spirituality – Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot

Pathway

This is an actual Tarot reading I did a couple of years ago. As you can see, the recipient kindly gave me permission to use it here in the blog. This is the kind reading you’ll get if you support Sage Sips on ko-fi now.

Reading from The archives: Use the search bar to find Tarot readings, Q&A, BTS and more.

Q: You drew a card for me on Halloween which was (and still is!) really meaningful, so lovely to connect with you again. I saw your Instagram post and would love to have you pull a few cards for me if the places haven’t been filled, but no worries if not! Happy to have a reading via the blog 🙂

For ******

First of all, thank you so much for your kind words!

I’m always so happy to hear when a reading is helpful….after all, that’s why we do these things! But the same is true as the last reading: If you have any questions, complaints or need any clarification with the reading please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Since you didn’t specify a topic, I’ll just move ahead with an open-to-anything point of view.

Your Cards Today Are:

Influence from the Past: King of Coins (Pentacles)
Current Situation: Three of Swords
Moving Forward: King of Swords

General Pattern

All cards are minor arcana, which in a layout this small is no real statistical surprise. Intuitively it feels like a bit of reassurance, that nothing really major is stirring the energies for you right now. It is all pretty business as usual more than it’s not. It has a feeling that business as usual for you entails being really good at what you do. Business as usual is kicking butt and taking names from the feel of it. In that vein, it feels like a very plain-talking, no nonsense kind of reading. It also feels like most of the reading energy is pointing toward work and career thoughts, which would go right along with having a coins card right off the bat like that. The repetitions are asking for attention. You have two swords, which connote action, the element of air, intellect and logic, authority, or your connection with society and culture at large. Knit all of that together and my attention is pulled to using cold, calculating intellect when it comes to work, especially when dealing with the authority structure, or any vying for promotions or power within the structure of the workplace. “Power Play” comes to mind along with an old episode of M*A*S*H where the Colonel accuses someone (Frank? Hotlips? Klinger?) of “going over my head so many times I’m getting athletes scalp” I guess the shorthand for that would be watch out for power playing brown nosers at work. The other repetition is the two kings. Kings connote leadership. It feels like the situation may be asking you for leadership, confidence, self-starting, standing up for yourself….even if you are already good at that, it feels like the skills you have will be put through their paces, and you may even be pushed a tiny bit outside your comfort zone in that respect. I ‘hear’ (meaning the intuition comes as words instead of feelings or images) to “Hang on and be brave” There was a great meme about spirit guides (the lady) you (the boy) and a life lesson. Here is the photo part if you want to take a peek: https://goo.gl/images/gdXriU Your guides feel like they are reminding you they won’t lead you anywhere you are not ready to go, but since you are ready…buckle up baby!

Background & Context: King of Coins

This part is the reminder of competence you have, and that you are more than ready to meet leadership challenges at work, or any other part of life, really. The King of Coins as a card connotes wealth and success, so a note of reassurance there again. I hear “build on past skills and successes” I’m not clear whether that means use your skills and knowledge that you have in hand to fullest advantage, to build new skill and expand your knowledge and experience…or both. It doesn’t feel like a job change as much as an expansion of the current situation.

Current Situation: Three of Swords

Classically, this tends to be a bit darker, more dire card across all of the decks and references that I have. Often it will set me off on maternal lecture mode about be safe, keys out, park under lights, and all that usual lecture….but not so much for you today. This feels more petty than malicious. It isn’t the devil or dark side card for good reason. This feels petty, and small, and contained to one aspect of life, like office politics. “Watch out for petty backstabbers” comes to mind. Very office politics, but also heavy on the petty….like an annoying mosquito that can drive you mad if you let it, or just brush it away. The more calm, detached, intellectual and swords / mental-focus the better.

