Tag: tarot

Hauling the edges back in

Sometimes a line from a movie lodges in my brain and sort of lives there for a while until it proves to be real-life useful idea. I use them here in the blog all of the time: “Work the problem” from Apollo 13, Curly’s “one thing” from City Slickers, and now one from The Right Stuff.

I don’t even remember this one exactly. Writing a blog and professional Tarot was over a decade away and not at all on my radar when I first watched the movie and heard the line. I think it was Pancho, in the bar scene where Chuck Yeager had his cameo, but she said something about test pilots “pushing the edges of the envelope and hauling them back in again.”

Everybody seems to love the first part. We’ve all heard about “pushing the edge of the envelope” since the movie was released way back in 1983. Nobody seems to remember the “haul it back in” part. It’s just as important. If you have all intense bright light you can’t see any more than you can in pitch dark. Or as somebody said, “any landing you walk away from is a good one.” You can’t walk away from a landing if you don’t have one. As laudable as “pushing the envelope” may be, the things you learn at the edge serves no purpose if you don’t bring them home to use.

The 4 of pentacles has a reputation for meaning miserliness or greed. Or it can be a reminder to be careful with the budget. I’ve seen it interpreted as a protected, hoarded or very secret treasure that isn’t shared. Today is one of those days where the card is hinting at a bigger message, a half-bubble off of the strings of keywords attached to the card. This is one of those days where a purely intuitive connotation steps to the front. Pay attention to those whenever you do a reading. Energy and spirit really have something to say when that happens.

Be yin. Today is a day for hauling the edge of the envelope back in. It isn’t a day for pushing or striving or extravagance either literally with money or spiritually or emotionally.

It is a good day to rest and abide, and integrate, and learn how to live and use the things you’ve learned. It’s a little like the spiritual equivalent of putting away the groceries you’ve brought home. It’s time to put your spiritual learning into it’s real world place and start using them. There is a careful deliberate feel about it. Protect your spiritual treasures by solidifying them, living them. It’s a good day to turn off the afterburners and bring this Monday in for a landing.

“If you can walk away from a landing, it’s a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it’s an outstanding landing.” – Chuck Yeager

Today’s Tarot: Fear and Indecision

Fear and desire are at the root of indecision. We desire to do the right thing. We fear the consequences of doing the wrong thing. We fear harming others with the consequences of our choice. We desire to avoid the responsibility of choosing. We want to avoid the nuisances of minor choices. Fear paralyses.

Consider the alternatives, have a plan B, remind yourself if/when you can reverse directions should you unintentionally make the wrong decision. Think: is your decision (or lack of one) motivated by some desire – including th desire to avoid? Addressing fears about potential outcomes might make a difficult choice little bit easier to make.

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Bittersweet by Choice

Like all the cards, there is a yin and a yang, multiple threads of energy and meaning, which is a different thing from a reversed card. A reversed card is one that turns over upside down relative to the person doing the reading. That speaks more to blocked, slowed, complicated or turbulent energy around the card, which isn’t the case here at all.

Either way you look at it, life changes and sometimes those changes suck.

It is bittersweet to walk away from things that once were pleasant and good but have run their course. People, things, circumstances have their time, but that time doesn’t always last forever. Sometimes those things leave us against our hopes…other times we have to take the walk.

Being a cups card, it’s almost automatic to think in terms of relationships evolving or ending. Romantic relationships, close friendships….all kinds of relationships…are important things. But the card can reach much farther than that. It doesn’t have to mean relationships. It can mean saying goodbye to thought habits, physical habits, addictions, comfortable routines, physical objects – anything.

Our feelings about change and releasing old things are as varied as the things we left – or that left us.

My mind goes to a couple of personal examples. For one thing, leaving my parent’s religion was a toxic, gut wrenching experience, but was ultimately a very good thing. Best decision I ever made. If the card was a picture of THAT experience, the cloaked figure wouldn’t be walking away in an air of contemplation, it’s be doing a happy dance like the grim reaper at the end of Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. On the other hand, when I left my first job – as bad as the job itself had gotten- I was moping around the last day like the ghost of Hamlet’s father “farewell, farewell, remember me.” While I was thrilled to move on to a new opportunity, I was going to legit miss working with some of the people a great deal. Both situations meant walking away from something gone very wrong, both had a swirling melange of emotions. Both experiences were bittersweet in the moment of leaving, but a positive, even joyous thing in the end.

Such is the message from the eight of cups today. Leaving (or being left by) anything or anyone can be bittersweet, even if the thing in question is terrible and toxic to us. It may be bitter now, but the sweet can come in time.

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Today’s Tarot: Tipping Point

Frank Herbert famously wrote “A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct” which in turn was adapted into the more famous movie line “A beginning is a very delicate time.”

Beginnings, I would add, are also tipsy, unpredictable, even mildly terrifying times.

The Fool depicted as Captain Jack Sparrow is one of my favorite cards from Thom Pham’s Heart of Stars Tarot deck. The character, as played by Johnny Depp, captures all sorts of threads held within the card.

The Fool card isn’t about “foolish” as contemporary language might make you think. Humor and play are certainly connotation within the card. But there is more to this kind of humor than meets the eye. Just like Captain Jack. He turns out to have both unexpected cleverness and ulterior motives. Contemporary stand up comedy is another analogy for the Fool card. Think of comedians who deeply insightful social observations in their humor; Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, Jimmy Fallon, Eddie Izzard and George Carlin to name a few personal favorites. Author Richard Clarke once said that you can tell more truth through fiction than non-fiction. You can tell more truth through humor than you can say outright. Such is the nature of the Fool card.

