Tag: today’s tarot

Today’s Tarot: Gestalt and Context

Today’s card picks up and continues the theme from this week’s YouChoose Interactive Tarot, finding the unity behind the duality. The advice here again is to look for the big picture. Look to the background context to understand whatever your top of mind concern might be. The old adage “don’t lose the forest in the trees” is another way to say it. You know how photos of something to buy online often has a person’s hand or a coin or a pen or other common object to give you an idea of the actual size of the object being sold. That is the kind of relative perspective the Tower card will sometimes point out to us. The World calls for a bigger big picture. Look at the thing, the other thing shown, the relative size AND the background AND the lighting in the photo. See the difference?

Another example is one of those crazy hard jigsaw puzzels that have a lot o little pieces but big areas of the same color. If there is just one piece missing, it is easy to focus on the hole and make the piece fit. But early on, you have to look at the big picture….the shape of the puzzle, the piece relative to all of the others plus the picture on the box.

Sometimes there isn’t any one big AH-HA moment. Sometimes you have to piece together the big picture from all of the clues around you.

Today’s Tarot: Sightline

“Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there’s got to be a way through it.” – Micheal J. Fox

Taraffirmation #14: I see things as they really are, and work for the best with the resources at hand.

Don’t let old experiences or expectations for the future cloud your vision. Solving a problem requires that you see the problem for what it really is. Sometimes when accept things as they are for what they are, there aren’t as many obstacles in your line of sight after all.

Today’s Tarot: Cup of Contemplation

 

The Four of Cups in the Witches Tarot (by Ellen Dugan and Mark Evans, all rights reserved, used here with the permissions granted on Llwellynpublishing.com) is my favorite of all of the Four of Cups that I’ve seen.

It reminds me of the word abide.

If this present moment is one of contemplation, of introspection, of moodiness, or melancholy. Abide with it. Sit with it. Allow the mood to be in its fullness without judgement, action or reaction. 

The stream is key. Let the mood flow. Don’t keep it. Don’t deny or bury it. Moments and moods pass. 

Today’s Tarot: Controlled Burn

The suit of wands is associated with the element of fire. The Three of Wands in particular is associated with waiting combined with alertness, inward activity that isn’t always expressed with outward activity.

It reminds me of an episode of “Avatar: The Last Airbender we recently watched. Controlled fire is life. Uncontrolled fire can lead to destruction. The Avatar was given a leaf with a smodering fire at the center. His training task was to keep the fire from reaching the edge of the leaf for as long as possible but not to extinguish it.

The Three of Wands hints at that same subdued energy and change. It isn’t a card of charging ahead, but still is positive, and hints at success. It isn’t a card of completly standing down and taking a nap. It is a card of watching, analysing, following your dreams, but not chasing and flailing after them.

Follow your passions in a clear, focused, deliberate way. Control the burn, not put out the flame.

Dirk, DeGrasse Tyson, and the connected symphony

“…Learn to see. Realize that evertything connects to everything else” – Leonardo Da Vinci

“We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the Earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe, atomically.” – Neil Degrasse Tyson.

“The bond that links your true familyis not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.” – Richard Bach

“Everything’s connected.” – Dirk Gently TV series

We long to be together, to talk, to touch, to eat, love and laugh. It is the good and right human thing to do. Often, life demands separation in the typical sense. Loneliness forgets. It forgets the neither space nor time can break the bonds of love, of familial respect and joy. Our lives play out all on the same pale dot within the same wider Cosmos and within the same winding eternity.

You can purchase Melody Sheep’s excellent music on Bandcamp. https://melodysheep.bandcamp.com/album/symphony-of-science-collectors-edition

Todays Tarot: Every Little Thing

 

“We can “read” anything in our world as an answer to an issue or question. The answer is in our heart and the world reflects it back to us. If you asked a question and your eyes caught a spider web, this web would reflect the truth that was within and be an answer to your question.” – Joy Star

One contemporary way of understanding the four minor arcana suits in is terms of relationships: how we related to the physical realm, to our inner selves, to society at large and when it comes to cups, our relationship with relationships or our innermost circle of loves, friends and family. In a nutshell, all of the king cards symbolize leadership. Cups also relate to the alchemical element water. Water in general relates to intuition (think of the fish in a cup, mysteries from the depths of our psyche connotations from the Page of Cups card.)

Stir all of that together and it eventually boils down to intuition leading you, or leading through a deep trust in your intuition. One of my favorite interpretations for this card over the years is the king of cups as pointing to a spirit guide. A more literal spin is that of a mentor who guides your development in a specific area but in more connected, long term, developmental way than you would associate with a teacher or manager or organizer.

For now, I’d like to focus more on the spirit guide side of it. If you feel drawn to the mentoring side (either as mentor or mentee) I strongly suggest reading Chunliang Al Huang’s excellent book Mentoring: The Tao of Giving and Receiving Wisdom.

