TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your morning coffee. Today: Nine of Swords
Apologies to podcast listeners. Due to a technical glitch, yesterday’s “You Choose Interactive Tarot” didn’t go out through the podcast after all. It is available on the blog for anyone who is interested. Link is in the episode description.
Today’s card is the nine of swords.
Like most cards, it has several threads of meaning. Today two threads are stepping forward, universality and direct proportion.
Experiencing some degree of worry and anxiety is never easy, but it is ubiquitous. It is pretty much a universal experience. There is an adage attributed to everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Alexander Graham Bell to the Positive Mom blog and back again. It has long been said that “if you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived.” Just look at babies learning to walk. The greatest among us took a few plops on the old diaper at that stage of life. Or as Thomas Edison actually said, “I never failed at making a light bulb. I just discovered 99 ways NOT to make one.” It is just the human experience. There is no walking without a few falls and there are no light bulbs without a hundred not-lightbulbs. In the words of the R.E.M. song, “everybody hurts, sometimes.”
Alan Watts gives us a hint at the other thread of meaning. He reminds us that “we cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.” That shouldn’t deter us from experiencing life any more than a small sit-down should deter us from walking or a blown light bulb should deter us from finding a light.
If we experience life through a pinhole then worry comes as pinpricks. But pleasure can be unsatisfyingly small in proportion. Worry and anxiety can be artificially large sometimes. The hopeful side of the nine of swords is that on the other side of worry, relief can come in equal measure.
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If you are serious about living an enriched life and being a better person, then stepping outside of your comfort zone – even for a moment – is inevitable. That happens a lot in Tarot. The cards will nudge you toward a better path even if that means kicking you entirely out of your comfort zone in the process. This post might be one of those moments. It is for me. Today’s card uncomfortably pokes at some old issues, but imma just say what intuition gives anyway. This post is a little sweary and political. If you are not up for that, no worries, just skip it and come back for the next post. I’ll be back to my usual religion and politics avoidance policy by then.
Evangelical dogma and connotations around the word pride is reason nine thousand ninety-nine hundred and eleventy-one why I ran screaming from my family’s religion.
I was raised in the American evangelical subculture by the church deacon and Sunday school teacher who helped found the town’s first Southern Baptist affiliated church. (Yeah, THOSE Southern Baptists in the WaPo article) That kind of thinking turns the innocent word “pride” into something wrong and guilt-riddled. They turn pride into a sin (as do Catholics, so I’m told.)
If being happy with who I really am while proudly celebrating the authentic selves of the people I love is a sin, then hail Satan and pass the asbestos underwear! See you in hell, frens!
It’s a stretch, but I’m guessing the “pride” they are talking about is maybe a language artifact. Language shifts and evolves over time, even when fundamentalists don’t. Bronze age manuscripts filtered through medieval translations and bent to contemporary evangelical ends frames their version of “pride” as being unbridled ego. It makes sense that, in a world before psychology, a mental state like that would be attributed to a more common word like pride. If you define it in those terms “pride goes before a fall” isn’t wrong. Out of control narcissism leads to poor choices and risky behavior (like, for example, the former president who was supported by 80% of white evangelicals according to NPR)
Whatever the reason, it is still a shame that the newer, healthier connotations of the word pride is often haunted by these older, negative, derogatory undertones.
It’s June, so it’s not psychic or paranormal for my thoughts turn to Pride Month.
With the Four of Wands today, the words “quirk” and “celebrate” step forward. “Quirk” is the name for superpowers in the anime My Hero Academia that we’ve been watching lately. Superpower or not, socially acceptable or not, “quirk” here means anything that makes you unique and is a key part of your individual, authentic self. “Celebrate with pride” comes strongly to mind.
This is where it gets uncomfortable. I am reminded of reason number 1 why I ran screaming from the evangelicals: bigotry. Rampant, pervasive, intractable bigotry including overt homophobia. Not every single individual certainly, but the words that pour from those they collectively elevate to their pulpits speaks for everyone in a congregation. Loudly.
The ministers are literally in front of and above everyone else when they speak. Imagine the heartbreak as a teenager when they would nearly yell bigoted bullshit about “the homosexuals” when I had friends in the community who where some of the kindest most compassionate, open, inclusive loving people I’ve met to this day.
The Four of Wands is about community celebration. It is about lifting others up.
And it can be about embracing those who were rejected by their birth families because of who they authentically are. I love those “I’m your mom / dad now” memes supporting lgbtqia kids who are rejected by their own families. Anybody the evangelicals reject is prolly my kind kind of people.
