Tag: thomas edison quote

Rain

If you want to catch lighting in a bottle you have to stand in the rain.

Hello and welcome to TaoCraft Short Sip: a Tarot contemplation for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee.

Today’s card is Lightning in a Bottle, one of the expansion pack cards created for the Alleyman’s Tarot deck by Seven Dane Asmund. It’s one of two lightning in a bottle cards. It is interesting to compare the two. You can see the other in the April 2022 blog post “The Makings of Magic” The other card is more ethereal while this one has almost a steampunk, industrial feel. The other card emphasizes the luck aspect of success, this one emphasizes the action part of it.

This card is akin to the famous Thomas Edison quote that “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” Anything is possible but not everything is remotely probable. Tarot is a little like that. It doesn’t predict – it inspires us with the possibility and guides us with practical probabilities, but never exact certainties. You can’t predict exactly where lightning will strike. But you can read the weather report to see where the rain will be.

According to the national weather service, lightning can strike 10 miles or a little more away from a storm. So sure, it’s theoretically possible to be hit by a bolt of lightning while you are sitting in your back yard on a sunny afternoon, but it is far more likely to happen if you climb a tall tree in the middle of a thunderstorm.

If we think of this metaphoric lightning as creative inspiration, you can just sit around waiting for an idea to hit. Especially if just sitting around is part of your personal creative process. But that’s the trick isn’t it? That’s the climbing a tree in the rain part. That’s the perspiration part. It isn’t the sitting around in and of itself that sparks the genius. It comes from knowing what inspires you. It comes from thinking about and understanding your creative process, whatever your creative process might be. When you know yourself and know your process then you can put yourself in circumstances where the lighting will find you instead of you constantly chasing it.

So now you have your spark in a jug. What are you going to do about it? Anything? Or is just knowing you captured it enough?

It might be. Happy is the person who defines success in their own terms and achieves that instead of striving for other people’s expectations.

But let’s suppose that your success includes other people. What if you want to show or share the lightning? That’s when the work starts. That’s when climbing out of our imaginary tree and doing something with the bottle comes into play. This is the part of the process where the makers are going to make and Thomas Edison starts to sweat.

It takes work to do anything else but sit in a tree with your lighting bottle. If abiding with your lighting bottle what you want and need, by all means do that. There is a great deal of light and satisfaction in doing that and it is 1,000 percent enough. In this scenario, I think of the lightning bolt as being a metaphor for Zen style enlightenment. It is for you alone. It is for you to take home, make a part of your life, and let it light your way from now on.

If the lightning represents creative inspiration, then there might be more that needs done, a different tree to climb so to speak. Catching the idea is the first stroke of luck, making it exist in physical reality is another tree climb. If the thing you create is popular with other people, then that becomes another lucky lightning strike altogether.

Both bolts require us to spend time out in the rain.

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The Makings of Magic

TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot for your day (or evening) in the time it takes to sip from your coffee (or tea). Today: The Alleyman’s Tarot Lightning in a bottle and the makings of magic

Welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.

Today we are drawing from the Alleyman’s Tarot by Seven Dane Asmund of Publishing Goblin LLC, used with permission. It’s a big deck, with one booster pack already in it and yes, you bet I’m planning on getting the other booster packs if possible.

I’m not a collector by nature, but I’ve been around collectors and I understand the passion. It’s not a greed thing or a materialistic thing. It’s a surround yourself with symbols of something you love thing. As a professional Tarot reader and Tarot writer slash blogger decks appeals to the maker part of me. It’s a “right tool for the right job” kind of vibe. On one hand they are a collection of specialized precision tools, yet on the other hand “every tool is a hammer” as the Adam Savage book puts it.

I know some Tarot readers who have dozens of decks. The Alleyman’s Tarot is my eleventh. I’m enjoying it even more than expected. It is a virtuoso deck, that pushes your comfort zone just by the vast array of tones, images and artwork. It’s also challenging by virtue of the cards like this one that are absolutely gorgeous, but not traditional RWS or lenormand symbolism. I can’t imagine anyone with the wherewithal to collect well over one hundred decks, but the vast array of different cards all beautifully curated by the creator gives you a taste of exactly that. Seven Dane Asmund has pushed all of our Tarot reading envelopes. Now it is up to us to haul it back in.

