Tag: death

Conquest Through Surrender

TaoCraft Tarot Short Sip is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. Today: Conquest through surrender with the Death and Hawkmoth cards

Welcome to Tao Craft Short Sip. I’m glad you are here.

Today’s card is a new one for me. It is the Hawkmoth card created by Literal Crow for the Literal Crow Tarot and used here in the Alleyman’s Tarot deck.

This is a new card for me. So far this has been one of the most easily readable decks I’ve owned yet. Maybe it’s because it’s Monday, but I had to look this one up to even begin. The Alleyman’s notebook begins by connecting this to the death card and the life cycle of insects. Like the death card, this card is about change but with less foresight.

It reminds me a little bit of insect related quotes.

I’m not sure who actually wrote it, but the Morticia Addams character said “Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”

Author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach wrote “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly.”

One of my favorite quotes lately is related, but thankfully leaves out the bugs. Adam Savage reminds us to “follow the process, not the plan.”

In essence, change is inevitable. With the death card, the change is a foreseeable, knowable thing. I’ve seen the death card most often at bachlorette parties of all things. Not because marriage is death or any such 1950’s tropes like that. It’s because marriage is a life altering change. You’ll never be an unmarried single person again. Even if the marriage ends you are not single again, you are divorced or what have you. The death card speaks to a known, forward looking albeit life altering change. The quality we assign to the change is beside the point. Marriage is a perfect example. The old single you is gone forever, but old dies to make way for something wonderful.

I think the Hawkmoth card is less deliberate. It is about a change that blind-sides you. It is about blurry, unplanned, undirected change. If the Death card walks up and lops your head off, the Hawkmoth card is change by a thousand paper cuts. It is about long term, gradual, almost imperceptible molding of a new you.

For a new you to emerge from that process, it takes a degree of surrender. In a cave, stalagtites and staligmites don’t fight the dripping water, they surrender to change and process that builds them up and makes them strong.

Some changes require our evolution. Some changes require that we surrender to them in order to conquer the greatest challenge of them all:

ourselves.

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Today’s Tarot: What it Doesn’t Mean

Wash: “This landing is going to be interesting”

Mal: “Define ‘interesting'”

Wash: “Oh god oh god we’re all going to die”

– Firefly television series by Joss Whedon

The death card usually is an indicator that things are going to get interesting, if they aren’t already.

But, as with the Firefly crew, it might not be in the fiery crash sort of way that you were thinking. After all, it’s pretty bad story telling to kill off all of your main characters in the five minutes of a tv episode.

I remember watching totally enjoyable brain candy movie back in the late 80s where a Tarot reader pulls the death card just as The Warlock sneaks up from behind and murders her. Classic trope. That was before I learned to read Tarot much less read professionally. That classic trope has gone from fairly cheesy to downright laughable.

Everyone knows that the death card doesn’t mean actual death. So much so that revealing the actual meaning has become a trope in itself. The best example of that is Lisa Simpson and the Happy Squirrel card. Makes me giggle every time…

The Simpsons were created by Matt Groening and are the property of 20th century studios

For real, I’ve seen the death card more often at bachelorette parties than any other time. It makes sense. With a wedding, you have a whole group of people celebrating a transition and irrevocable change – a big happy one.

Even if that marriage later winds up in the messiest divorce ever, it still happened. It still changed people from who they were before the wedding. The event goes on their permanent record so to speak.

Transition and change as a death image is a common thing in both fact and fiction. To gain a butterfly, you lose a caterpillar. To gain a cupcake, you lose some flour, sugar and eggs. To gain wisdom blissful ignorance must vanish. Life altering change can be as terrifying as death itself even though change is the essence of life.

Change for the better is a grim reaper no one needs to fear.

Cue the cowbell.

YouChoose Interactive Tarot: Heads Up Display

Sorry for the slight delay getting this up today. Did a little impromptu website setup for the hubster’s new site PGH Tai Chi.

There are reasons why my Tarot work is named what it is. Taoist philosophy has been a big part of who I am and how I live since I first learned of it in the late 1980s. That in turn lead me to Tai Chi and Wushu, which is where we met and the rest, as they say is history. We taught martial arts together and even owned a martial arts school for a time. Although a medical concern has prompted my retirement from teaching and competition, it is a deep pleasure to return to practice and to see my husbands progress in his martial arts teaching career. I am grateful for all that I’ve received from Chinese culture and how it has enriched my life. I stand in gratitude and solidarity with the AAPI community. Between my southern evangelical upbringing and what I’ve learned from exoteric Taoism, I’ll choose the Way of Virtue every time. Xie Xie.