The Four of Wands is about celebration. Authenticity is something to celebrate. People living their truest life is a profoundly happy thing. A lack of self esteem can make us more prone to bias or worse (a 2011 article on psychologialscience.org is one quick example) Confidence is fuel for compassion. Pride in ourselves breeds compassion for others which leads to pride in those around us which creates acceptance which seeds even more self esteem and so it goes. Pride not only isn’t a sin, it arguably makes the world a better place.
Pride month is a lesson for all of us. It is hard to hate others when you are comfortable with yourself. Those of us with privilege are exponentially more responsible to protect and celebrate and uplift Pride Month.
I used to think that my experience of leaving evangelical religion and coming out as a tarot reading, science loving, Taoist, atheist and witch gave me a teeny tiny partial keyhole glimpse into what it is like for the lgbtqia+ community on both sides of the closet door.
If there is anything at all I’ve learned from Pride month about being a good ally, it’s that being an ally doesn’t have any fucking thing to do with me. Pride month for an ally is about being proud of other people – proud of the people we care about.
If you are living an authentic and kind life – I am proud of you.
Celebrate who you authentically are. Celebrate everyone else’s authentic self too. But don’t let the celebratory pride slip into the self-centered pride. Pride and a safe and welcoming place is something for every month, not just big business June advertising. Although I kinda like all the rainbow tshirts. And the one big burger place donating a portion of their chicken sandwich profits (including Sunday sales) to a lgbtqia+ organization to troll the anti-equality uber christians that run that other chicken place. I’m all the way down with that particular cororporate move.
I celebrate with you because I’m proud of you and who you really are.
In Carl Sagan’s fiction work Contact, Ellie Arroway is a scientist involved with SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intellence (which is a real thing.) In it, at one point, she considers not only the vast distances between Earth and other potential homes to intelligent, communicative life, but also the role that time inherently plays. Obviously, it take a heckuva long time, even at the speed of light, for one side of message to get from there to here and vice versa. What if there is also a vast difference in lifespan and local experience of time. A few days to us is a lifetime to a fruit fly, and many generations to a germ. As she was driving she noticed crack or bumps in the road at fairly regular intervals. What if, she wondered, the pulses in a signal came so slowly, so widely spaced that we didn’t even notice the signal, with each blip of the message just being dismissed as an anomaly.
Makes me wonder if the universe isn’t really teeming with intelligent, communicative, technological life but each at such widely disparate time scales, that nobody can connect with anybody so that everybody thinks they are the only ones…but that something for another time.
The same phenomenon can happen when it comes to our interaction with Tarot, or any form of esoteric guidance, even pure intuition. Sometimes the whole idea gradually unspools over days, weeks or months until finally the last piece falls into place. If we miss a piece, the message goes on until finally the “ah-ha” happens.
A single card daily meditation practice is an excellent way to get a feel for this among many other things. Not only do you get a specific read of the energy for that specific day, you can see patterns emerge over the course of days, weeks, even years. My personal example of that is the strong presence of pentacle cards during the first part of the pandemic and the evolving intuitive images of the U.S. map with all the little tornadoes and the hurricane on the horizon that both reflected the overwhelming cultural zeitgeist energies that were so strong during 2019 & 2020.
What say you empaths? Has the cultural and environmental energies stopped ringing your bell quite so hard? I think that is the impetus behind the speckled stone image. Boundaries are firmer, individual concerns are at the fore and the existential political crisis (at least locally here in the US has dropped into the background somewhat.)
Today’s card connects to yesterday’s Four of Swords card which connected to previous readings. There is a continued thread of change & rest themed energies.
The Hanged man connotes stagnation, but this energy hasn’t been hanging around long enough to take on that interpretation. Hanged Man can also mean surrender, changing your way of looking at things – it can take on exactly the wait, don’t push, change what you are doing, rejuvenate, and contemplate energies we’ve been seeing. My hunch is that this kind of energy is going to be around for a while since we’ve seen it in a multi-day pattern like this. Astrology might ascribe this to some planet in retrograde or something. I don’t know anything much about astrology, so I attribute this to a yin phase, a time of quiet, of taking in, minor adjustments. It is a time of plugging in to recharge in whatever metaphoric sense you want to give the phrase.
If there is a message specific to today, I sense “patience.” Not everything unfolds at the pace we want or expect. There are reasons patience is considerd one of the great treasures of Taoism. Just like messages from aliens, life unfolds at its own natural pace, not according to our wishes.