Moving Forward: King of Swords

You know how I read cards…the cards have suit, element, layout position, and general card meaning. But each card, based on all that other stuff, can have a different spin or ‘flavor’ of message; advice (something to consider doing) caution (something to consider avoiding) or validation (acknowledgement, encouragement, cosmic thank you) There has been a lot of validation energy so far. This has a little more of an advice spin. The card feels less like it pertains to you and more like it represents an ally…someone in the hierarchy at work who you can cultivate an working relationship with, who can be a mentor of sorts. “Have your back” comes to mind. Like someone who knows your skills, sees your potential. It feels like it might be literally a male figure of some sort. Does any of this ring a bell for you? I’m not sure how else to understand the card, because it has a not-you but someone who can help you sort of symbolism around it. Beyond that it is dark – meaning no signal, not evil or bad kind of dark. It feels like that is the card or energy telling me that is a singular message from this card….seek out a mentor or ally at work.

Summary

This part is like a psychic “cold reading” where I free form give you any impressions that come to mind. In readings that have a topic or question, this part might connect to that or the cards….or it might not. In an open reading like this one, it just stays in the open frame of mind.

Often it starts with colors, or crystals or both. In this case I see citrine. It associates with the solar plexus chakra, and therefor confidence. Wear or carry it for confidence at work. It also resonates with the King cards, and the coins suit because the golden color has to do with wealth, career, luck and to some extent leadership.

I taste butterscotch, with lemon scent in the background. That might be a continuation of the golden color associations. Butterscotch may symbolize comfort, while lemon in aromatherapy is very cleansing and energizing. Lemon may be important relevant to work, as diffusing some lemon fragrance, lighting a lemon scented candle, or using anything lemon after work might do two things…first it would be a clear transition signal. It could remind you work is done, clear any annoyances or negativity from your day, and let you know to shift into family/home/private life mode. It will also lift your energy…stress or pettiness at work can put an extra drain on your energies. Lemon could help neutralize that and lift your energy after a long day. Don’t use citrus oils on your skin if you will be in sunlight within the next 12 hours…it can cause sun sensitivity. Also don’t put it on your skin if you have autoimmune diseases as it enhances immunity (a good thing in cold/flu season for most people)

And there the energies step back. I hope this helps!

Best Wishes,

Photo: Witches Tarot by Ellen Dugan and Mark Evans, used with permissions published on LlewellynPublishing.com

Weekend Oracle: Wonder Full

Sometimes happiness is something you have to do on purpose.

The energy today, at the start of the weekend, continues along the same thread that we saw at the start of the week in the “Strive to Abide” week-ahead reading.

This card comes from the Alleyway Oracle of Secrets by Seven Dane Asmund. The Alleyman card (art by voidbug) is intended to represent awe and wonderment, as is often found with a chance encounter with a mysterious embodiment of the Alleyman within the original deck’s fictional lore.

If you like thought provoking fiction I highly recommend The Alleyman Podcast.

But back to today’s card.

If you can strive to abide, then you can choose happy.

Deliberately. On purpose. In the middle of disaster.

It’s not easy. I wouldn’t want to imply that it is. It is a black belt level fight with yourself.

I read somewhere that we humans are hardwired to spot threats and dangers long before we process the good things. It’s evolutionary survival.

But so is happiness. It’s hard to survive when your mental, emotional, and physical health is disintegrated by constant stress, pessimism and negativity.

If you aren’t feeling it – ok. Abide. Feelings are temporary. Feelings can be influenced. Causes have effects and you can be the cause that has the effect of you feeling a little better.

The mind body connection flows both ways. Decreasing stress can improve physical health, and caring for your physical being can improve your mood.

If memory serves, it is a Buddhist premise with some solid physiology sprinkled in.

Arrange your face. The face is highly innervated. Arrange your face into a small Mona Lisa smile and keep it that way for a few minutes. The feeling represented by the facial expression and body posture you’ve adopted can sleep into your emotions however you were feeling at the outset. That may be why Buddhist teachers mention posture and facial expression as a part of beginning to meditate. It sets up a positive feedback loop. Body posture improves meditation which reduces stress which improves physical health which improves mood….you get the idea.

It may not be our first instinct to see beauty and good things. We are wired to focus on threats so we can avoid or mitigate them. Today’s card is a reminder (akin to the high priestess card in the RWS Tarot) to use our big old homo sapiens brains and step in and deliberately appreciate the good that saturates our existence. If it wasn’t there, we wouldn’t exist to appreciate anything. Look around. You aren’t actively in danger right now, are you? (If you are, what the hell are you doing staring at a screen reading this?!)