That being said, back to this week’s cards.

Take a look at the cards in the video. Pause the video if you would like a moment to think. Restart when you are ready to see the card you choose. Or just pick quick and roll with it. Either way, I send all good wishes for your week.

All three cards together: Heads up, pay attention, look for change and be ready to act. I don’t know why, but the word “latchkey” comes through. If that makes any sense to anyone, I’d like to hear what that is about.

Left: The Chariot. This is the jet pilot card. This week life may need a heads-up display. The advice is to pay attention. If you aren’t into jet piloting, maybe a pirate will do…keep a weather eye on the horizon, changes may be coming. Pay attention to subtle signals or synchronicities that can give you valuable information for the path ahead.

Center: Death. Remember the Simpsons episode? You gotta watch out for that happy squirrel card before you have to worry about the death card being a literal thing. It is all about change. Nevermind the horizon, change feels like it is on the doorstep, and the Grim Reaper probably wants some chocolate hobnobs in a nod to Dave Turners most excellent How To Be Dead book series. Read it. You’ll need it this week from the way this card feels. Need it meaning a good laugh. Death means change. My mind is strongly drawn to the humor of the books. Stop, drop and roll with it. A spoonful of humor helps the changing go down in much more palatable way. Not all change is bad. Keep your head – and your sense of humor.

Right: Knight of Swords. Knights are action. Swords denote action – thoughtful, incisive, precise, daring action. In martial arts there is a saying that you fight like you train. If you pay attention, if you don’t fear change, if you put your heart and mind into what you do (especially if it is something you love to do) then when you are thrown into a situation where action is needed quickly, your muscles and reflexes are well trained to act. Practice, prepare, think so that if the unexpected happens you can act quickly, the right thing to do will flow from you.

All in all, heads up – Pay attention to details, prepare for change, prepare for action.

Cardless: Thoughts on an anniversary

What a year.

Perception of time is so fluid and so individual it’s no wonder humans created clocks and calendars just so we can navigate our way through the tine drop of time we are given for our lifetimes. If nothing else, the year of the pandemic has taught us that. After all it’s been blursday the 363rd of Marchish for about three years now, hasn’t it?

Let’s set the cards aside for a moment. I have an interesting intuition flexing exercise for you: Look back over the past year since the global Covid-19 pandemic was declared, but look at it exclusively through the lens of intuition. What were your intangible, intuitive perceptions over the course of that time? When and how did you become aware of them? What did life look like intuitively to you in January 2020? March 2020? Summer solstice? Fall equinox? At the American election? The holidays? January 2021? How did the intuitive feelings connect to actual events as they unfolded? Did you learn anything about your intuitive perceptions in the empathic pressure cooker that was 2020? Seriously, I’m interested in your meta-assessment of your intuition this past year (stay private – you don’t have to share details) The comments are open if you’d like to add your two cents to the topic today.

I live in the eastern United States. The cultural zeitgeist energies and emotions were so strong last year that looking back at the intuitive landscape has a certain tangible quality, almost like the memory of actual events. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the mental images of a U.S. map with little black tornado shapes spinning and wiggling and moving around all over the map. I remember the image of the ocean with a hurricane on the horizon. I remember a shimmering iridescent soap bubble or force field whenever setting empathic boundaries came into the conversation. I remember the image of survivors peeking out of storm wreckage. I remember the map again with the little tornadoes fading to grey.

Part of me wants to take pride in how well the images matched the events that unfolded after – I’d call the insurrection riot a hurricane among many, metaphorically speaking. It feeds into the cassandra complex my ego has brewing. Actually, it was just a clear-eyed view of energies that were current at the time of the mental image. It was in no way prophetic or predictive, just as Tarot and intuition always is. It helped me to do good readings for clients. It helped me know when to feed the spiritual side of life and when to stick to my knitting (literally) and take care of practical things. Sensitivity to energy helped me to ease up on the spiritual stuff (especially when it was getting way too judge-y and taking on a fearful edge) That is exactly what Tarot and intuition is supposed to do both in ‘normal’ times and times of extreme duress. It gives a read of where we are and suggests a better way forward. Tarot and intuition didn’t predict a damn thing in any of this. Still, intuition worked. We all have it. You can use it too. All you have to do is take the lid off and give your ESP a little bit of TLC. (Of course, me and my ego are happy to help you in that process)

