tarot card layouts – Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot

Welcome Back 2025 (part 2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The email / recorded format has a ton of advantages:

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

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

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

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

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

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

That, as it turns out, was a miscalculation.

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

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

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

All of my readings generally have the same basic structure:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of my policies are listed HERE.

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

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

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

Learn With Me: Lenormand Tarot, say it loud

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

Order Private Tarot by email 24/7 no appointment needed. Prices from $5-$40 total cost. OPEN all holiday season. ORDER HERE

Part 1

Over the past several weeks we’ve looked at the history of Lenormand Tarot as its been told by Christopher Butler in the book accompanying this deck and a few quick online searches. The origins are as fuzzy as any other Tarot deck.

So far we’ve looked at a few single cards. The more I work with the deck, the more I appreciate the artwork. Color on black with a certain neon light at night aesthetic is my favorite palette. Been definitely feeling the intp, cyberpunk lofi aesthetic these days. This deck is a standout in the art and visual representation. I don’t care much for the pale colors and deliberately old, eighteenth century look of most of the other decks that I’ve seen. The lesson there is to find a deck you resonate with VISUALLY regardless of RWS vs Lenormand setup to the deck.

See? We really are learning stuff here.

We also learned how the Lenormand Deck pushes you toward intuitive reading. You have to rely on your own intuition for the role that the playing card insets play in the card interpretation – if any. In contrast, the RWS decks use that aspect of intuition through card reversals. Lenormand disregards reversals outright.

I have to agree with my friends who said, in their experience, Lenormand tended to be more blunt, direct, in your face and to the point. I have a hunch that this is a function of Lenormand being a smaller deck and, I suspect, you might get the same punchy quality if you did a major arcana only reading with a RWS deck. Some limited run specialty decks are majors only, and when I first experiments with “cybertarot” software back in the 90s, the demo was majors only – and this has a similar feel to those majors-only readings. Just like when a lens narrows a beam of sunlight, it increases the heat and intensity of the light it could be that a smaller deck increase the intensity of a reading. But I also suspect there is a “goldilocks zone” at play, too. Too small of a deck, or too large of a layout could dilute or blur the cards’ insights to the point that it is no longer useful at all.

In my experience, larger layouts will do that regardless of the deck’s size. Even the 10 card celtic cross can get unwieldy and contradictory. I see no value in even trying the every-card-in -the-deck 4 x 9 grand tableau layout that is common to Lenormand. It is absurd to me on its face. My hunch is that Mlle Lenormand was riffing from pure intuition and using the cards to connect with her clients. That isn’t to say that it is schtick or performance or a con or a trick…people are sometimes more willing to believe “the cards” over what another human has to say. The cards make us feel that the information is otherworldly, something more or special compared to human insight.

The cards are skeletal armature. The cards are a structural foundation on which human intuition builds.

That is the larger, functional insights from these cards today. Please read tomorrow and we’ll take a look at these cards specifically in this pathway layout. The right hand card is fading energies, the middle card is current energies and the left card is growing energy as I read these.

continues tomorrow …..

Best Evidence of Gravity

“And then, for fun, he pretended that he was climbing down the wall. He did it almost instantly in his mind, convinced himself against the best evidence of gravity.” – Ender’s Game by Orsen Scott Card

I read Ender’s Game several years ago. It reminded me of the movie version of Heinlien’s Starship Troopers, but with a completely unnecessary, gratuitous final chapter. The final chapter blew it in my opinion, but like everyone else, my favorite parts where the zero gravity games and Ender’s first person descriptions of spatial orientation in that environment.

Apply that thinking to Tarot.

When Ender was floating around in zero gravity, did it change him as a person when his feet pointed in a different direction? Does the meaning of card change if you sit facing north instead of south? The Earth moves roughly what? 20 miles per second around the sun. If a card’s position in physical space really made that much difference in a card’s meaning, the meaning would change second by second wouldn’t it?

Maybe it does, but that’s for another day.

If a client is sitting directly across from me, every card that is upright from my point of view is reversed from theirs, and vice versa. A sideways card to both of us would be perfectly upright to someone sitting to the side. Early in the book, as he first travels from Earth to space, Ender realized that the names of surfaces and their function is determined by gravity. Gravity is what made any given flat surface the name of floor vs wall or ceiling. Gravity is what defined the subjective experience of down vs up or sideways. The same applies to a Tarot layout. Before you can consider reversals, you have to have some defining anchor point, some relative reference point (yeah, that kind of relative, as in Einstein’s theory of Relativity.)

The obvious reference point is the person doing the reading. But even when you have that clear definition of what a reversal IS, does really MEAN anything? Classically, a card reversal changes the meaning of the card somehow.