Take a breath.

That is a life giving miracle, right there.

Do you have the means for your next meal? Are you wearing clothes? Obviously you have an electronic device to entertain you and connect you to other people. This train of thought reminds me of the scene from the 1990s Robin Hood where Morgan Freeman’s character tells Kevin Costner’s Robin of Loxley “You whine like a mule – you are still alive!”

I can’t remember where I saw it, or if there is any logic or facts or data behind it, but I think I’m latching on to the memory of a 2 second social media clip because there is some level of truth to it….bursts of emotions, even the most painful ones, last 90 seconds unless we mentally grab onto them and keep replaying them in our mind.

If the Chariot card from Monday reminds us that we can choose to abide then today’s Alleyman card reminds us the world is full of wonder that we choose to see.

Thanks for reading! See you at the next sip

Buy me a coffee on ko-fi during the month of June 2026 and the proceeds will be donated to ACLU in celebration of Pride Month

Low Tech Ritual

Also on Sage’s Second Cup blog

Our hot water is out.

Sure, I’ve done my fair share of complaining about boiling water on the stove to keep us and the kitchen sanitary like I’m Ma Ingalls and this is 1826 or something. That’s in spite of the fact that I’m doing it in an air conditioned house with an electric stove and not over a wood fire in some hovel hole of a cabin in the wilderness. I LIKE it here in the future with electricity, indoor plumbing and whatnot.

But you know what they say about clouds and silver linings. Or as author Richard Bach put it “there is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands.”

Hmm. Maybe that plus the narrow mountain top ridge image from the “Summit and Crossroads” and “Move with Charisma” tarot readings is a solid hint to re-read Bach’s Illusions or finally get around to reading The Razor’s Edge. That’s idea, too. Book reviews over on Second Cup – but none of that is the point. Back to the hot water thing.

The problem with the stovetop hot water is that it is a sloooow way to do things.

The beautiful part of the stovetop hot water is that it is a slow way to do things.

I especially noticed it bathing. The slow acts of putting the water on to heat, cleaning the sink, moving the soap from its usual shower spot to a place on the countertop within reach; trivial things to be sure, but it takes on an almost ritual-like quality.

It was a mindfulness trap.

Without intending it, it dropped me into a meditative mindset. Instead of quick, thoughtless and profoundly mundane, I found myself engaging with the moment. It wasn’t the usual quick hop shower. This was a thing.

The same can, and does, apply to Tarot reading.

It doesn’t matter what you ritual IS – it matters what your ritual DOES.

Whatever your process or ritual, it shifts you from the everyday world into an engaged frame of mind. The ritual and process of a Tarot reading shifts us from mindless to mindful. Whatever your ritual, habit or process might be, it makes tarot reading into a thing.

Spirit speaks in whispers. Tarot and its attendant rituals, even the casual ones, helps us to hear those whispers.

Using a reading cloth, or a particular shuffle pattern, having a dedicated space, lighting candles or incense or whatever you do when you do a reading all has the effect of slowing down our normal pace. Those objects and activities aren’t sacred, but the mindset they create is.

Tarot reading rituals are a mindfulness trap.

The pattern quiets and comforts. It is like giving a toddler a new toy or handing a banana to a hungry monkey. Some routine or ritual that is a built in part of beginning a reading comforts and quiets our logical mind enough to help us hear our intuition and the quiet whispers of spirit and energy.

A wonderful as the modern age and its indoor plumbing may be, some things are ancient and still powerful. Often the most powerful things are the quietest, and the simplest, like a low tech ritual.

Raise a mug to civil rights

“Buy me a coffee” on Ko-fi during the month of June 2026 and get a daily meditation style Tarot reading by email as a thank you gift. All proceeds will be donated to the ACLU in support of their work to protect LGBTQIA+ equality and civil rights. Happy Pride Month!

Feel the Feels

from the archives

What’s in your cup this morning?

Hello and welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.

The Alleyman’s Tarot deck was extra rowdy this morning. It was sliding out of my hands and spewing all over the table after just one shuffle.

Today’s card is the Ace of Cups.