“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you”
Authenticity is the whole reason that I re-branded from Modern Oracle Tarot to TaoCraft Tarot. It is an unfortunate reality that psychics and Tarot readers can be a target for all sorts of biases. We are often caught in the crossfire between religious fundamentalists who are convinced we are all evil and pedantic would-be skeptics who think we are all criminal. When I began in-person work in 2003, I had a whole laundry list of reasons to do so with a low profile inoffensive public image.
By 2018 that list had changed. By then, Modern Oracle no longer reflected who I am or the kind of Tarot work I want to do. I still don’t intend to deliberately offend anyone, but I am no longer willing to dilute my work to spare other people’s exaggerated sensitivities. Some places still require us to use the “for entertainment only” disclaimer. Tarot is entertainment because it really is a lot of fun. It is also much more. Tarot is a genuine expression of spirituality and life philosophy. Being honest is more important than being inoffensive. Integrity is more important than expanding market appeal.
Authenticity circles right back to the core premise of TaoCraft Portfolio. How do you find the right Tarot reader for you?
Professionalism and transparent business practices is a good place to start. If you are looking for entertainment, then a good stage personality is all it takes. But if you want a reading because you need honest to goodness guidance, both professionalism and personality matter. You wouldn’t want to talk about sensitive emotional or spiritual issues with someone who holds ideals that you find repellent.
I am Taoist, Zen, and solitary eclectic all in one. I was raised evangelical, but I’ve been an atheist for decades now. Science works regardless of what we believe. I am a LGBTQIA+ ally. Black lives matter. There is a climate crisis caused by humans and we must do everything we can to live in balance with nature. Women’s rights are human rights, especially reproductive choice. Healthcare is a universal human right. Shit happens, but love is love, and compassion is the one measure of it all.
You may think it odd that I want to come out and say these things so explicitly. You may think it is odd that anyone would care about such things. Still, if we know there are no unexpected cultural or political landmines, then we can do the reading from safe, solid ground. Both of us can relax. If any of these things anger you or offend your religious sensibilities, then I’m not the right Tarot reader for you. If you don’t mind this worldview (or maybe even agree with it) great! Let’s get started!
The free download version of TaoCraft Portfolio explains all of the basics about TaoCraft Tarot: descriptions of a session, a sample reading, explanation of the layouts, policies and so on. The “About” page in the menu gives you the same information but also has background pages about philosophy. The full expanded version of TaoCraft Portfolio will be available in the Shop late 2020 and has all of the “about” information collected in one place but adds expanded essays about philosophy and the occasional peek behind the scenes of Tarot readings.
Whew! At last. Our weather forecast finally includes some cooler nights, the first hint at my favorite time of year.
It is still that re-branding anniversary season, and the one card Tarot reading giveaway continues until Halloween. All you need to do to get the FREE reading is use the contact form on the special offers page.
Please stay tuned to the blog. More re-introduce-TaoCraft-anniversary season “Portfolio” posts are on the way.
Left: Queen of Wands. All queen cards represent leadership from a care-taking and nurturing standpoint. While kings were out defending the kingdom, the queens would care for the welfare of the subjects. From a more contemporary standpoint, this is like parenting, teaching and caring for other people. I see this card often in readings for caretakers like health care workers, teachers and so on. It often serves as a reminder to take care of yourself too. You are not as helpful or effective as a leader (of any type) if you are burned out and exhausted. This isn’t a call to over-indulgence, but it is permission to grab a nap, take a few minutes to meditate, indulge in that half hour online yoga class…that sort of thing.
Center: Ten of Wands. The Ten of Wands is as much short term encouragement as the Queen of Wands is advice for a marathon. The queen is lifestyle…the ten is looking at the short term situation. It’s a grind, and going to be that way for just a little while more. Ten is the largest of the number cards and is often associated with completion. I think of it as being similar to a ‘changing line’ in I Ching readings. In Taoist thought and the I Ching, anything in its most extreme holds the seed of the opposite, is primed and on the verge of a shift, a little like going over the top part of a Ferris wheel ready to go around again. The ten of wands, as the artwork suggests, is related to feeling overburdened or stressed. It’s not quite over yet. Sometimes this card asks you to evaluate what you should put down and what is needed to carry – a sort of a ‘thin your sticks’ idea. In this case, for this week, it is more of a ‘grind it out’ feeling. There is a sense of something nearing completion, so hang in there, do the do, grind the grind and soon you’ll be able to just toss the whole load down, job well done.
