I was just on one of my favorite websites, Crystal Vaults.
It’s a good browse.
I love a good rabbit hole – a website with enough meat on its bones that you can browse and read and spend a little time and get good, solid, reliable, time-tested, usable information. If tiktoks, reels and shorts are a thin potato chip, then a good website is a full sized sandwich. Maybe a piping hot bowl of stew. If your lucky, it is the information equivalent of a full meal.
I like to think that TaoCraft Tarot is an all you can eat buffet of Tarot.
I’ve been at this for years. Decades. What started as small side freelancing to earn a little extra income for school expenses turned into 30 years of Tarot reading experience (almost 25 years of that as a professional) writing and blogging all along the way. Not all of it was on this platform, but a surprising chunk of it has been.
I love a good browse.
I hope you all will like browsing here, too. Welcome. The library is open. Feel free to use the search bar to dive into the Sage Sips / Taocraft Tarot archives. Enter a topic or tarot card and see what you can find.
It’s an ancient idea. Buddhist teaching long ago realized that taking action – or even making a decision or making a plan of action – can ease worry and anxiety. Practice and role play are a crucial part of emergency training.
Action eases anxiety, even in tarot. Knowing your energy environment and thinking about a good next step can go a long way to easing turbulent emotions.
Today’s Energy
THE HEART: Hope and love exist. It is near, but tangled in the maze and weeds of daily living. Don’t lose the forest in the trees as the saying goes. Don’t lose the love in the background noise, either.
Next Step
THE CRANE: Something new must deliberately be created. Clear away the mindless, the outdated, the harmful, that which has lost usefulness and the love and hope surrounding you will become clear. It is like Michelangelo’s sculpting method:
“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” ― Michelangelo
The love and hope energy is already there.
Clear away the extra and unneeded, and love will emerge.
Deck: Healing Light Lenormand Tarot by Christopher Butler, copyright 2021 all rights reserved, used with permissions granted on llwellynpublishing.com
Pause the video and think of your question or the week ahead. Choose your card, left or right. Restart the video to see the reveal and get your free tarot reading below.
7 of Cups: Choices are important and may feel stressful and overwhelming. Start with logic, but if all practical things seem equal, let your intuition and instincts lead the way. The up side of this is that multiple choices exist – at least you aren’t painted into a corner with few choices at all. When there are many options, especially when they all seem equal, it can all be very overwhelming. Sometimes being the one to have to make a hard choice alone is an overwhelming burdon, even when the choice seems clear. Choices and options can be intimidating in any combination of circumstances. If you are facing a big choice or have too many options, your head and heart have to work together. If logic fails, let your heart lead the way. In the end, clarity is crucial however your sort it out. Focus on the end. Choose your destination and the way to get there will become more clear.
King of Wands: Wands have to do with the fire element. King cards speak to leadership. Good leaders start with compassion and wisdom, but kings can’t rule without a kingdom. King cards often represent protecting and providing for the place where they rule. Wands can also symbolize your relationship with yourself. Remember your agency over your own life. Own it, mistakes and all. This is a good week to tap into as much main character energy as you can muster. Write your own story, lead your own inner kingdom. Combine wisdom and compassion with confidence and skill. Set boundaries and enforce them.
Thanks so much for reading! See you at the next sip!
Sage Sips is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip your coffee
ADA (action dissolves anxiety) Tarot are daily meditation style Tarot readings intended to bring a moment of reassurance in difficult times. They aren’t predictions – they are an idea to bring a little direction to the days when everything seems upside down and uncertain. The unknown can be frightening, and any little plan of action is reassuring. Action, even in idea and plan form, dissolves anxiety (at least a little bit.)
Knight of Pentacles: Today’s energy is practical, calm, logical, and down to earth. The day needs a calm, practical response, even if you arent’ really feeling it. When it comes to practical, down to earth, roll up you sleeves and tuck in, this time “fake it until you make it” might just work.
Ace of Swords: Creative problem solving is key. Use what you already know to solve new problems, and look for new ways to solve old problems. Either way, it’s hard to beat a good, practical life hack or piece of know-how. Work smarter, not harder. The trick is to find the right tool for the right job.
Sage Sips is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip your coffee
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Left (what is going on, the current energy): The Empress. Nature is calling. Deep solutions for small problems are closer at hand than you may think.
Right (a good next step, an idea for what to do next): Nine of Wands. Whatever you are feeling right now is valid and worth your attention, even if it is a whole lot of tired. Tend to your needs for a minute so you can regain your strength and persist for yourself and or others.
Sage Sips is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip your coffee.
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Think of a question or concentrate on guidance for the next few days. Choose the right or left card. Pause the video if you need more time to think, then restart to see the card reveal.
THREE OF PENTACLES: No man is an island – you don’t have to do this alone, literally or figuratively. It’s OK to ask for a helping had or to give one where it is needed. It feels like this will make something that seems big actually easy. Many hands make light work as the saying goes. Do what needs done then everyone can go out for a beer after.
TWO OF PENTACLES: Keeping in balance often means constant small adjustments. Don’t let the constant part overwhelm you. It’s just how life goes. Only dead things don’t change at least a little bit. The body has to create new cells in order to grow or heal. The key here is the SMALL part. Small, easy simple adjustments now can save a lot of trouble later. There is an old adage for this card, too. As Benjamin Franklin told us, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
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THE FOOL: Sometimes a new beginning is a thousand mile journey that starts with a single step. Other times it’s a thousand foot drop that starts with being shoved off the edge of a cliff. Either way, adaptability is a survival skill.
SEVEN OF PENTACLES: Focus on what you have, not what you don’t.
Think of a question, a topic, or just the next few days to get general guidance. Choose your card. Pause the video if you need time, then restart to see the reveal. Pick a card and get it’s message for you below.
The theme, the “meta-message” that came through repeating cards over the course of multiple readings during the holiday season seems to continue. The calendar may have turned to February, but the energy hasn’t turned in a new direction quite yet.
Dire things are still happening in the US. That is a dark, stressful energy that is like low lying dense dark smoke underneath all of the rest. There is still a sense of chaos continuing as the ‘new normal’ for a while, which explains why the Hanged Man major arcana card is still, ahem, hanging around. The Page, generally speaking, resonates with the bizzarre-feeling, surreal nature of it all.
But if you pull away, focus on a higher level above the blanketing clouds of fear, there are glimmers of a more hopeful individual message:
PAGE OF CUPS: There are deep lessons to be comprehended. From the weird to the sublime, life is trying to tell you something that is ordinarily hidden or very “out of the box” Be patient, be good to yourself. There is a hard lesson to learn here, but give yourself whatever measure of grace that you need to learn what life has to show you and to deal with the emotional fallout of whatever comes to light.
HANGED MAN: Buckle up and settle in. Things are going to hang this way for a while. Expectations and attachments can make things that are outside of your control feel worse.
In The Tao of Pooh Benjamin Hoff writes about busy-ness and constant striving. We are very conditioned to that in the modern world. Not everything has to be constant movement. It is important to be still and incorporate things we’ve already done, things we’ve already learned. It may seem like stagnation to the “Busy Backsons” as Hoffman call it, but life and the universe may still the journey until old lessons are fully set. You can’t walk on a new sidewalk until the cement is dry.
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
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