I’m sure it is just because of the great finish on the cards and the fact that I’m not exactly little miss coordination this morning, but it seems like chaos is part of the message today.

Cups have to do with the element of water, so you have all of those metaphors. Of all the properties of water, the movement is what comes to mind. It’s the “water can crash” part of Bruce Lee’s famous “be water my friend” interview. Cups also traditionally symbolize emotions. Another way of understanding the suit of cups is our closest relationships. Nothing touches our emotions like love, romance, marriage, family, children – all of our closest relationships.

The ace always touches on the essence of a suit. The ace of cups today is pointing square at our emotions and emotional state.

It is, after all, storm and hurricane season.

A couple of years ago, at the end of 2019 when the pandemic hadn’t fully hit, I did a series of readings. It seems like the energy environment was ringing everybody’s bell – hard. I must have had at least half a dozen different people say that they were having intense emotions or anxieties that they couldn’t explain which drew them to the reading. In some ways it’s hard to believe that is already two and a half years ago, almost three. In other ways it’s hard to believe that it has been ONLY two and half years ago.

Still, time has passed and that particular storm of emotion and energy has passed right along with it.

The same advice still applies, however.

I’m not talking about true mental health issues here. Those deserve respect, and the skills of a professional. Tarot isn’t for that. It can help, certainly, but Tarot is excellent for coping and gaining insight into normal ups and downs that we all experience at one time or another. Tarot helps all of us surf the crashing waves of human existence.

It’s like the extra slippery-slidey Alleyman’s deck today. Sometimes life just gets chaotic energy sometimes. Over on my personal blog “Sage & Stuff” I call it the squirrel rave after that internet meme that says “I don’t have ducks, I don’t have rows. I have squirrels. And they are having a pagan rave.”

When you are in the middle of a squirrel rave or a hurricane or life’s crashing waves or whatever metaphor you like, the ace of cups is reminding us that our emotions are still our own, regardless of the surrounding slippery crashing chaos. You don’t have to take on the energy and emotions around you.

For some people that is easier than for others. We all have our own unique levels of empathy. We all have our unique levels of stress tolerance. We all have our own individual skin thickness when it comes to stress and emotions.

Which reminds me of a pediatrics lecture I heard a very long time ago where the doctor quoted some sort of old adage along the lines of “some kids are carrots, some kids are eggs. If you put one in hot water it goes to mush, but the other just gets hard boiled.”

Whenever a wave of emotion hits, especially if it feels out of character for you or feels disconnected sometimes it pays to do a little bit of an empathy check or an intuitive sensitivity gut-check.

This is one time where we can bring imagination, visualization and the mind-body connection into play for our benefit.

Imagine this:

Think of something that you can imagine to be protective. This is imagination, so it can be anything. Imagine a shield of energy like a comic book superhero. Imagine a wizard’s invisibility cloak. Or a Faraday cage that real-world screens out electromagnetic signals. I like to think of it akin to Violet’s shield power from the Incredibles Disney-Pixar movie. Imagine you are surrounded by whatever force field invisibility cloak fortress-of-solitude symbol that you chose.

Then do an emotions check. With that protective visualization in place, what are your emotions now? Is that thing you’ve been feeling quieter now, as if it was something outside of you that has been pushing your buttons? Or is it inside your super-shield with you?

It is easy to shrug off difficult emotions and blame it on things like being empathic or mercury in retrograde or whatever. It’s natural to want to keep difficult emotions at arms length at least until a situation settles down or we heal enough to actually deal with them.

There is an up side to it. Sometimes the emotions really are out there and once you sort that out you can get back to being the laid back zen low pressure center of the hurricane.

Sometimes emotions are the tempest in a teapot, all yours to deal with. Sometimes emotions are a storm warning vibrating to let you know what the energy environment holds. The still waters inside your cup are still yours to keep no matter what is on the horizon. Both take courage to keep the cup strong. The emotions inside the cup are your feels to feel either way.

Thank you so much for reading and listening. I appreciate each of you and a special hello and welcome to new subscribers and social media followers. I’m always grateful for any likes, subs, shares, follows, questions or comments that you can spare.