I’ve been watching the new season of the Witcher, so the Mages of Artuza came quickly to mind when I saw the lightning in a bottle card – specifically the scene where initiates were in a cave with a hole in the roof during a thunderstorm and were required to capture lightning in a bottle in order to become fully fledged Mages.

The phrase “lightning in a bottle” has been around much longer than TV shows. Generally, it means sudden, unexpected, unconventional but huge success at something rare, at something once thought nearly impossible. Lighting in a bottle is a get rich from YouTube, put a ding in the universe type of luck-meets-skill achievement.

Reliable origins of idioms like this one are just as hard to find. A quick search of the google machine gives you the idea that it refers to eighteenth century experiments with electricity like Benjamin Franklin’s kite and Leyden jars. Leyden jars are conductive material on either side of non-conductive glass in such a way that it will hold a small electrical charge. It used to be party entertainment to get a little spark from them, kind of like scuffing your sock feet across the carpet and touching a door knob on purpose. In the poetic language of the day, those little sparks were literally lightning in a bottle.

The Alleyman’s Notebook that accompanies the deck connects this card with a situation that can’t be forced. That interpretation fits in with the pop culture analogy. You can’t MAKE lightning strike. You can’t MAKE opportunities happen but you can position yourself in such a way as to be in the conditions that more favorable for the right opportunity to happen. You can put yourself in a mental and physical space to take full advantage of it if it does.

You can’t make lightning strike any given place at any given time. Putting real world electrocution aside for a moment, if you stand on an iron rich rock near salt water ocean with your arm up in the air during a thunderstorm, there is a better chance that you, the lightning and a bottle will all wind up in the same place at the same time.

There is a practical, mundane, banal side of catching lightning in a bottle. It may seem lucky or miraculous, but the most unlikely success still has elements of practical intellect and persistent effort. As Thomas Edison famously said “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration. Lightning in a bottle is random luck plus the courage and cleverness to take advantage of unexpected opportunity with a healthy dose of effort to follow it all through to fruition. These are the elements of mundane magic available to anyone.

There is one more element. A subtle one, the one that makes you into a lighting rod and gives you the power to contain it in the bottle. This is the part that makes the apprentice into the sorcerer. It’s the part that takes us back to the rainy rocks at the witch school of Artuza.

Harmonize with nature.

Lau Tzu gave us this advice in the Tao Te Ching a long, long, long time ago. If you are a grower by nature and you are in a sunny field, plant as you wish. If you are by the sea, step out onto the rainy rock and lift your bottle to the sky with confidence.

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See you at the next sip.

The Whole of It

TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your morning coffee. Today: Nine of Swords

Apologies to podcast listeners. Due to a technical glitch, yesterday’s “You Choose Interactive Tarot” didn’t go out through the podcast after all. It is available on the blog for anyone who is interested. Link is in the episode description.

Today’s card is the nine of swords.

Like most cards, it has several threads of meaning. Today two threads are stepping forward, universality and direct proportion.

Experiencing some degree of worry and anxiety is never easy, but it is ubiquitous. It is pretty much a universal experience. There is an adage attributed to everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Alexander Graham Bell to the Positive Mom blog and back again. It has long been said that “if you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived.” Just look at babies learning to walk. The greatest among us took a few plops on the old diaper at that stage of life. Or as Thomas Edison actually said, “I never failed at making a light bulb. I just discovered 99 ways NOT to make one.” It is just the human experience. There is no walking without a few falls and there are no light bulbs without a hundred not-lightbulbs. In the words of the R.E.M. song, “everybody hurts, sometimes.”

Alan Watts gives us a hint at the other thread of meaning. He reminds us that “we cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.” That shouldn’t deter us from experiencing life any more than a small sit-down should deter us from walking or a blown light bulb should deter us from finding a light.

If we experience life through a pinhole then worry comes as pinpricks. But pleasure can be unsatisfyingly small in proportion. Worry and anxiety can be artificially large sometimes. The hopeful side of the nine of swords is that on the other side of worry, relief can come in equal measure.

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