Right: Queen of Pentacles. There is something very similar in energy between this card and the Queen of Wands. I suspect it is also related to self-care, but with a different spin. Pentacles are related to the element earth and the practical, physical realm . This card brought several old adages to mind, heavy on the Benjamin Franklin. “A penny saved is a penny earned” makes me think that if you chose this card, this isn’t a week for impulse buys or unnecessary spending. At the same time, “penny wise and pound foolish” came through and in hand with the other advice. Don’t impulse buy, but don’t fail to invest in something good and needed. The energy around that part is about quality and value. Make the calculation between cost and quality. It brings to mind all of the DIY, low plastic and refillable products that the algorithms have figured out I like and are now filling up my socials…it costs more up front, but saves money in the long run. That is the kind of budgeting and money-wise thinking the card is suggesting. “Cleverness” and “Shrewd thinking” comes through too. Use your head in money matters this week. Be clever, not miserly.
Overall, three cards together, nurture your leadership, whichever style fits your situation the best. Take care of your self as you go along to keep yourself strong and well for the long haul. Grind through if you need too, then take time to recover when it is all said and done before you pick up your next project or obligation. Or works smarter, not harder. Use cleverness and wise investment to take care of yourself and those who depend on you.
Hi. This is me from (mumble mumble) years ago. I still use this photo because it is the only one of me I’ve ever really liked.
This is me now, in Bitmoji form which is as good as it’s going to get because the website, blog and socials are mostly about Tarot, a little bit about spirituality, with a sprinkle crystals, meditation, spirituality and just enough off-topic things to keep it interesting. I want you to feel confident and comfortable ordering a reading here, so please let me tell you a little about the bitmoji-fied face behind your email reading or the voice on the phone.
I started reading Tarot cards around 1990 or so. Early 90s anyway. I was still in my 20s, had left my parent’s religion and was finding my own spiritual path. Tarot & oracle cards played a crucial role in helping me find a healthy way out of a fundamentalist evangelical upbringing .
I started reading for myself because, honestly, who could afford to use those phone psychics that were so popular back then? It took a little effort to find authentic readers and teachers in those pre-internet days, especially in an a conservative area where good psychics were still mostly underground. Eventually, I was very fortunate to have readings, workshops and intuition development classes with talented, brilliant people like Sallie Christensen, Gina Hiller, Joy Star, even meeting Ted Andrews once at his Animal Wise workshop.
It turned out that I’m actually really good at doing Tarot readings too. A good friend encouraged me to work online, so I started with Keen, Advice Trader and AllExperts under the handle Baihu. When dissertation expenses came along, I started working for myself and Modern Oracle Tarot was born. In 2018, Modern Oracle and Tarotbytes blog were expanded to include Reiki, meditation tutorials, and my Quirk & Flotsam Etsy shop. I renamed it all that Fall to create the TaoCraft Tarot that you see today.
I’m a Reiki Master-practitioner (2000)
I’ve been doing folk arts and crafts since my Grandmother taught me to embroider when I was 6 years old. Making handcrafted meditation beads was a natural extension of everything else at TaoCraft Tarot. The meditation beads are in the TaoCraft Tarot Shop along with ebooks like PeaceTarot and a few other handmade odds and ends that find there way there.
I’m a retired Tai Chi instructor (Chinese Martial Arts, Mount Lebanon PA 1998-99) but still love playing taijiquan. I’ve studied meditation, Taoism, Zen / Chan Buddhism and other spiritual traditions on my own from various sources through the years. In magick, you might call me a solitary eclectic.
In “real life” I have a Bachelor of Science in Medical Science and worked as a physician assistant in psychiatry and cardiology. When motherhood came along, I went back to school to be able to work independently, completing a Ph.D. in Natural Health. Although the school’s accreditation has since been withdrawn, my work and dissertation stands. The dissertation is available to view on RondaSnow.com. Needless to say, this is a science, logic and reason friendly Tarot style.
That’s pretty much all of it. It’s all Tarot and the good stuff from now on, at least until I get the urge to re-introduce everything next year at anniversary time. I’m really grateful to all of you, new subscribers and old friends alike. If nothing else, I hope this lets you know I’m nice, normal, nonthreatening kind of person who just happens to be able to read Tarot. I wish you all the best and hope you feel confident getting reading because there is nothing to fear here.
It’s a fundamental idea. In Buddhism, the first noble truth is the existence of suffering.