The blog, podcast and youtube channel are not monetized by me: your energy message comes first here, not advertisers’. Please visit the TaoCraft Tarot page on ko-fi where the shop, memberships and virtual coffees all support the creation of this unique (almost) daily Tarot content.

See you at the next sip!

A Mask That Lets You Dance

Today’s card is from The Normal Tarot second edition by Seven Dane Asmund. They describe the card as being connected to dreams and deeper meanings. I get the sense of two threads of meaning connected to the card today. One, connected to the dreaming part, another tied to the visual image on the card of masks and dancing. Of the two, the mask part seems to carry the larger energy.

For the dream part, I get a sense of yes, you are right. If you have a hunch about what a dream meant, you are right, it is what you think. The next few days to maybe a week feel like the right time to do shadow work, dream journaling, read about dream symbolism and so on.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”
Carl Jung

Visually, my attention is drawn to the masks in the masquerade scene. Masks are a kind of safety. Literally when it comes to airborne viruses. Socially masks can be a shield of safey that shows a carefully curated portion of our authentic self so we can dance freely until our full face can be free too. You are not lesser if you protect some inner, precious side of yourself. Sometimes a mask is like the face shield on a hockey helmet. Sometimes a mask is the thing that can let you dance fearlessly.

“Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.”
Frank Herbert, in Chapterhouse Dune

Week Ahead Tarot: Summit and Crossroads

This is different.

When I do these week ahead readings, typically I either use my Action Eases Anxiety layout with my one and only Lenormand deck, or I use another layout with one of my several RWS decks, whichever one intuitively seems right for the moment.

Oddly, today’s energy asked for a TaoCraft Path layout with the Lenormand deck. Gives me the feeling that either this is going to land with someone personally OR that the collective energy has something to say and wants to be heard. With any kind of luck, it’s both.

Anyway, here’s what we got.

Influence from the past: The Mountain (right)

OK – maybe the storm lasted 6 years instead of two. I ‘hear’ (meaning the intuition comes as mental words or music instead mental images) both the words “end game” and an old 1970s song “Looks Like We Made It” (Barry Manilow? – ugh. OK, message received. I’ll brain bleach that with music I actually like now)

The feeling and imagery reminds me of images given toward the end of covid lockdown, of cautiously coming out of a storm shelter to see what damage has been done. Maybe that was actually the eye of the hurricane and 2024 was the second side of the 2020 storm.

It also gives me of the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy crawls over the edge of the cliff where his dad is staring over the edge thinking Indy was dead. So Indy just stands there too, trying to see what everybody was looking at.

Long story short, this card is letting us know we made it – again. We’ve climbed another cliff, and now it’s time to drag ourselves over the edge, see what everyone else is looking at and figure out what to do next.

Current Energy: Crossroads (middle)

With this I ‘hear’ “Hekate” and “keys”. The mental image is coming to the top of the mountain or dragging over the cliff edge as with the last card and immediately being faced with a crossroads. The straight ahead path immediately heads down the other side of the mountain. Left and right paths go along the summit ridge in opposite directions. All are equally lit by the setting or rising sun, all three seem equally compelling. My instinct is to stay still and gather a better sense of things. Choosing to do nothing just now is still a choice. I hear “this needs time”

For YOU as individual, I hear “the key is imagination.” If you imagine that your stresses are winding down (regardless whether they FEEL that way or not right now)…imaging that they are. Imagine that you have survived your stress, it is behind you, and you have four clear choices of how things go from here in the near future. Left, right, straight ahead or stand right the hell here for a minute, which pulls you? Which looks brighter in your mind’s eye? Where are each of those choices headed? Which direction do you WANT to go?

“No rest for the wicked” as the saying goes. We are being hit with a deliberate, mindful choice as soon as the wave of stress and challenge begins to pass. The time to choose your next steps is NOW. It’s about the mindfulness of the choice. Even if the choice is to stop and rest for a minute, MAKE that choice deliberately. It doesn’t matter as much what you choose, only that you choose it with full awareness and purpose.

You can change your mind later, the point is to at least make up your mind for now. Don’t just let this week happen to you. Experience it on purpose.

