Basically, it’s a day to just do normal stuff. Grind it out. Get it done. There are no big spiritual or aspirational energies around the card today. It’s all about just building a life brick by brick, step by step, moment by moment.
Even in Tarot, not everything is a big spiritual revelation. Not everything in life has a big symbolic purpose. Like Freud said, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
Come back tomorrow for the spiritual stuff. For now, at least for today, go grind the cigars.
The Ace of Pentacles could be called the essence of things.
On the top layer you have success, abundance, and all the positive top-line meanings.
For all the attention that is given to court cards, the aces fascinate me. They speak to that simplicity that is so near and dear to Taoism’s heart. They are about the essence and nature of the minor arcana suit, in this case pentacles (coins in some decks.)
Pentacles are associated with the earth element. They are our relationship with the physical realm, tangible, practical things. Which begs the question of what is the essence of those things? What is the nature of stuff?
I’ll leave that to physicists, which is fascinating as heck, especially once you start getting into the whole Schrodinger, Heisenberg quantum thing. Especially for someone like me who can’t even explain why its bad if the lights dim when the refrigerator comes on.
For our purposes, let’s look at the role stuff plays in life. Of course, now my mind is stuck on the old George Carlin bit…
I’m talking functionality. We want stuff. It pays to know what you want. Achieving, manifesting (however you want to look at it) works better when you have a specific and clear vision of what you really want. If you get to the essence of it, then window dressing and expectations are less likely to get in the way. When you work from a place of simplicity and essentials, the things you REALLY want can take a multitude more forms, and have a multitude more ways to find a way into your life.
That’s wants. Today’s card is, energetically, talking about needs. Physical need is the example, but the energy idea can be extended to mental, emotional and spiritual needs too.
This feels like a moment in time, but possibly an important one. Just for a minute, just for today, what is a literal need. An immediate, pressing, life-depends-on-it need.
Your next meal.
Your next drink of water.
Your next breath.
Now give it your full attention and gratitude as you meet that need. Try it. Just once. Just for today.
How does that feel?
Today’s Tarot card is available as a blog post, a Clairvoyant Confessional episode, and on YouTube Shorts.
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If there is an overarching idea to all three cards together, it would be that your choice matters, which is the core essence of all of the YouChoose video posts. These readings are designed to cut through the noise of social media and let you personally touch your reading. As Mat Auryn said in Psychic Witch “What you touch, touches you” or something very akin to that.
If you like this personalized touch to the readings please let me know! If you tell me the kind of Tarot content you would like to see, I’ll do my best to create it. Talk to me! Ask me anything* and I’ll do a Tarot reading for it in the upcoming season of Clairvoyant Confessional podcast (new episode expected Sunday, September 26) Drop a comment below or email your questions to ClairvoyantConfessional@gmail.com.
Six of Swords: Go with the flow, but choose which current you float in. The dog you feed is the one that grows strong.
Page of Cups: find wisdom and inspiration in the absurd. Laugh your way into a better frame of mind.
King of Pentacles: Control what you can – but remember that control seldom occurs in the physical realm. Most of the time your only dominion is over yourself. How you react to things is where you greatest power and most impactful choice can be found.
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Tarot turned on its head: I choose the card. You use your intuition to pick the meaning.
Let’s turn Tarot readings upside down for once. I choose the card, YOU use YOUR intuition to pick the meaning for today. Let me know in the comments how you like this format.
Today’s card brought an avalanche of quotes and pithy little sayings to mind. You Choose which one most speaks to you today:
“Just do it”
“Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE” – Josh Whedon
“Follow the process, not the plan” – Adam Savage
“The Universe doesn’t give you what you ask for with your thoughts – it gives you what you demand with your actions.” – Steve Maraboli
The Pamela Smith artwork for the Eight of Swords speaks for itself.
The card is about feeling trapped, not knowing the cause, not seeing the way out.
The key piece is the gap in the swords in front of the figure. A way out exists. Their feet aren’t bound. Their feet are still free. A few steps forward, and they are outside of the circle of swords.
They say the height of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly expecting a different outcome. This card cautions against that. Not only is it unproductive, but it lays down paths, builds thought habits that blindfold you just when you need creative problem solving the most. Swords represent mind and intellect. It could be your trap is mental as much as physical. Your feet are still free.
Think outside the box. Shake it up. Do some small thing differently than your usual routine. Shaking things up some safe small ways might help you break out of a mental Groundhog Day movie. A few small steps forward might help to set your mind free.
Some people blame these things on Mercury retrograde. My genX brain calls technical glitches that I can’t figure out gremlins. I still kinda want to be a computer geek when I grow up.
Just spent two attempts and more time than I wanted to spend trying to get today’s youtube tarot short to upload. I think the problem is in the processing on YouTubes end, actually. Either way, enough bashing against a road block.
In fact, that is the message this last attempt gave: put it down and come back later.
It’s a good general message. The woo isn’t everything. No every minute of every day has to be a spiritual success. Not every moment has to be some grand enlightenment. When the energy is wrong for spiritual things, and you run into one wall after another, it is perfectly OK to set aside the spritual and spend some quality time in the practical physical realm.
It’s more of the meatspace energy we’ve talked about lately.
If you want some woo…today is a good day for grounding, balancing, centering. Get your head out of the clouds and your feet planted on the ground.
It’s a good day for the Zen proverb: Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
Or the Alan Watts quote “Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”
So chop your water, carry your potatoes and peel your wood, set aside the gremlins and have a good day in spite of it all.
Even though we are having a vegetarian supper, it’s Meatspace Monday.
