Hello and welcome to TaoCraft Tarot Blog and podcast.
Today’s episode is truly short, because I want to leave you with this one simple idea: indulgence can serve as a way of showing gratitude.
There is a tendency, at least in our puritan-influenced American culture to hold back the things we find most precious. From a place of fear, we lock life away in an attempt to revere and protect it.
I tend to think and feel that way. Probably far too often.
That is where the indulgences of the holiday season serve an interesting subtle purpose. Yes, by all means it is – and should be – a celebration and a stress relief. But it is also a means of expressing gratitude for life and all the little pleasures it provides.
For example, a cookie isn’t just a cookie at the holidays. It is a treat and a tradition. Eating that cookie and a half dozen others with joy and abandon is not only celebration, it our gratitude in action, our thankfulness for the flour and sugar in the cupboard and the bakers in our grocery stores. It is a child-like enthusiasm and unpretentious thank you.
Now substitute cookie for your favorite parts of whatever winter holiday you happen to celebrate.
And with that, I reach for another cookie and raise my gingerbread spice coffee to you in a wish for health, happiness and prosperity for us all in 2023!
I’ll talk to you in January, but Zombie Cat will be stopping by later this week with his so-called predictions for the New Year.
Merry Happy Everyone!
Thank you all so much for reading and listening in 2022 and always! I’m still pondering a name change. TaoCraft Tarot resonates with me because it is a reflection of my deep-down, life-long philosophies.
BUT
It is more important that this Tarot website resonates with YOU. Tarot readings, the really good ones, are a conversation and a collaboration between the reader and the sitter (seeker, querent, whatever term you like to use) I want to make this a warm, inviting cozy place for us both to contemplate Tarot and related topics together.
Conversations are made up of words. Words are the net we throw over ideas to draw them into our conversation.
In 2023, TaoCraft Tarot will (probably) become Sage Words Tarot to match my personal blog. It’s still me (under my pen name Sage) and we’ll use our words to talk about Tarot and do readings for you.
I hope everyone who has followed this Tarot work under Modern Oracle (1002 – 2018) will stick around through one more, hopefully more welcoming name change.
CrystalCast psychic reading – a look ahead to the week of 26 December 2022
Hello and welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.
It’s been quite a year for me, and this cast for the final week of 2022 rubs a little lemon juice into a private emotional paper cut. That being said, I’ll leave it to you to decide if this resonates for you or not. That being said, it isn’t about us per se as much as it is a confirmation or explanation of other people or of some of the unkindnesses we may have experienced or witnessed this year.
It might be a pitfall of being a people pleaser. It might come from some deep seated desire to do the right thing above all.
Or it might come from being elitist, egotistical, holier-than-thou and judgemental.
The take-away message that I see here is that people are more important than ideology. When I say ideology, it could extend to anything but top of mind right now is religion. Use it interchangeably in this post, if you like. Damage is done when we put religion or politics or policy over the people they were originally intended to help.
I tend to look at life through a very secular humanist lens. True to pareidolia, our natural neurological tendency to see patterns where likely none exist the pattern I see here is a human form reminiscent of the constellation Orion. If the upper blank rune stone is considered the face, the left hand could be the largest obsidian chip. Left is considered the yin or receiving hand. Give and take is a consideration this week. Don’t leave your receiving hand closed. Give a little love to yourself even as the main focus is caring for others. The black color of the obsidian also resonates with yin, resting, receiving, accepting, abiding: All things to remember.
The right hand is the larger raw quartz bead. If we consider this patter as looking at another human face to face, the quartz would be the sending, giving, yang right hand. Our task this week is to care for others. It’s our turn to give that extra little bit of care and consideration be it literal, like taking out the extra holiday garbage, or giving a little tlc to the emotional bruises the holiday season can inflict for some while celebrating all the good that comes of it for the rest of us.
The “m” shaped rune is ehwaz, which Thom Pham visually likes to two people holding hands. It has to do with relationships.
Your relationship with people and with yourself is pre-eminant. In my opinion any person that puts organization and dogma over people are making the wrong choice. Organizations and their leaders that ask that of their members are barking up the tree of cultism and psychopathy in my non-expert opinion.
The extended diamond shape next to ehwaz is othala, which has to do with homeland, legacy, or ancestral home. I get the purely intuitive sense of that ancestral legacy being self-knowledge in the vein of Socrates. I want to associate it with the treasure of being confident and comfortable within your ancestral home, your own skin. The more you know thyself, and the more comfortable with that authentic self, the more impervious you are to other people’s petty judgements. More importantly, it makes you less likely to judge or demean others, even inadvertently.