Best Next Steps: The Stork (left)

The Stork symbolizes newness and cycles. Not all change is bad, but new change is hot on the heels of old change. This last phase, this last storm is rapidly closing, but there is no fence to straddle, no flat path to follow. Standing still is a choice on the razor’s edge. New movement and change comes quickly. In this mental image of the summit and the paths, the top is narrow, maybe a meter wide. Straight ahead slopes down quickly, right and left remains flat but narrow along the ridge. Every direction is equally light, equally compelling.

You can always change your mind later. This feels less about which direction you choose…less about WHAT you choose and more about making a choice NOW and even more importantly choosing AT ALL. Don’t let this week just happen to you. Be deliberate and mindful about what you do, even if it is to nothing. Stay the course if you want, but do it on purpose.

Astrology isn’t my strong suit, but it is the full moon, a blue moon, in Saggitarius for whatever that is worth. The astrology side of social media caught my attention with it because it is supposed to be good or lucky for my sun, moon and rising signs. It is supposed to be at time to plant seeds of intention as this is an opportune time for the to come to full and good fruition.

I’ll take that.

But I get the sense that this is an opportune window of time, a favorable energy environment for deciding your direction. Nothing has to be finished now. The Stork card hints at birth and beginning. Take it all in for a moment, but plant the seeds now. Or as social media’s Tank Tolman says….begin where you stand.

For some, standing is a beginning.

The past has been hard. You’ve seen things and done stuff, and crawled back up and over the edge of the cliff. Right away we are hit with the likelihood of more change, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Level and downhill is easier than dragging ourselves up a steep climb. It is all sunlit and warm (gives pleasant sunset vibes) The thing to do to move forward in harmony is just to do it – do anything or nothing so long as we do it deliberately

Here is to a sunny summit kind of week for us all. See you at the next sip!

Tarot and the Lo-Teks

Yesterday’s post was, obviously, about a new shop item on my ko-fi page. All the proceeds from my ko-fi page go toward web-hosting Sage Sips without ads, keeping the Substack paywall-free, and maybe generating a few donations for causes I care about (more about that in a later post.) I’m not going back into business. Handwritten Tarot readings are not a money-maker.

Trust me, I’ve tried it before.

I originally offered tangible, pen and paper Tarot readings years ago, when AI was the stuff of cyberpunk fiction – not anything anyone actually used in normal day-to-day life.

I’ve always been a William Gibson fan, dating back to Neuromancer. I originally offered handwritten Tarot because it was cool and niche. Bringing back handwritten Tarot is more the Lo-Teks from Gibson’s short story turned Keeanu Reeves movie, Johnny Mnemonic.

I never imagined that a person to person email with a digital photo would seem low-tech next to computer-generated art and writing, but here we are. Physical paper and handwriting seems like ancient, mysterious wizardshit by comparison.

If you want a talking type of reading – eesy peesy. There are psychics by the dozens out there doing that and it is up to you to figure out if they are trustworthy or not. (The Tao of Finding a Psychic might help) As far as I know, there are only a handful of us working in the typed-word and email formats, and fewer still that do handwritten pen and ink readings.

“A thought is powerful, the spoken word even more so, but the written word is the most powerful of all”

Sallie Christensen, psychic and author

I’m not going back into business, but I am offering these readings as a quiet rebellion against AI. This is my Lo-Tek Tarot.

Handwritten Tarot is magical and powerful – arguably even more so than spoken in-person ones. This kind of Tarot can never be digitally replicated. My bad handwriting and cringy doodles show you they are 100% real, 100% HUMAN .

Handwritten Tarot has all the advantages of any distance reading: You can’t unintentionally give body language cues. There are no leading questions, no stage mentalism, no tricks – these readings are pure spirit and intuition. No drama, no AI slop – just quiet wisdom in the ancient way of pen and ink writing.

Please include your name, U.S. mailing address, and question for the reading with your order. If you don’t include a question or topic, no problem! I’ll automatically do an open style reading and let intuition lead the way.

Sent folded into a standard #10 envelope, this Tarot reading is discreet and private. This is highly customized folk art with no refunds or exchanges. Available to USA mailing addresses ONLY.

This nominal charge is only to cover the cost of paper, postage, driving to the post office and the extra effort that these take to create.