If it is any consolation, though, the image today is a clear map and the wreckage is gone. My attention is drawn to the physical (perhaps another aspect of all the coins/pentacle cards that have turned up during the past year) There have been storms and fires and floods and accidents the same as any other year. Those literal changes and disasters increase the pandemic disaster exponentially for those who experience those losses too. The change is even more heartbreaking and profound for those who have lost loved ones. The fortunate rest of us, whose closest loved ones and physical environment is as intact and unchanged as it would be after any other year can take consolation in that. Look out the window. For the vast majority of us, the streets and houses are all the same as last year. What we DO and how we do things has changed quite a lot. Sure, there are plastic shields and hand sanitizer dispensers in the stores, but for most of us all of the physical infrastructure of our lives has been left untouched by the pandemic year.

I have another suggestion for today. Find something familiar. Any tangible thing that is the same as it was in the before time. A place. A park. Your home. Your backyard. An article of clothing. A favorite song. A coffee mug. Anything. Drink in the familiarity. Ground and center yourself around that. Life, attitudes, energies – many things have irrevocably changed in the past year. Soak up some comfort and courage from the stuff that hasn’t.

On second thought, maybe Tarot does have a card for this. It is one of life altering change, some tragic but some also for the better.

In memory of those lost. In gratitude for lessons learned.

public domain card image

Conspicuous In Its Absence

When I do a reading, the first thing is to talk with you about your question, topic of concern, or you OK for an open reading. Then we shuffle the cards, put them into the layout you ordered (by email, you get a photo of the actual real life cards, by phone I’ll list them out for you, or whenever in-person readings come back, you can see them for your self.

Once the cards are ready, the first part in all formats bigger than a one-card, is what I call the “general pattern” where we look for any clues from the patter of cards taken as a whole. One of the things we look at is the number of major vs minor arcana cards. Of the minor arcana cards, we look at what suits are showing and how many of each suit are there.

“Negative space” is an idea from art and sculpture. The art-thing itself sets shapes and boundaries in and around the space it occupies. Kind of like a paper snowflake where the cut out parts are shapes too. Like the hearts in this one (Found this on a Google search. you can get the pattern at papersnowflakeart.com)

Sometimes, if three of the four minor arcana suits are showing, intuition will pull toward the suit that is missing as if it is being conspicuous in it’s absence and is sending a message by not showing up.

2020 has been a heck of a decade, and hindsight is 20/20 too. When we look back what can we learn? Surprisingly, I found one of those negative space, conspicuous in its absence kinds of messages when I looked back at the broad swath of cards that have shown up in the past year, a couple of patterns emerge. Early in the year, there was a preponderance of Pentacle cards, with their earthy, practical, pragmatic advice. The message was to not judge ourselves too harshly as we did what needed done during the early days of the covid pandemic. If it took pajama days and pandemic snacks to cope, so be it. If it took nuts-and-bolts, one foot in front of the other suiting up and masking up and putting food on the shelves….well, let’s just say the rest of us are very grateful. Then things shifted. Later in the Summer and Fall Cups cards stepped forward with a shift toward the intuitive and the spiritual. Wheels and worlds, Towers and Magicians, even the Devil card (Shadow Side in the Witches Tarot deck) put in an appearance.

But no Death card.

At least not in any prominent, repeating, attention-getting way. Given the profound tragedy the pandemic has brought and continues to bring, it is a wonder that the card didn’t show up every other day. With so many lost, this year has brought profound and permanent change to so, so many families.

Early in the year, there was a lot of zeitgiest, general-culture, general-society energies. If we look at the Death card from that perspective, then its absence makes more sense. Not intending to be callous toward the worst that has happened, if we remove tragedy from the card (as is its actual use and meaning….we all know the card actually isn’t a harbinger of literal death)

The Death card is about permanent change. When permenant change is conspicuously absent, maybe the big scary change isn’t so permenant on a large scale cultural level.

We’ll never regain and never forget those who were lost. There may be permanent scars from all of this. But in the end, in the very very long run, life just might get back to OK.

You Choose Interactive Tarot Reading: Coronavirus the 13th edition

Left: Death. Momento mori. Valar Morghulis. Wash your dang hands, listen to experts, mitigate viruses…if not for yourself, then for someone you love.

Middle: The Emperor. It’s ok to be ok. It’s ok to take it all in stride. That just means that this is your time to shine, to be hero and protector for the vulnerable ones. Valar Doheris.

Right: Five of Coins. We are all riding this space rock together. Just be excellent to each other.