Yoda was right. Fear and anger and dare we say emotional pain of any kind leads to the dark side.
Socrates was right. The more you know yourself, the more you can accept and abide with the unique, amazing person that you are.
The art form of Kintsugi is right. Brokenness has the potential to become beautiful.
In this last week of the year, in the flow of yuletide, in the hope of brighter days to come, give freely of your compassion and be generous your ability to see the beauty in cracks and crinkles. Give all of these things freely to yourself as well.
Zombie Cat’s Tarot Reading for 2023 is coming later this week. Zombie Cat doesn’t give a flying brain cell about how Tarot really works, how probabilities really work or if his so-called predictions come true or not. He’s a zombie. And he’s a cat. All of Zombie Cat’s readings are 100% guaranteed to contain words and have a 50% chance of being dead wrong. I hope you’ll stay tuned for the fun.
As for me, I want to say thank you here and now for your kind attention. I appreciate your following the blog and the podcast. It means a lot that you are willing to spend a few minutes and few sips of coffee to consider these little Tarot contemplations.
Both the Blog and the Podcast will be back right after New Years. I’m considering a few superficial updates, maybe even a name change as my Tarot work continues to adapt to some off-line meatspace changes. From your end of things, it will all be pretty much the same. I want to make things more regular and predictable for all of our sakes. Hang in there with me. We got this.
Wishing you all a happy, healthy, peaceful and abundant 2023!
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
But you can have a long cool drink of your own.
This card’s advice and energy might be a little connected to a private reading I did earlier today, but nevertheless it is one of those proverbial truisms that applies to everyone.
We can’t control other people, but we sure as hell can control ourselves.
We can offer our love, but can’t make other people accept it – much less requite it.
We can accept the love that is given to us. We can choose to reflect, return and magnify that love.
We can choose to close ourselves off, but don’t dare be hurt when other people turn away and stop offering their emotions and energies to a closed up lump.
Let emotions flow – there are always more where that came from.
Yes, absolutely, choose, control and curate how you express them and who you express them to. You can control that much, but not how -or if-they will react.
“You do you boo” is as demeaning and dismissive as it feels when someone says it to you…but it is also full, unbridled permission to let your freak flag fly and to do just exactly that…you.
“People are as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Has been attributed to Abraham Lincoln among others.
So what do you do about people who choose differently than you had hoped or just generally make up their mind to be miserable?
I don’t know.
I suspect the answer is to let them.
Respect their choices. Respect the mind they’ve made. But just as importantly, respect yours just as strongly.
Choose happy, and it is yours.
Wishing everyone a happy, healthy, peaceful and prosperous Yuletide Solstice time and New Year.
Thank you for reading and listening in 2022. Please stay tuned for a shiny new and improved blog, podcast and other new surprises coming in 2023.
Vacations have value, even if you don’t travel. The change of pace, the change is habits, the change in intent and energy is an important rest from the usual grind. But as it was, I got to visit the beautiful city of New Orleans for the first time and it is tied with Cocoa Beach and Mustang Island Beach as my favorite place south of the Mason Dixon line … because food and music. Lordy, the food. But that is another story for another time.
Like the Terminator, I am indeed back.
Email Tarot is OPEN all holiday season.
Order email readings 24/7 HERE including the popular “Year Ahead” readings that is perfect for the New Year.
I’m turning over the new year predictions / new year tarot reading for 2023 over to “Zombie Cat” which will next week. All of Zombie Cat’s readings are 100% guaranteed to contain words and have a 50% chance of being dead wrong.
E-books, touchless pre-payment for in-person readings, live online readings & distance Reiki are HERE The instant download scheduling instructions include a free sample chapter of the upcoming booklet Portfolio
Hi and welcome to the TaoCraft Tarot blog and Podcast. I’m glad you are here. I hadn’t planned on doing one of these this week, but when the time presented itself, well, the schedule is that there is no schedule so here we are.
This is a new blog & podcast feature that I’m developing. It’s purely intuition driven, using crystal chips and rune stones tossed randomly on a reading cloth as a prompt, or a sounding board, or an amplifier for the intuition. But then, that is exactly how Tarot readings work so it isn’t so much develop as practice. You get the idea.
I like the way this energy picks up where the last one leaves off. Remember how the runestones made a line, a wall of sorts a few weeks ago. The advice was to chill and not to push and wait for the energy to flow again.
