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.

Do you want it fast or do you want it Mona Lisa?

A behind the scenes look at the philosophy and thinking behind Tarot readings

I love pithy advice.

So naturally, I’m a little bit of a Ben Franklin fan.

Through his Poor Richard’s Almanac he tells us that “haste makes waste.” He also wrote that “Well done is better than well said.

I agree – except for Tarot readings. In that case, well done IS well said.

Written or spoken, words have power. Why else would we be talking about some pithy little aphorisms from the 1700s? Actions do speak louder than words, but it is often words that crawl into your head and live there rent free.

That is especially true when the person speaking or writing the words are afforded some sort of authority or expertise. Filler writing from a nearly 300 year old almanac might not get any attention at all if the author wasn’t also a revered figure from American history.

It doesn’t have to be that magnitude of authority. The inept rantings of a random stranger on the internet can impact your mood if you let your guard down and stumble across a troll at a vulnerable moment. Ill-intended, ill-considered words can, regrettably, have power too.

In the world of Tarot, both in-person and online, the psychic reader is assumed to have special knowledge, a skill or expertise that we have not developed in ourselves. Not in any real power or control sort of way, but their words are given that tiny bit more credence. Their words hit a little harder and can get in your head a little easier.

Tarot is all art and heart, not certification and certainty. Whether any one reader is a good match for your personality, your nature, your needs is up to you, and only you, to decide.

One factor in that decision is time.

Tarot is an art. Writing a book takes time. The Mona Lisa wasn’t painted in a day. Quality takes time. If you can find it in yourself to make an advance appointment or spend an hour in conversation with the reader or wait a day for an email reading you’ll get much in return for your time and money investment. Thoughtful Tarot is often the best Tarot.

That is where my side of the Tarot table comes into play. It is up to a professional reader to take whatever time is needed to do a good reading. It is up to us, the professionals, to set time, set boundaries, set working hours, make transparent policies, set clear intentions and manage expectations. It falls to me to let you know that a quick 10 minute at a party is all fun and giggles, while giving my fullest attention to a hour-long private session.

I’ve worked for online psychic services. I’ve called as a client to the old school 800 services. A couple of those impulse phone calls were the precise right message at the precise right time and I’ll always be grateful. But the key is again, time. The call may have been spur of the moment on my side, but the artful words I received were not. Those wise words were given by practitioners who were there for working hours, unhurried and ready to serve. 

The instant gratification of getting a reading right away during a time of emotional upheaval has its place. By the same token, Tarot isn’t a crisis hotline. Tarot isn’t an emotional emergency room. Tarot’s real power lies in inspiration and empowerment. Tarot’s long term superpower is guiding your choices in a way that steers your whole life in a better direction. That takes time. A lot of time and effort on your part. In the short term of any one reading session, it still takes a little time to listen to spirit and to choose the best way to say something that we can.

So please pardon the odd little pauses silences in the conversation while we do that. Or, in the case of email, if it takes more than an hour to get a well written reading to your inbox. Wise words are worth the wait. Choose the ideas that live in your head rent-free carefully. Evict the ones that no longer serve you well.

Tarot is all art and heart and haste can waste your time.

Well said IS well done.

Thanks for reading! See you at the next sip!

Behind the Scenes: Tarot Diplomacy (aka real talk from your spirit guides)

Distance readings are my specialty! ORDER HERE

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It’s a learned skill.

And an internet meme.

James Bach, author of “Secrets of a Bucchaneer Scholar” once posted on social media that “People get defensive because they have something to defend.” It’s a normal, natural response and part of the learning process. After you read Tarot professionally for a while you learn not to take it personally. They’ll get over it. Or not. It’s up to them.

Sometimes the thing people are defending is something they actually need to change. Sometimes the “it” they are getting over is an honest answer that they didn’t want to hear. Nobody enjoys being called out on their s**t.

Sometimes being called out is exactly what we need.

As much as we enjoy indulging our confirmation bias, tempers flare when our biases are challenged instead.

As I read the cards, Tarot is usually a world of ideas, empowerment, encouragement, expanding horizons and gentle nudges. A little diplomacy goes a long, long way.

On the other hand, if subtle messages and gentle nudges are ignored, after a time our spirit guides (or however you think of these things) roll up their sleeves and break out the frying pan to the face method of communicating.

That’s the case here. Cups cards deal with emotions and close relationships. The emotion in question for the inverted four is moping and self-pity. There is no nonsense around the card today. Short, sweet and to the point, kind of like a caveman club over the head, the reversed four is telling us to stop moping, it’s time to move on. Wallowing in self-pity serves no one here. AKA …Knock it off!

Fire alarms aren’t quiet, subtle or diplomatic. They are loud and in your face and don’t care about feelings.

It isn’t fun for anyone when things get tense or feel confrontational. That’s never the intent of a Tarot reading. The intent is to shake us out of a stuck place or turn up the volume on a spirit message loud enough that we can finally hear it. The more important it is for us to hear a message, the more blunt, loud and direct the spirit message will become. A good Tarot reader can reflect that sense of urgency without being mean about it.

Even when spirit is telling it like it is, a little Tarot diplomacy (and humor) can go a long way.

Thanks so much for reading! Please follow the blog to get all of the latest posts direct to your inbox. See you at the next sip!

For the record, I wrote the bulk of this post yesterday, so no (private client from this morning) this isn’t directed at you. We all need a little bit of brutal honesty from the cards every now and then.