Or, as the T-shirt defining Taoism says, shit happens. The five of pentacles in Tarot reminds us of the same thing. Difficult things happen to all of us sooner or later. It isn’t for us to judge the type or magnitude of that difficulty relative to our own life experience. It is enough to know that a fellow human struggles. Big or small, serious or trivial, true crisis or laughably minor, real world challenges and emotional upsets are a universal experience. Or to put it in t-shirt terms, shit happens to absolutely everybody at one time or another.
The card doesn’t stop there. It calls us all to compassion, sympathy and empathy whenever and wherever the aforementioned shit happens – always, everywhere.
There is much going on. The energy environment (I can’t tell if it is local, regional, national or global) is starting to feel like it did back in January or February, on the cusp of the maximum lock-down we had here in the U.S. I’ve been repeatedly, for months been getting the mental image of a storm on an ocean horizon and a sense of foreboding. Over the past few days it is as if the outer bands of the storm are starting to touch shore. Yes, I’ve probably been watching too much news, and yes, it probably is tied to the toxic mashup that is American public sentiment right now. If you are to any degree empathetic or energy sensitive, now might be a good time to batten down the hatches, grab your favorite protection crystal and start reinforcing healthy boundaries between your energy and external energies. Healthy boundaries are crucial.
Compassion flows best when it flows both inwardly and outwardly at the same time.
It’s still your choice, even on days where it feels like one card is the right thing to do. It’s still your choice whether you would like use this card as a prompt for your own DIY reading or scroll down to the one I’ve written below…or both.
It may not be one of our run on coins cards, but The Fool, reversed, has pandemic advice all over it.
Begin a new journey? Nope – stay your backside at home.
Begin an inner journey? Absolutely! But that is where the reversal comes in. Mr. Andrews describes the cayote on the card as one of the most vlever and adaptable animals. So a reversal here begs the question of where and how you are having problems adapting. Taoist philosophy has a similar idea. If you don’t bend, you could break. Living beings are supple, bendable. Life wants to be clever and adaptable like cayote in order to stay that way. Dead things are rigid, stiff, unbending, brittle, breakable.
This isn’t over. The old ways have to change, else death may follow. Yes, you have to do things differently and think about things differently now. It bests the alternative. Bending is far better than breaking.
Stay safe, stay home. Protect the ones who go to work to protect you by staying home for them.
Take a deep breath. Take a look around. Get the information about where you are, so you can catch your breath and catch your balance before moving on.
Things have been pretty yang lately, energetically speaking. Yin and yang, outward, inward, pushing, taking in….all of those things apply on a mental level as well as the physical.
Choosing is a mentally active thing, even in those times when you choose to do nothing or choose to decide later. Choosing not to choose is still a choice, even when made through apathy or inattention. It is still doing a thing. So is stopping, at least for a moment, to regain your balance.
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t resonate with astrology on a lot of levels, most of all with the whole Mercury retrograde thing. I mean, take a tiny step above the ecliptic plane and Mercury moves just fine. Look. Look at the planetary movement from the big picture, from top down. A little shift in perspective and POOF! No problem.
So stop. Just stop.
The cure for all the frustrations that social media looooves to blame on Mercury is to go from frenetic mental yang to a moment of mental yin. Stop. Re-calibrate. Re-orient. Re-balance. And Re-member how the solar system actually works. Think of this trick-of-eye retrograde time as a time for mental yin. Naturally, if you push and keep a frenetic yang spider-monkey-on-amphetamines state of mind during a yin quiet-and-observe energy time, you are going to be blocked and frustrated. If, as Neil Degrasse Tyson says, “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you” then neither are the energies of the universe obliged to cater to your agenda. Like the rhythm of the planets, energies ebb and flow. Sometimes energy is right for a large and in charge King of Passions and Choices like we saw yesterday with the King of Pentacles. Other times the energies are right for a moment of watching, mixing, balancing.
The Tao in TaoCraft is about finding harmony with energies as they are then making a better way forward. Tarot has a card for that.
I’m not making up the coffee part. Intuition works best when you are comfortable and can be in the flow of it (a rather Taoist – like notion, don’t you think?) Although meeting people in-person and doing Tarot parties is total fun and one of the real joys of being a Tarot reader, the writer in me loves curling up with my TarotCards, my laptop, a hot cuppa joe and diving in. It’s a different, more energy attuned way of connecting with intuition and spiritual guidance for people. Handwriting with pen and ink is even more so. I call it my specialty just because I enjoy it so much. I’d like to do even more distance work in 2020 than I have in the past. But I’m happy to help with either style. In-person appointments resume January 2. Distance readings are available now (order on the home page, noappontmentneeded)
Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot 
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