This is our cue. We are past whatever that blockage or “wait” energy was. Energy is on an upswing. It’s time to climb. It’s time to move again…or time to move on.
Here the images go all pop culture. I get a snippet of that old Doors song, about “break on through to the other side” (Where did that come from? I’m listening to my goth playlist right now, for crying out loud.) Here is another reference for the gen X and boomers out there. Cue the kool-aid “oh yeah” commercials with the pitcher mascot guy breaking through walls and stuff. I think that means we are definitely on the other side of whatever that blockage might have been.
But it isn’t as lighthearted as flavored sugary sugar drinks might imply. There is a catch in the throat and a little heaviness in the pit of the stomach with this one. It is definitely time to move on, but it isn’t necessarily with with a light heart or a dry eye. This is a very nostalgic time of year. It is the hardest time to think of leaving anything behind, even things that have proven harmful or long past due. There is a strong eight of cups sort of bittersweet feeling here.
As much as I love Halloween, there comes a time to get rid of the moldy jack o lantern and that turkey carcass has got to go.
It is also a very forward looking time of year. We all hold hope that next year will be just a little better. That happens. I live in the United States so I can only compare the local energies, really, but compare 2022 to the toxic dumpster fire explosion that 2020 here. NOW covid vaccines and real treatments actually exist, unemployment is remarkably low, things are getting fixed because there actually was an infrastructure bill,there is a good man in the White House and toilet paper in the stores. I might have to make a loaf of sourdough just for old time’s sake, but that’s another story.
The larger piece of raw quarz at the top gives a sense of amplified energy “from above.” We are moving again, and headed in a good direction.
My logical side throws in “don’t screw it up” in what sounds a lot like Han Solo telling Luke Skywalker not to get cocky.
The Raidho rune is expansive, and speaks of will power, personal power, discipline, self-control, motivation, action…all of which fits the narrative of movement, rising, moving on.
Ihwaz speaks of an awareness of karma, and personal responsibility. We reap as we sow, and the seeds we plant now brings a future harvest. Act as if what you give to the universe returns to you three times as much.
The light and dark crystals seem even in amount, a reminder to be as steady and balanced as you can be. Solid footing is more important than speed. Slow and steady is still moving ahead, still moving on, just the same as a sprint. This isn’t a race.
The lone chip off to the side reminds that what is said isn’t for everyone. You must decide if it resonates or if you are an outlier to this cast’s message.
And there the energy steps back.
I was around more than planned in November, but the blog and podcast are going to be on for-real hiatus from December 5 to December 22. Happy Holidays to all of you, whatever holiday you may or may not celebrate.
I celebrate the human spirit that survives the long night and the diverse multitude of colorful lights that you all are. Best wishes to you. See you soon.
Hi and welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here. TaoCraft Short Ship is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee.
Today’s card is the seven of cups.
Cups, very generally speaking, have to do with emotions. The seven in particular has to do with emotions that are overwhelmed, typically by overthinking or too many options. Marketing calls it “decision paralysis” as I recall.
I’ve talked about this with some other Tarot readers. We tend to be thinkers, and overthinking can really bog things down, believe me.
It is a natural thing. There are reasons why startled frozen indecision is compared to “a deer in headlights.” Being put suddenly on the spot can stop decision making in its tracks just as much as overthinking or overwhelming options can.
Regardless of why, what do you do when you can’t decide what to do?
Not to sound too much like a bad fortune cookie, the answer is right there in the quetion.
Do.
If you are overthinking, get out of your head and into your body. Exercise. Wash the dishes. Take a warm shower. Sip a tea. Go for a walk. They call stuff like that “clearing your head” for a reason.
Do.
Turn your attention from the mental realm toward the physical realm for a while. Don’t worry. You can get right back to your overthinking when you are done. You might just discover that after a short break to do something in meatspace that the overthinking is so overwhelming anymore.
The same thing works when the thing that has you stopped in your tracks is big, difficult emotions. Emotions may follow you around while you do it, but again, shift your focus to the physical for a while. Intense emotions might need a little more physical effort. This might need a run instead of a walk, or some serious housework instead of just doing the dishes, and it certainly isn’t going fix everything. Don’t walk away from your emotions forever, but a short walk around the block so to speak isn’t a terrible idea.
It’s the balance of opposites, balance of yin and yang thing.
Sometimes when your emotional self or your mental self is over-doing things, the physical self might be under-doing things a little bit. Turn up the physical a little bit to help balance the overworked and overwhelmed mind and spirit.
Your questions are always welcome in the blog comments. There is a link to the blog for all of you podcast listeners. Any likes, subs, or shares that you can give are also much appreciated.
