tarot – Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot

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.

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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!

Still here

Happy Blue Moon everyone!

Am working on a long-format post for the first time in ages. It feels good to do that kind of writing again. I’m hoping to do more.

The day job has been day-jobbing this past week, but I’m hoping to do a week-ahead reading post tomorrow if I can squeeze it into the squirrel rave playlist.

I hope you’ll stay tuned to both Sage Sips and Sage’s Second Cup.

Weekend Oracle: Summer Knight

Seven Dane Asmund, creator of The Normal Tarot (used here with their permission) reads Summer Knight 1 as “beginners luck.”

I’m also getting a little bit of a Page of Wands vibe here.

This weekend, it might not be as much luck as destiny.

You made it! It doesn’t have to be pretty or stylish or winning by a large margin to count as hard-won experience that your later, not-beginner self can call on. Maybe squeeking through with “beginner’s luck” is a little boost, a little nudge in the direction you are meant to go.

Begin where you are.

Bloom where you are planted now.

Sage Sips is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip your coffee (or whatever you like to sip this time of day). Like what you read here? Please support me on ko-fi to help keep the blog and Substack free without ads or paywalls

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.

Weekend Oracle: Fade

The ‘Waning Moon’ card is about gradual change. Today’s message lives in the Venn Diagram overlap between intuition and real world science. That is often the case with moon related Tarot and Oracle cards. Obviously – the cards reflect thoughts and emotions inspired by the literal, physical, objective real-world moon. No wonder the moon is a favorite of the science minded and the spiritual minded alike. No wonder the Artimis 2 mission captured America’s heart in spite of the political catastrophe that we’ve become.

Copy – moon joy.

In his Animal Wise Tarot deck, Ted Andrews strongly ties the Moon card to natural cycles. The physical natural world has much to teach us, but so does the metaphysical and the spiritual. It is as natural as the rest. As a lovely point of sychronicity, the moon tonight as I write this is a waning crescent which seems to emphasize the notion of fading.

In my mind’s eye see ombre hair color, again bringing fading to the forefront.

But gradual change is still change.

Think Isaac Newton.

Newton’s first law of motion is the one that tells us objects at rest and objects in motion tend to stay that way. The bigger the thing is the more it takes to move it, turn it or stop it.

The racism, fascism and Christian nationalist bigotry in the US is one hell of big thing. It’s going to take every bit of all of us to stop or change it.

Inertia is a thing. It is woven into the fabric of the universe. We shouldn’t be surprised, perhaps, if the right-wing extinction burst is the slowest in a bazillion year history. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening just because it is happening slowly. The earth turns in 24 hours. The moon circles us in a month. Jupiter turns in around 9 hours. Neptune takes 165 Earth years to circle the sun.

Neil DeGrass Tyson famously said that the “universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.” Neither is it under any obligation to meet any single one of our hopes and expectations. Things happen in their own time. They may change slowly, but they inevitably change. That is another law of the universe in both philosophy and the physical law of entropy.

The waning last quarter half-moon faded to tonight’s crescent and will continue to fade to the dark night of the new moon. Then it will fade brighter again.

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend toward justice unless the full weight of multitudes and generations drag it there slowly. Hate and bigotry can fade, but only when we gradually, relentlessly do all we can to erase it.

Dilute it relentlessly with kindness, even this must and will fade.

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

Sage Sips blog is Tarot in the time it takes to sip your coffee (or whatever you like to sip this time of day) Please support me on Ko-Fi to help keep Sage Sips free and open to everyone without ads or paywalls. Thanks for reading!

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

Soft Landing

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After the sun rises it sets. Days and weeks begin, and then they end. Tarot can help set the tone for your day or week. But it can do more.

Tarot gives you a 360 degree view. It can broaden your horizons, it can help you look ahead and plan, but it can also look back and understand.

Daily meditation tarot can help bring a day in for a soft landing just as well as it can get your day off to an inspired start.

The Star is about hope and aspiration and guidance.

In reverse it hears you when your compass is spinning and you don’t know which way to go.

Tonight, the Star suggests that when you don’t know which way to go that means you are already there. Be where you are.

When it is time to move, a new star will rise and you’ll know what to do. For now, bloom where you are planted. Find the contentment and happiness that is already there just waiting for you to feel it.