; volunteer at an animal shelter, plant trees, that sort of thing. There is more to it this time. Full on politics has come crashing into a pretty little playing card.
After 4 July 2022 I can only see an inverted Joker one way: This is serious.
What the actual freaking fuckitty frack was that yesterday, America?
To the rest of the world, all I can say is – I’m sorry. I did all I had the means to do. I voted, yard signed, contributed – at one point I even volunteered and phone banked – which sucked – for a candidate who, luckily, did not suck. Yet here we are, screaming down the highway to theocracy and oligarchy and a bunch of other -archys and -isms that are – um – bad.
Democracy is in danger. Look at yesterday as if it were a Tarot reading. Consider the implications and symbolism if you drew a card that was an assault rifle slaughter of innocents at an Independence Day celebration. I’m at a loss for words. On top of the death, horror and tragedy you have a literal representation of democracy and decency under fire.
Maybe it was the movie JFK, but the phrase “kill box” keeps coming to mind. And, too, there was just an interview with Andrea Mitchell and a retired agent who worked in Dallas at one point in his career. He spoke about the paralles between the Highland Park shooting and Lee Harvey Oswald. I encourage you to listen to reliable news reporting and get the information directly for yourself. I’m not a journalist. It’s my job to stand here and point to the symbolism of it all.
This is serious.
I am worried for all religious and spiritual minorities (atheist, agnostic and secular included) as well as our LGBTQIA and our POC brothers and sisters.
This joker is not joking. All good and decent people have to band and act together, including voting this fall in hordes and droves. We have to make the polls look like that scene from the movie World War Z.
Meanwhile. Stay safe, be careful. Protect your privacy. Protest smart. Be aware of your surroundings in both cyberspace and meatspace. You are precious. We need you.
Thank you for reading and listening. Short Sip will be back tomorrow, hopefully with a little better mood for you. Take good care of yourself.
If everything changes in time, doesn’t that mean time is magic?
Hello and welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. Short Sip episodes are Tarot contemplations for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee.
Today’s card is the Magician. It’s nice to see some major arcana cards showing up lately. That in itself is a nice little validation for me, that some of the energy and effort that I’ve been investing into refreshing the website and migrating the shop to a different platform in an effort to keep prices down on readings just might pay off.
It’s also an interesting compliment to the summer energy that’s out there. As a whole, the major arcana has so called “higher energy” That’s kind of a confusing way to say it. Sometimes higher vs lower energy is used qualitatively. Higher connotes something more esoteric, more spiritual, somehow “good” or virtuous while lower is sometimes used to connote something more banal and mundane, perhaps lesser quality or even malicious.
When I think of major arcana cards as having higher energy, it is a quantitative thing. Electromagnetic waves that have more cycles per unit of distance are said to have higher frequencies. There are just plain more waves in the wavelength not that they are any better or worse – unless of course you are talking about radiation and living tissue but that’s another story that we’ll ignore for now, since we are talking about Tarot card symbolism, not hard science & physics.
What I’m trying to say is that major arcana cards aren’t any better or any worse than the minor arcana. There is a surprising amount of overlap between some minor arcana cards and the majors. The minor cards have a gentler touch with the advice. They hand you a cookie and tell you that by the time you are done it will all be right as rain. Major arcana cards are more ka-pow. They are Oda Mae looking you straight in the eye and telling you that you in danger, girl.
I’ve been told by my Lenormand Tarot reading friends that the whole Lenormand deck is a little like that, all no holds barred frying pan to the face type stuff. It’s on my list of stuff to check out, but I have some other oracle exploration to get out of my system first. I’ll tell you more about that when it’s closer to ready for cyberspace.
Meanwhile, back at the Magician, this is fairly blunt. It reminds me of those internet memes from around the time when the movie “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” was released where Wong would portal in, throw down some random weird statement and portal back out again. Today’s card is a little like that. There aren’t any circles here. No sneaking up and nabbing the point from behind like with the Turn Around or Tools of the Inner Trade post / episodes.
source: @imgur
The Magician card symbolizes transformation as much as it does manifestation. The only difference between life and magic is our preconceived expectations. The flow of time and life change and transform everything. If you are still alive, you are still magic.
Thank you for reading and listening! Any likes, subs, follows, shares, questions or comments that you can spare are always appreciated. Comments are open on the blog, which podcast listeners can reach through the link in the show description.
Just a reminder that the blog, podcast and socials will be on a short summer hiatus July first to July sixth. Email readings are open on the blog website throughout that time. So is the ko-fi page where memberships, the shop, commissions and virtual coffees all support the creation of this free to access Tarot content. The blog and podcast are not monetized. That let’s me serve up a sip of spirit message without the taste of corporate messaging.
Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot 
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