You are just perfectly enough just exactly as you are.
Right here. Right now. You already are all you need to be in this moment. Take a deep breath. Are you in any real danger right this very second? If you are, what in the living heck are you doing reading a blog or listening to a podcast? Take care of yourself for goodness sake! But if you are reading or listening to this, chances are things are OK enough to allow for a little screen time. Even if things are fantastic, take a little time off from that emotional energy and let the time it takes to read this or listen to the episode be a bubble of emotional rest for you.
Hello and Happy Thanksgiving to all our U.S. friends. I’m glad you are here.
Today’s card is the King of Cups, in reverse. Like we’ve talked about before, I read inversions pretty much the same as upright cards, taking all of the keywords and meanings into consideration all of the time anyway. If the card turns over upside down relative to the person doing the reading, or “reversed” as we call it in Tarot parlance, it looks right side up to a person on the other side of the table. Reversed or upright, considering the big picture is key in this kind of work. Abstractions, ideas, archetypes, and intuitive nudges all make a tiny bit more sense when you keep the cosmic perspective in mind during the whole card reading process. When you think big picture, the orientation of the card on the table matters less.
In any reading, public collective or private, a reversal speaks more to the position in the layout than the individual card. Layout position plus a reversed card is a clue to an area of life that may be conflicted, slowed, problematic or blocked. In a one card reading, a reversal can mean a broadly applicable slowing or turbulence in the person’s energies or in the collective, zeitgeist energy
Or not.
Freud once said that “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Sometimes a reversed card is just a random happenstance from shuffling the deck.
Some decks, I’ll grant you seem to be more reversal prone than others, no doubt due to mundane physical properties like card size and paper coatings and what have you. My beloved Alleyman’s Tarot Deck is especially wild and wooly in that respect, so I tend to give reversals from that deck a little more creedence for whatever reason. On the other hand, the back on my favorite RWS deck feels more staid and proper and it’s reversals chalk up to shuffling and general. It’s funny how we humans like to anthropomorphize our favorite work tools. I get it why BB King named his guitar Lucille. Some stuff has vibe and zing and personality, especially things that we have given our time, creativity and our life energy.
Except today. Today the RWS deck came up reversed and it feels like it means it.
The reversed king of cups is about emotional maturity. It connects to the feeling of defeat and brokenness that the Ten of Swords spoke about in “The Lemonade” post/episode.
Clairaudience (intuitive hearing) gives the words “Own what you feel.”
2022 may be more bittersweet in retrospect than we realized. There are ribbons of darkness in the onrush of holiday celebration.
My mind again goes to those lost to gun violence, or as one newscaster put it to all the chairs that will be tragically empty this holiday season. It is perfectly understandable how grief of this magnitude can leave its mark on the collective energy, both on a conscious and unconscious level. Emotions of every kind tend to run high during the holiday season.
Whatever the emotion, whatever the intensity, whatever the reason, you have to own them and validate them even if no one else will. The emotions exist. They are valid and they are real and, more importantly, they are yours. How you express them and how you act upon them are your responsibility just like a kingdom is the responsibility of the king.
Once acknowledged, emotions can be let go. Once understood, they are less likely to resurface in disruptive ways. It’s not magic. It’s social science. It’s human psychology.
And it’s how Tarot works. Tarot works, not to accurately predict the future, but to help us own and understand our emotions. Psychologist Carl Jung taught that “Until the unconscious is made conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Tarot helps us find exactly that kind of insight.
It’s not my intention to equate Tarot readings with qualified clinical therapy, or a cure for any sort of mental health issue. It is, however, a great tool for stress management and personal growth for a healthy individual. I say that based on hundreds of readings over the course of twenty years of doing public professional Tarot readings. Time and time and time over again I would see people relax as a reading progressed. As we talked about new ideas, explored possibilities and validated their own intuitive hunches, shoulders would go down, foreheads would smooth. As readings go on, people would sit back in their chairs and the tone of their voice would soften. The easing of emotional tension was obvious, even to someone with no formal psychology or body language training.
Tarot works by helping us all own our emotions, understand our situations and create a more reasoned way forward.
Tarot doesn’t predict our fate, it frees us from it.
Thank you so much for reading and listening. I wish you a happy and healthy holiday season.
Hello and welcome to the TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.
Before we get to the ten of swords, I want to give you a quick reminder about my winter Tarot reading schedule.
There is none.