Just like always, these readings are highly customized ephemeral folk art for entertainment and personal spritual enrichment, and do not predict the future. No refunds or exchanges or any of that other business-y stuff. Caveat emptor and whatnot.

Order one from my ko-fi shop HERE if you are interested in giving it a try.

Two Way Doorway

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A doorway works perfectly fine in both directions.

Never mind the dedicated pressure triggered in and out doors at the supermarket, I’m talking about your ordinary door.

Threshold, portal, liminal space – its all the same basic idea here.

The collective energies have been niggling at us through the eight of cups for a while now, and it isn’t done with us yet. The energy hinted at turning a corner with it as we talked about the other day in the Standing in the Shimmer post and the brilliant @spiralseatarot on threads once again wrote the eight of cups and about holding space for good things to fill the gap where we have let go of the things that no longer serve us.

Inspired by the gap in the cups that she pointed out, I intuitively heard “portal in time.” Time is something worth exploring in connection with the eight of cups.

The card at its core is about letting go of something while at the same time walking toward something better. It looks back and ahead simultaneously from the portal, the gap in the cups, this bubble we forever live in, this present moment.

Setting mindfulness and the present moment aside for another time, let’s think of the two directions we can cast our attention with this card.

With the classic Pamela Smith artwork, we can’t see what the figure is walking toward. The future is literally out of view. The crescent and round face in the clear, cloudless sky very likely was mean to communicate moon energy, but the crescent and round shapes seem a bit of a moon and sun combination – yin and yang together. That with the clear, cloudless sky both hint at infinite potential held in that out-of-view future.

The Tao Te Ching tells us that one becomes two (the unified oneness of everything can be understood in harmony of opposites, yin and yang) and the two becomes three (I see it as an echo of biological reproduction) The three becomes five (the five classic elements) which in turn comprise the totality of the physical world to this system of thought.

Long story short, the future hold a LOT of potential with this card.

The portal to the future, the gap in the cups, the space Spiralsea advises us to hold is where we draw from that infinite potential. The gap/portal/space is this right-now moment where we make the decisions and take the real world actions that influence the way things go from here. The figure on the card is taking a step. It’s not the cliff dive we see on the Fool card. This has a deliberate quality. This is a decided first step in a new direction.

It takes courage to step in to a new and unknown direction.

It takes courage to deal with the past.

If the background of this image hints at an unknowable but potential laden future, and space in the cups is our portal to time and the sacred liminal space in which we hold our hopes and intentions for the future, then the foreground deals with the past. The ground is beige and barren, with the rest of the card filled with blue, sky and water. The cups rest solidly on the bottom edge of the card.

On one hand this card is about walking away from a bad situation, expunging something harmful or dismissing something from the past that is of no more value. You’ve heard me quote it dozens of times, this again reminds me of that quote from the movie The Last Jedi where Kylo Ren says something akin to “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. It’s the only way to become who you were meant to be.”

A change that profound should never be made rashly.

The past may be barren, lifeless ground, but it is ground just the same. It is solid. It exists. It happened, it ain’t changing, the memories are yours forever.

When you walk away from the past, you can’t change what happened but you have absolute control over how the past affects you. In the gap in the cups, in this present moment space we hold, we choose how much of the past we allow through to the present. When we let go of the past, the past events still exist unchanged, but the effect it has on us is transformed.

We aren’t letting go of the literal events of the past, we are releasing the mental and emotional hold those event have on our present moment – and in turn their hold on the future.

The doorway in time we see symbolized here goes two ways. It is a present moment liminal threshold where we can both plant seeds for the future AND stop the past from contaminating those seeds. We can let go of the past’s hold on us at the same time we can choose a new direction.

Please feel free to explore the archives. Type eight of cups or 8 of cups in the search bar on the right side of the page (laptop view) to see more thoughts about this card from old posts.

See you at the next sip!

Week Ahead Tarot: Look and Listen

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My first thought today was to do the usual Action Eases Anxiety layout with the usual Lenormand or RWS tarot decks.

But instinct, or intuition, or spirit or the muses – or whatever you want to call it – had another idea.

