tha magician – Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot

From the archives, September 1, 2019

I love it when people talk in T-shirts.

My husband is a drummer. This morning we were watching and interview / demo video on with Stanton Moore, the drummer for Galactic. If you like music and/or drums even a teensy bit, and you don’t know Stanton Moore or Galactic, run don’t walk YouTube or his website or where ever you listen to music and check it out. It may not be your taste in music, but it is worth a listen just for the sheer skill and musicality of it all. At the moment, my personal favorite is “Ha di ka” from the album Carnivale Electricos because it totally reminds me of The Magician card from the Black Cat Tarot.

But that’s another story.

In the middle of all the music stuff he said that you can always “improve your groove” which would make a pretty good t-shirt, I think.

He’s talking about a music groove and learning / improving your skill as a drummer, but to me the non-musician, it invokes the notion of dynamic balance, comfort, ease, being “in a rhythm,” a sort of wu wei state of mind. You know, just rolling with things as they come and it’s all good.

So how do you improve on that? Why would you want to? After all it is OK for everything to be OK, at least every now and then.

Acknowledging the groove improves it.

There is a vaguely toxic version of gratitude floating around out there. I had a client one time that was going to be grateful goddammit until she got the romance she wanted. She had heard that gratitude brings the things that you want, and was essential to the spiritual Law of Attraction. Being grateful for what you have brings you what you want. Valid point – sort of. I had to wonder how grateful she really, genuinely FELT if she was as miserably laser focused on her current loneliness and that new relationship as she said.

Scott Cunningham wrote that “the feeling is the power.” Empty gratitude as an exercise to gain something can’t feel all that terrific. The magick happens when you feel the gratitude for the stuff that is right here, right now. When that happens, the gratitude brings you a wealth of good things that were right there under your nose, perhaps unacknowledged.

Gratitude is a comfortable groove. It is not some ecstasy, not something you can force or do as a means to an end. If you aren’t grateful now – OK. If things are bad – OK. Acknowledge that realistically too. You have to understand how things actually are before you can improve them, right? Gratitude can come in the form looking around and feeling that things aren’t so bad after all. As I type that, I “hear” (which is how I describe intuition that comes as sounds, words or music instead of mental images) a song by Esperanto reggae artist Jonny M, “Malacxa” which means “not awful” or “not bad”

The Magician, all songs aside, is a good card for the concept. The process of finding a groove, being in it, acknowledging it, improving it, can work a sort of magic. Gratitude CAN attract good things, but not by doing it come hell or high water to get some specific thing. The groove magic comes when you appreciate and improve the groove you are already in more than you throw your mind and energy at something that is not in your groove right now at all.

Tag: tha magician

Improve Your Groove