It was a nice surprise to have a few minutes to write this. I’m expecting a jam packed schedule between now and January. I’m so, so, so thankful for the text to voice audio blogging that WordPress, Anchor FM and Spotify have available.
And I’m also grateful for each and every one of you. Thank you for reading and listening despite the erratic, random posting non-schedule. I’m cautiously optimistic that I can get back to trying to follow social media best practices after the new year. I’m in awe of all of the wonderfully talented people who create “content” on a regular schedule. I have yet to make that work for Tarot. Energy, intuition and the ebb and flow of life doesn’t give a flying rat’s patootie about posting schedules. Intuition and creativity has its own agenda and I owe it to all of you to go where my real strength lies which is Tarot readings and blog writing, not social media presentation.
Speaking of which, the new “crystal cast” posts that I had planned for Mondays will have to wait until after Thanksgiving, possibly until after New Year, too.
But stay tuned. Right or wrong, accurate or not, Zombie Cat is going to try his paw at a fast and loose Tarot reading for 2023. That cat is a little unhinged (as zombies often are) so whatever predictions he makes – don’t blame me. Look for that in December.
All in all, I still like to think of this utter lack of a schedule gives the blog a little bit of an underground, renegade, pirate radio sort of vibe. I hope you’ll come along for the ride, such as it is.
On top of it all, Elf-con 1 has officially been declared at my house. I got knitting to do and stuff to bake.
So before I have to hop out to shop for flour, sugar and that one last skein of yarn, let’s take a look at the Ten of Swords.
Just to show that spirit and energy operates on its own schedule, here is some context for today’s card.
I had an appointment in the afternoon, so when the morning obligation rescheduled, I had every intention of indulging in a second cup of coffee and a leisurely scroll through Instagram. That’s when I stumbled across one of those social media talents we were talking about earlier. Digital creator Barry Brandon (instagram.com/forallhumans.co aka @queerindigo) posted a video about personal authenticity, the Colorado Springs shootings and a variety of other things. I can’t begin to capture it here, and urge you to watch it for yourself.
When he said “…it shouldn’t be this challenging to exist in one’s skin. It shouldn’t be this challenging to be oneself…” it made a solid landing right in my wheelhouse.
I’m an atheist, Taoist, solitary eclectic witch, Tarot reader and the hardcore evangelical christianity in my family has diminished if not outright severed most of those relationships. But that is nothing … NOTHING … compared to the level of hate and bigotry that the LGBTQIA+ community has to face every single day. As someone who cares very deeply for multiple people in the community, it is absolutely terrifying to even think about everything they face … and meet with such grace, courage and love.
When that ton of emotional bricks hit, I punted the leisurely scroll and followed the intuitive impulse to pull a card and see where that would lead. It led to the 10 of Swords card draw that you can see in the video above (the link is in the episode description as always for podcast listeners) and that led me here.
To my mind, that context and this card are all of the same collective energy in the context of the Club Q shooting this past weekend.
In these times, it is natural and so easy to be furious and terrified and just … done.
We all know the line from Yoda and Star Wars about “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
Which, along with the ten of Swords, begs the question of how to deal with hate and anger and defeat and suffering.
There is no easy answer.
There may be no answer at all.
For me personally, the only answer I know is to be the best ally I know how to be, to advocate for gun control and equality legislation to the best of my ability and to urge those I love to be as careful and safe as it’s humanly possible to be while still living their happiest most authentic life.
Martin Luther King Jr. once said that “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
In lighter times and easier energy, the 10 of Swords is akin to that old adage of “fall down seven times, get up eight” or “when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”
To plan, to act, to be righteously angry, to rebound from defeat and to do so from a place of love is difficult, but it is the most potent lemonade we can make.
Thank you all for listening and reading.
TaoCraft Short Sip Tarot is a contemplation for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. If you enjoy them, please visit the TaoCraftTarot ko-fi page where shop purchases, readings, memberships and virtual coffees all support these free Tarot readings on this non-monetized blog and podcast.
When past and future, logic and intuition, planning and action all meet it can seem like magic.
Few quick announcements:
The podcast is going on short hiatus until December 1
Email readings are OPEN order anytime.
Check out the new, improved, PayPal secured, single contact ordering process. (No more sending your question in a separate email!)
My schedule now through December is pure unadulterated Elfcon 1 chaos so I’m not making any promises about anything until after New Year’s Day. Delivery times for email readings will vary – a LOT – but don’t worry. Your reading will indeed happen. Thanks in advance for your patience.
Happy Thanksgiving U.S. folks! Have a great weekend everyone!
Sage Words Tarot 