A beginning is the best known connotation of the card, ostensibly because it has long been the first card in the major arcana part of the deck.

Beginnings are weird. No matter how much you expect them and prepare for them, then there is still a pretty good chance something is not going to go according to plan. Sometimes we think about something, but for some reason we never set a hard start or take the leap. Sometimes that is a by-product of uncertainty, lack of confidence, or outright fear. Sometimes it is a matter of timing. Going back to Frank Herbert, enough time has to elapse and conditions have to be right for the spice mass to reach critical mass and blow. That is why it is a classic Tarot trope for the Fool to be off balance, one footed, or on the edge of a cliff. If you don’t begin something that needs begun, life will often come along and begin you. Maybe that’s why Captain Jack moves the way he does.

copyright Ronda Snow

This is my new beginning: Clairvoyant Confessional is my new podcast available on Spotify, Anchor.fm, PocketCast with more outlets on the horizon. If you would like a private distance session with a podcast psychic – here’s your chance.

Confession #2: Yo-ho

I’m a clairvoyant and I have a confession: I like pirates.

Not the real life ones. I’m talking the gnarly haired, eighteenth century, Caribbean styled, Adam-Ant-reminiscent movie, book and TV kind of pirate. I wasn’t kidding when I said Pirate Radio was part of my vision for this podcast.

I know, I know. Pirate radio isn’t THAT kind of pirate. But you have to admit, both kinds have, as J.K. Rowling wrote “a certain disregard for the rules.” Or, as Barbossa said in The Curse of the Black Pearl, “the code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.” That’s the cool thing about not knowing anything about the conventions of media or podcasts or any sort of broadcasting. The guidelines can go overboard and I’d never even notice (insert loud SPLASH sound effect.)

Unless and until somebody somewhere out there sends some psychic tarot questions to clairvoyantconfessional@gmail.com, the rando pirate DJ monolog aestheitic will be a big part part of the podcast. I plan to schedule things that way, too. Which is to say there isn’t going to any sort of schedule whatsoever. Just stay tuned, subscribe to podcast on Spotify or Pocketcast or subscribe to the blog on TaoCraftTarot.com. You never know when the SS Clairvoyant Confessional will come sailing through.

That being said, so what if I like pirates? What does that have to do with clairvoyants, psychics, Tarot, intuition, or any of that stuff?

Surprisingly, a good bit. Mainly because both are rich in metaphor and symbolism. A ship’s captain is a poetic symbol of autonomy and authority. Psychics are more like the navigators. We are all the captains of our metaphoric life ships. Think of your favorite fictional Captain. Would Blackbeard, or Barbarossa or Jack Sparrow – or Captain Kirk for that matter – surrender command? Even in their outlandish fictional situations, they owned their decisions, adapted to the outcomes, and stayed in charge. Sure, the navigator may have set the ship’s course, but the captain was the one who decided where the ship was going in the first place.

And so it is with you and Tarot / psychic readings. Yes, readings help you keep a weather eye on the horizon, but you still have the con, you still turn the wheel. If a captain refused the navigator’s advice and get the ship got lost, it wasn’t the navigator’s fault. If a navigator’s course stranded the ship on a reef, the captain was still responsible for agreeing to the directions that got them stuck. The captain was still responsible for getting the ship to port. And the captain would get themselves another navigator. If the captain and the navigator worked well together and got to where they needed to go, then they both got a share of the booty. Whichever way it turned out, the adventure is still under the captain’s command. The same is true for psychic readings. Your choices are still in command. Your choices steer the ship. I wrote the Tarot layouts that I use the most to show and respect exactly that. The 5 and 7 card layouts highlight your choices and the command that you have over the course that you take.

That’s it. That’s the confession: I like pirates because I’m the captain of this merry pirate Tarot ship. There may not be an exact schedule, but there will be some interesting episodes to come as we sail along. Thanks for listening, and welcome aboard.

Arrrrrrrr

YouChoose Interactive Tarot: Stand or Roll

Trying a new thing: I am letting the YouChoose videos, unpolished as they may be, stand on their own for a while. That way there is no chance of spoilers in the text below.

I hope you’ll let me know what you think either in the comments or by email at taocrafttarot@gmail.com

If you have any questions about anything Tarot or have content requests, let me know that too! Comments are open and welcome as long as they aren’t spam.

PS…did you see the new logo? So excited about converting to it 🙂

Decide to balance

In the video, we said that two cards in general can allude to either balance, or a decision. Usually, the decision in question is relatively minor and one of those “six of one and half-dozen of another” all things being equal kind of decisions.

As I give today’s energy a little thought, it still seems that balance is the thread of meaning that carries more energy, but at the same time the idea of “it’s both” steps forward, too.

What about deciding to balance?

Decisions are inseparable from balance. My favorite example is riding a unicycle. The rider is constantly making small adjustments in order to keep the unicycle upright. For those of us who don’t ride unicycles, you can see the adjustments the rider makes with the pedals and the movement of the wheel. The rider has to learn…to know and decide in the moment how to move the pedals in order to keep their balance.

Balance might serve as a good tie-breaker if you have a practical decision to make between two equal seeming things. Of the two, what will make your life more balanced? Little things mean a lot. Small decisions can add up to big effects. Opt for balance in little things to avoid big tipping points later.

Sometimes it really is hard to choose between two eqal things. They are intended to be lighthearted and fun, maybe a little snarky, but a Zombie Cat yes-or-no readings can help you sort out small choices where all things seem equal and bigger connections (like balance) are hard to see. Distance Tarot is my specialty. Order anytime, no appointment needed, HERE

Today’s Tarot: Hanging Around

Public Domain

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”

Neil DeGrasse Tyson via brainyquote.com