Spirit guides are a fascinating subject. Books could, and have been, written about them. My absolute go-to favorite is Ted Andrews’ How to Meet and Work With Spirit Guides. Some people think of them as something very separate from themselves like a patron saint sort of figure. Some see them closer, like a guardian angle or the one to one spirit guide described by Andrews, Bach and others. Still others see a “spirit guide” as a reflection of our spiritual side, our “higher selves.” This is the kind of guidance that Joy was hinting at when she wrote about the world reflecting our truth. Things like Tarot cards, planets, stars, runestones, I Ching lines….whatever it is…don’t give answers in and of themselves. They are the carrier signal, the pipeline, that lets the message come through. Oracles deliver the message from our inner wisdom and higher selves through the noise of everyday living to our everyday consciousness. The cool thing is every little thing can be an oracle. Remember that lyric from the song by the Police “every little thing she does is magic” ? It is just as true that every little thing is magic. Anything can be a tiny little validation, or an itsy nudge toward the way you should go. Every little thing is magic when you look with intuitive eyes.

Forget Tarot, Follow Science for This One

Just saw this….seems relavent in light of that 7 of pentacles reading earlier this morning.

Tarot can help cope with the stress of the pandemic, especially if your role is to simply stay the heck at home. For the rest of it, forget Tarot and follow science. Now go wash your hands.

PeaceTarot Wisdom Nuggets: Three of Swords

Three of Swords is usually a card of caution, although usually not as dire as a Devil or Shadow card. It is reality grabbing you by the nose and making you look. Beware, the lesser angels of human nature are afoot. Stay alert, act with precision. A cool, calculated, level headed reasponse could be your best ally.

Today’s Tarot: A Well Stocked Cookie Jar

With all the pentacle cards that have been showing up lately, I’ve taken to re-reading old reference books to see if there is some obscure meaning, or some facet of the cards I’m missing. Call it due dilignce, although it is probably closer to trolling for inspiration.

Today was browsing the book that came with the deck in the video. It is my far and away favorite deck right now, the Witches Tarot. The book is by Ellen Dugan and the georgous artwork is by Mark Evans.

The keyword “homemaker” jumped out from the description for today’s Queen of Pentacles. My first knee jerk response was drudgery, housework, negative connotations of leaving the workforce that still get foisted on stay-at-home moms who are seen as somehow lesser, or giving in to old strictures of patriarchy.

Ok, let’s let that go, let the cultural programming wash a way for a second. Deep breath.

Now let’s connect the word homemaker to the more common, more resonant, overarching meaning of nurturing and self care that typically comes through with this card. Now lets connect that further to the pandmic that was such a huge wave of energy coming through the pentacle cards lately.

Rather than the HGTV Martha Stewert version of homemaking, think “nesting.”

Think comfortable. Think of making a soft cozy little nest of pillows and blankets and watching TV in bed or from your favorite seat. Think pillow forts and cookies and comfort foods. It is sourdough season.

There is the potential for good things to come out of this experience. Those out and working have found strengths they may not have known before. May they also discover a vast pool of support they have never had before as well. Delivery trucks, supply trucks, and grocery stores have my eternal gratitude to go right with the healthcare and first responders.

We’ve been given the chance to face up to…and befriend who we are right here and right now. What better way to make a friend than sharing a cookie or two? We’ve been handed the chance to rediscover childhood pleasure, and create new ones. We don’t need mass consumerism and a constant drive to heal, to grow, to progress or to succeed. To bake a loaf of bread, put on our jammies, to become OK with a being on earth…even on who likes the occasional sweet treat or second (or fourth) cup of coffee, or letting yourself sit and finish listening to that song, a stretch, a yawn … any of a million tiny sensual physical realm pleasures that are close at hand with minimal effort.

We can get back to obsessing over appearances and diets and progress and consuming and doing and achieving later. For now, stock the cookie jar and deeply, mindfully enjoy the simplest, smallest pleasures at hand. Little things mean a lot, even when you are the Queen.

May we always have well stocked cookie jars and appreciate the simple pleasures close at hand.

Today’s Tarot: When life hands you unbranded gelatin dessert

I dunno who writes them, but their kind of a comic genius, whoever they are.

I don’t know if they still make them, but Hallmark had a series of cards featuring the lovably salty Maxine. That is exactly the flavor of the advice that is coming through the Ten of Swords today.

Like Maxine says, when life hands you lemons, stuff ’em in your bra. Knowing how to deal with adversity can be, as she said, as “easy as nailing Jell-o to a tree”

Sometimes life sucks. The beautiful thing about Tarot is it has that covered, too. Not everything is all sparkly rainbows and ice cream cones. Cards like the Ten of Swords can be a pep talk about getting up the eighth time after being knocked down seven, or it can validate how you really feel. It is a card that gives permission to take a little time and space when you need it. It’s for when you just want to forget the get-ups and math lesson, and just stay down there a minute. You don’t heal, emotionally or physically by neglecting a wound.

When you get knocked down you don’t have to hop right up and nail gelatin dessert to the nearest shrubbery. Just don’t stay down there stuffing citrus in your underwear forever and it’ll be ok.