First, I felt pushed toward the Normal Tarot deck (by Seven Dane Asmund, used with permission) Then the layout seemed all wrong. Anxiety is often connected to outside conditions like *gestures wildly* everything in America right now.

At that point I hear “look within”

How very Bene Gesserit.

Look for and listen to your own deep intuition. It speaks quietly, and needs your full attention and maybe some amplification. Any microphone of your choice will do. For me it’s cards. It might be astrology, or a random song on a randomly chosen playlist. It might be that one wise snippet posted by someone in the middle of your nightly doomscroll. Whatever your amplifier of choice, look inside and listen to the spirit and intuition that is in there. Take yourself seriously.

Looking at the deck’s guide, the Drowned King is about tragedy at the hands of hubris. It is biting off more than you can chew, and then choking on it.

I am also reminded of the taijitu. The opposite colored dot in the middle of the widest portion of each color speaks to how anything in the extreme holds the seed of its opposite.

The advice is really about moderation. This is a week for taking the middle way.

Yell too loud and yes, you are heard, but you also let your enemies know where you are. Learn too far forward and you fall down. We’ve been called to action a lot recently by the Knight of Swords, but there are limits. Know yours.

When you’ve been pushing the “edge of the envelope,” you have to know when to “haul it back in” as the movie The Right Stuff put it.

Look inside and listen. You’ll know when to move, and when to stay put. You’ll know when to strive, and when to take smaller and chew so you don’t wind up like the Drowned king.

This card and the inverted star together let us know that we are where we need to be right now. Sit tight. Bloom where you are planted. Be present with here, now. Too much pushing or striving could lead to disaster.

Taking slow sips this week – see you at the next one

Persistent Surrender

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I like to think it’s a writer’s thing.

I call it the niggles when a thought captures your creative imagination and keeps poking at you until you write it. The Ten of Swords has been a little like that the past couple of days.

Had the niggling notion to draw a card for Wednesday (two days ago) but didn’t get anything posted after drawing the card because life, day job and everything. I drew the card with the intention of expanding Sunday’s Action Eases Anxiety reading, Cresting Wave.

I originally wrote Action Eases Anxiety as a 2 card layout showing, essentially, what it is and what to do. The cards describe current energies and give a suggestion about how to best navigate them. My thought was to add a third card …. a how-to-do-it card, which would flesh out the sentence, and let the layout echo parts of speech: subject-verb-object in a vague sort of way.

The new, third card was the 10 of swords and it prompted an avalanche of random sayings and platitudes plus a bonus earworm of a song from one of my favorite albums back in the day. It all pointed toward the 10 of swords keyword surrender. Often this surrender is the wave a white flag and admit defeat kind that the dire-looking Pamela Smith artwork would indicate.

In this case the surrender word has a different connotation. It is more like acceptance but not acquiescence. There is an element of going with the flow that we see in the six of swords, but with a much more disturbing undercurrent and context than the six would carry. This card connects to the previous reading in a way the six could not.

Surrender is a way to persist.

Someone on Twitter several years ago captured the absolute essence of this card as it presents today. I can’t remember who it was, but I want to say it was author Chuck Wendig in his You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton era. Whoever it was, they described the Ten of Swords something like “yeah, you are laying on the floor in utter defeat, but while you are down there you look under the sofa and find the car keys you lost two weeks ago.”

Today, the so-called negative aspects of the card are only negative or bad from a hyper active, frenetic, pushing, over-achieving point of view. Sure, it’s bad from an all-yang sort of perspective. If you look at it from a more yin-balanced perspective, surrender IS persisting.

Surrender lets you understand your situation and deal with it honestly and rationally (after all, intellect is a swords thing.)

A psychiatrist at a hospital where I worked a long time ago once said that “the decision not to decide is still a decision.”

So by that same token, waiting and watching IS doing something.

Yes, it’s true that if you wait for the perfect time to do something you’ll never do it because the time is never perfect, BUT timing can be better if not perfect. Waiting for perfect is the problem – being thoughtful and strategic is not (again a swords / air / intellect thing)

Surrender and retreat isn’t defeat, it is advancing in a new direction.

“He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.”

Adaptation is survival, and that is the key to persisting in this energy.