Usually for me it works out to be Meatspace Sunday, but alliteration makes everything better. Even when that’s not the kind of meat I’m talking about. Any other William Gibson fans out there? I can’t remember how long ago I read Neuromancer or how many times I’ve re-read it since, but I’m pretty sure (considering how old my gen-x backside is getting) he’s the one who coined “meatpuppet.” It has a bit of an, ahem, adult meaning in the book, so let’s just say it means the physical body….meat instead of mind, physical reality vs virtual reality kind of reference. I’m not sure who came up with “meatspace” as the physical real-world counterpart to “cyberspace” (also a Gibson word, if memory serves) but I think it was Adam Savage who is another one of my favorite inspirations and creative influences. Neuromancer and Every Tool’s a Hammer are both excellent reads. Several thumbs up for both
But on to the Chariot card. Sure it has all of the chariot race Ben Hur kind of energies that Thom Pham depicts here in the Heart of Stars deck. To win a chariot race you have to pay attention to what the heck you are doing. I often explain it as the ‘test pilot’ card. Whether you are racing chariots or flying fighter jets, being preoccupied or letting your mind wander can land you in big trouble. But that’s not quite the energy of it for today.
It’s a little more meta than that. Pay attention to where you pay attention.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very thankful to all of you who read the blog and watch the videos. Please keep it up! I love having you to talk with (and for goodness’ sake feel free to talk back. I have the comments moderated to keep the energy spam free and reasonable for all of us) But just for a minute, pull back. Be a person reading a screen instead of letting your mind rest IN the screen. Pull back to meatspace, be aware of your surroundings, your device as a whole, the words on the screen, yes, but also of the environment you are in. Be aware of you where you are right now as part of that meatspace whole.
It’s easy, especially for those of us who tend to “live in our head” anyway, to get caught up in an intellectual, conceptual virtual reality be it found in websites, or movies, or TV or books. For us, it is even more crucial to reconnect with physicality. Take a mental vacation into meatspace. Get a little exercise. Savor your favorite dessert.
Pay attention to paying attention. Put your mind into meatspace sometimes.
That seems to be a big theme lately. It can be overwhelming when too much changes at one time. Some changes are forced on us by time or circumstance. Other are chosen and it is for our own good to walk away.
No matter why we choose the bittersweet journey away from the old and toward the new, there are always memories of the good things to ease the transition.
No matter why we choose the change, or what the change may be, a mix of emotions and a degree of wistfulness is way of it. It is a moment in-between.
If you ever get a chance to listen to Menage A Tarot podcast, I recommend it…not my parts, but listen to David and Kate. They are two of the wisest Tarot readers – wisest people – I’ve ever met. I don’t remember which episode it was, or if it was one of our many off-air conversations, but David mentioned one time that it was a good idea to listen for messages for yourself at the same time you are reading for others. Except he said it way WAY better than I ever could. Today’s card aside, I highly recommend Menage A Tarot, along with David’s new podcast Ninth World Journal and Kate’s website Daily Tarot Girl. Good stuff, that.
Yesterday, we talked about the tweek to the interactive you-choose-your-own-card video readings. The focus is shifting from the week ahead to just now, whenever you happen to access the video. The shorts are the same, Tarot for today…now…whatever day, whatever now it finds it way to you. The biggest difference between the two is YouChoose readings and the Today’s Tarot shorts is the format. YouChoose is more of the energy-environment, energy-flow kind of read. Shorts are going to be vague, pithy, and (hopefully) fun advice for the day kind of things. They are all going to look alike, and the whole reading is on the screen. It’s fun for me to distill the whole message of the card down to one sentence fragment. That’s why I like Twitter. Brevity is the soul of wit as Shakes peare wrote.
Whatever day you choose your card, that it day where it applies. Whatever day the idea crosses your path, it’s an idea that matters and the day it matters on.
If it sounds like trying to be messenger for synchronicity, it is.
Interpreter of energy, messenger for synchronicity; That’s what Tarot Readers do.
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There were a lot of things that sprang to mind with this card today. I’d just been watching the news, and the draconian law in Texas was still fresh in mind of course. Young social activists came to mind: Greta Thunberg, Yolanda Renee King, the March for our Lives Rally and more.
But the card isn’t speaking TO them, it is speaking to the rest of us ABOUT them. Listen to them. Help them. Protect them. The king is leadership and sometimes leadership means putting someone else better suited to the job in charge. Sometimes leadership is showing others who to follow by following them.
I’m old.
I’m on the leading edge of the GenX cohort. THAT’s who I want to talk to today, because brothers and sisters, we have fucked up. As we came of age in the Reagan era, we failed to vote. We failed to do what these kids are doing and if we had we might not have eliminated their problem but we certainly could have lessened the desperation that we all now face.
We blew a lot of things on our watch…not that it’s over. There is no hope that I can see of winning the hearts and minds of boomers. All we can do there is to listen to and support the few badasses that generation has left. We may have blew our chance to be the vanguard of real progress, so now is our time to kick down the doors and get out of the way of the kids who are.
The sword on the card speaks of protection. The king image speaks of decision and leadership. It falls to us to protect and facilitate and lend any scrap of wisdom or insight we might posses as a new wave of activism comes crashing in behind us.
You might have thought we were beyond it, but welcome to the bigger Thunderdome, GenX. We aren’t the children of the apocalypse. We are Mad Max now. We don’t need a hero. We need to BE the hero. Our time has come to fly these kids out of the hellscape we allowed to happen.
Sage Words Tarot 