Hello from Pandemicland

Lordy.

Being from a medical background, the old B.S. Med. Sci.  part of my brain has been following Covid-19 medical reports, including unexplained hypercoagulability, unexpected pulmonary thrombosis only discovered at autopsy, silent hypoxia in the presence of near normal CO2…and that a second wave of  sars-cov-2 is expected to hit right at the start of typical flu season AND be worse than the initial wave we are having now.

#holycrap! #staythefuckathome #washyourdanghands

I won’t bore you with my medical history, but long story short, in-person sessions are closed until somebody squirts a vaccine in my arm. Anything else would be A. crazy and B. irresponsible.

THE GOOD NEWS is that we still have distance readings. Truth be told, I do my best work that way. Typing on a keyboard is like a broadband download right from my intuition. I can do deep dives into the spirit message without the really awkward social silences that would happen if I did that in a live session.

Deep dives aren’t for everyone. If you want something a little lighter, warmer and chatty…video readings are a great option. You get the conversational style of a live reading but with the no-appointment convenience and reduced cost of distance work.

Or, if you want the full live reading experience – phone readings are back! Just like those old school psychic friend phone readings…but without the triple digit surprises on your phone bills, per minute charges or connection fees. We are going to do this the modern way:

  1. Buy the session with the paypal button HERE
  2. Schedule the session HERE
  3. Call at your appointment time (by phone, Skype or Hangouts)
  4. POOF! Done! Live reading!

I’ve also updated the website with mobile users in mind. It’s all up front and obvious at the top of the landing page reducing amount of scrolling and rummaging around the menu.

FREE “digital InkMagick” one card readings by email are still available on the special offers page

Did I mention stay home? Email reading prices are $5 off for the duration of the stay at home order or April 30, 2020 whichever comes first.

Stay tuned for more YouChoose Interactive Tarot. I want to give you more POOF for your time out of those, too. Instead of random interactive readings by day, look for them on Sundays or Monday morning to serve as a look ahead to the week to come. Other videos will be the usual “Today’s Tarot” one card meditation style.

Other good stuff in the works, stay tuned, and as they say “watch this space”

Now go wash your hands.

Stay safe and be well – Ronda

 

 

My Side of the Tarot Table: YouTube

Whenever I take a break from thinking about the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve been thinking about the YouTube channel. It is harder to transition to speaking on video than I thought it would be. To be honest, I HATE the way I’ve been sounding this past week. I’m not always like that, I swear. Co-hosting on David Dear’s Menage A Tarot podcast with he and Kate was one of the most fun things I’ve ever, ever done! The clumsiness lately is a lesson for me. It will get better, I’m sure, now that I’ve figured out the what if not the why of what’s going on. I am hugely grateful to all of you who have watched the videos for coming on this bumpy start with me.

It’s not like my goal is to be the Markiplier of YouTube Tarot world, and I have no intention of trying to compete with speech-to-camera pros like Benebel Wen or Theresa Reed. If you are looking for polished, articulate, edited, or high production values…I can’t help you there. Writing is my forte, but I had the thought that the videos would give you a taste of what a live in-person reading would be like, but that isn’t happening right now either. It’s an energy thing. Let me explain.

I can connect to energy and spirit with a keyboard as well as anyone and (in my less than humble opinion) better than most.  I can type your message from spirit to you with all the power and clarity of speaking to you face to face. Maybe more, because live sessions don’t have spell check, and grammar hints. I love to read and a writer by nature. I connect to your energy seamlessly just by reading your name and question (or permission for an open session) on a screen. It’s like turning on a light switch.

When I write blog posts like this, it isn’t with a particular person in mind, but the switch trips just the same. I send these out with the intent that whoever needs it will find and that the message helps someone somewhere. I’ve gotten enough feedback from readers over all of these years to know that it works. YouTube may not capture that, but here, now, this blog and these words, this time with you captures every bit of it.

I can connect to your energy during your live session very easily. We chat and talk a little bit at the beginning, and that brings the connection clear and bright, just like lighting a candle.

YouTube, is a different energy animal. It’s like trying to do a reading during a middle school dance in a giant gymnasium. There is a megaton of energy, lots of connections to be made and, I suspect, some folks that are interested in Tarot. Maybe YouTube isn’t the best place for me to be…that’s why I decided to not sweat it or pour a lot of editing and production effort into it. YouTube for me is instructive, it shows the mechanics of Tarot more than the message of it. It shows that each card draw is random and genuine and the real thing. Raw and down to earth is just fine. I think of the “YouChoose” videos as a hand scrawled poster board taped to the wall of the gymnasium free-for-all that lets everyone know that there are some Tarot readings over here if you are interested in one-to-one, affordable, quiet, calm, zen like time with the cards. “If you build it they will come” is a thing. It’s an intention and manifestation thing. It’s a I’m here for you thing, in all kinds of cyberspaces.

But again, thank you to everyone who reads the blog, watches the vids, and follows along with social media. You all are the BEST and you are the ones that make this kind of work worth doing.

If you have any questions, suggestions, feedback, or just want to say hi…PLEASE click HERE for the easy contact form.

Hang in there everyone. Weird times and complicated energies are afoot. We’ll get through it. If I can help by listening to the howling winds of intuition … I’m right here and will do my best for you. Y’all got this. All of you.