We’ve come to a time in human technology and civilization where we can (an in my opinion should) think larger. It’s time to take Tarot big picture. An obscenely rich guy just went to space on a lark yesterday. It’s time to connect Tarot and intuition to energy rather than physicality, to a cosmic perspective rather than an earth-bound surface one.

Even without considering upright vs reversed card position, there are lots of meanings and keywords bundled into any given card. It takes practiced intuition to draw out the right meaning for the moment and the message.

Your own good internal intuition is the way to understand reversals the same as any other meaning for a card. Reversals don’t change the meaning, they enhance it.

The reversal is about the energy flow around the card, not the card meaning itself. All the good/bad, positive/negative, advising/cautioning aspects of a card’s meaning should be considered normally, regardless of upright vs reversed presentation. In this case, think of the energy flow like water flow. In an upright card, the flow is like a river, generally moving in one direction. The flow might be fast or slow, deep or shallow. Sometime, in some places, under some conditions, the flow swirls in circles, even flows backwards or sideways. Usually that happens when large rocks or bridge pilings that block the natural flow. Reversed Tarot cards hint at a block in the natural flow. Reversed Tarot cards hint at swirls, blockage and back flow connected to all of a card’s potential meanings.

The reversal of a card in a readings isn’t a definite reversal from good to bad. It could just as easily be a reversal from bad to good. Stagnation could be sweeping into a new lane of progress. A reversed card is a hint to look at energy flow and larger context.

It isn’t about the rote direction of your feet. It is about the best evidence of gravity.

Duly Noted

“Growing Ogres” was a challenging post to write. You can tell because it’s long. Einstein was right – “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

There are three basic layers to talking about layers in Tarot: easy, hard and hot mess.

Reading for yourself is easy. I can teach you to interact with the cards by yourself for yourself in no time. In a short ebook in fact. You can order it HERE. And yes, I’m still working on a second edition. We’re gonna need it when this whole pandemic thing is over. Adjusting is hard. Adjusting BACK is hard too.

Reading for other people is hard. Interacting with the cards, plus the intuitive messages from energy/spirit plus communicating that message effectively to the client, plus business ethics plus ethics ethics…professional Tarot reading has several layers of complexity and levels of difficulty above grabbing your favorite deck for a little guidance every now and then.

Describing my side of the table and the inner workings of intuitive readings is wildly complicated because it requires taking a reader right up to the edge of silent mysteries and individual experiences. Trying to put the wordless into words can turn into a hot mess in a heartbeat. Or, in the words of Lau Tzu, “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.”

All I really needed to say was the combination of video and text wasn’t working out the way I’d hoped, so I’m changing it back.

I’ll circle back to personal growth, evolution, authenticity, inner growing new layers, shedding old ones and all of that stuff another time. Meanwhile, if you have any feedback about the tweek in the layout names or the audio/visual combo experiment, I’d love to hear it.

If you are interested in the video & text combination, check out the “Today’s Tarot” posts and the weekly “YouChoose Interactive Tarot” posts.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”
Jeff Rich

Something new has hatched for you

Happy Spring equinox!

I’m happy to announce a NEW format for all email readings on the TaoCraft Tarot website (Etsy shop readings are unchanged)

Now you get a video introduction with every reading. Not just text and a photo, not just a lengthy video file to download. You get the best of both worlds in one private document because…

Vox humana

There is something special about a human voice. That includes real people voices not just YouTube or professional media voices. It’s a human touch that that technology still can’t quite replicate.

We all respond to the human voice one way or another, but we all learn from voices differently. Language touches our hearts and lives in our brains in individual ways. Some, like me, are bookworms. I love to read, I learn from books easily and I write very well. It’s my thing. Other people are audiophiles. I have multiple family members who learn and engage with ideas magnitudes better when it comes to them through the spoken word. Audiobooks and podcasts are invaluable to them. Still others need an immersive experience that uses both seeing, hearing and hands-on interaction.

That’s why I’m introducing a unique kind of distance Tarot reading that combines audio, video AND text to provide an enriched distance Tarot experience that works for all kinds of people.

With the new TaoCraft Tarot distance readings, you get the no-appointment-needed convenience of email but also a taste of the immersive in-person experience.

All at the same price as before. LIVE phone readings are still available and the same as always. I hope you’ll try a session.

There is more to come. I have other plans, and will be re-doing “The Big Explainer” behind-the-scenes peek at card layouts on the YouTube channel as I hone some some video & presentation skills. (ie fuck it I’m reading from a script) and putting some examples here on the blog. I’d LOVE it if one of you would send me a questions (or permission for an open reading) that I could answer in the blog for you (no names or identifying information, of course. You’d know who you are. Use the comments, because I moderate them and wouldn’t make that one public OR just email me at TaoCraftTarot@gmail.com)

But welcome to spring, a little change and a seed planted with the intention that it brings happiness and prosperity to all.