Ronda Snow's Blog, page 13
January 4, 2015
Happy 2015!
The audio is easy...I'm still co-hosting "Menage A Tarot" podcast with David Dear, the founder of the feast, I mean, podcast and Kate of "Daily Tarot Girl" fame. The next episode is coming mid January, and all the past episodes are available on iTunes and on the menageatarot.com website.
The video bit is my goal to start a youtube channel that is basically an expansion of the Tarot blog/website at modernoracletarot.com. My goal there is to make a few video examples of my readings so you can get a feel of what party readings and in-person Tarot sessions are really like. There are still loads of written examples of email readings on the website, same as always.
The writing goals are just a continutaion of last year. 2014 was spent promoting #PeaceTarot, doing live readings, and beginning with Menage A Tarot.
In 2015 my goals are to add e-book outlets and formats for #PeaceTarot, release "Modern Oracle: Arcana in Balance" and begin work on "Moonlight and Silver", a guide for relationship and decision oriented meditation and visualization work.
Of course, I'll be reading...have been as long as I've known how. Stay tuned here to see what books are sitting by my favorite chair and coffee mug. Have my fingers and toes crossed for more from Brent Denali in particular, and after seeing "Elementary" and "Sherlock" on TV, I might actually have to read the originals (I think they are free on kindle or guttenberg...but then, there is always the library! Luv the library!)
There you have this mouse's best laid plans. What are yours?
May all your highest and best wishes and dreams come to be at exactly the right time.
September 22, 2014
Merry Monday: Stuff That Works
I really appreciate it when stuff just works.
Unfortunately we usually notice the stuff that just works until it doesn’t.
For example, blogging. It’s nice to do what I’m supposed to do and have stuff do what it’s supposed to do in return. And when it doesn’t, all I can say is hurray for the people that make it happen again. Like the WordPress forum yesterday, and the good folks from the water company that fixed the water main break up the street a couple of weeks ago. Maybe it is because my Grandparents lived on a farm in rural Appalachia and lived with an outhouse…yes, you heard me, a grey, wood, stinky Li’l Abner hillbilly style outhouse…until I was 6 years old. NOT my favorite part of visiting Gramma’s house. I always blamed my sincere appreciation for functional indoor plumbing on those early experiences. The up side was their drinking water came directly from a mountain spring on their property, and the water was fan-freaking-tastic to drink…but that’s another story. The point is, I like it when stuff works. Especially a clean, easy water supply, flush toilets, electricity and my pipeline to the Web.
It’s obvious that we should appreciate other people in all they do, and not take even the smallest kindnesses …or even routine tasks for granted. People are important. And that includes the people behind the STUFF, those who invent, innovate, maintain and repair. I like it when stuff works, and appreciate the people who make sure that it does.
September 21, 2014
Many Thanks
Many Thanks to LizTheFair on WordPress Forums who found the one teensy problem with the whole domain mapping thing and told me the easy fix.
Many many thanks. You made my Monday Merry a day early!
In case you missed it … The podcast I co-host with David and Kate, Menage A Tarot is up and running, with a brand new episode for you to enjoy. This episode, “Ghost in the Machine” talks about Tarot and Mediumship (you know, talking to dead people). The podcast is very much live and available both on www.menageatarot.com and on iTunes!
September 20, 2014
SNAFU
There once was a blog named WordPress
Whose domain mapping was slightly a mess
My websites are down
I’m wearing a frown
You can also find me at this address
In other news, the Podcast I co-host with David and Kate is up. Episode 3, “Ghost in the Machine” about Tarot & Mediumship (you know, talking to dead people) is very much live and available free to listen on www.menageatarot.com and on iTunes.
September 15, 2014
Merry Monday : Viral Mash-ups
They are often an over-used meme and all too cliche. Sometimes they are fun, and fall under the greatest “Merry Monday” treasure of all…humor. But that’s another story.
For today, mash-ups can be beyawsome.
The “Pheneas and Ferb” Star Wars special had me in stitches. And there is nothing better than a good Weird Al Yankovic parody, right?
But there are other, excellent, but more serious mash-ups too. The one near and dear to my heart is Integrated Medicine. There are some things, actually a LOT of things, that Holistic Health does as well or better than the mainstream guys. Allopathy (mainstream “scientific” medicine) is the best at a some things too. It is just foolish to completely disregard one or the other out of fear, panic, bigotry and bias. The real skill is knowing when to use what approach. Both have their good points, and both have ways where they are just plain wrong.
The best solution is a thoughtful mash-up. It is possible to have the best of both worlds so long as we 1.advocate for ourselves in the screwed up steamroller world of mainstream healthcare (at least here in America) and 2. don’t act like a woo-woo nutburger.
Allopathy misses the boat in a large number of ways, but the biggest fail of so-called ‘natural’ advocates lately is the anti-vaccine sentiment. Look at the data. The proof of vaccine safety and efficacy is beyond denial. Just ask your local smallpox virus.
Vaccines are very much in synch with a holistic approach. it is in one of the few long standing overlaps between holistic and allopathic disease prevention. Natural Health advocates strengthening the immune system to prevent disease. Vaccines educate that healthy immune system how to ward off specific, serious, potentially deadly diseases. Better to teach your cells how to fend off (insert nasty illness here) with a shot than through surviving a deadly epidemic…if you actually do survive that is.
Click HERE for my annual screed about flu vaccines, from the archives. The basics haven’t changed.
And wash your hands.
Did I mention wash your hands?
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Click HERE to order #PeaceTarot for only $0.99
Special price ends September 21, 2014
September 11, 2014
Dream Undreamed
From one of my favorite poets.
Originally posted on The Arkside of Thought:
What dream is a dream undreamed,
or forgotten in the light of day?
What prayer is a prayer unspoken,
shelved and fading away?
What hope is this suffering ‘neath the gods
who make men to toil and die?
Who should pretend
He hears our cries?
Not I, my friend,
not I.
DREAM UNDREAMED
9•10•14
SAK
Technical Gremlins
To schedule a mini spa visit, holistic health questions, or book information, please contact me at rondajsnow@gmial.com if this website goes down these days. Tarot is available as below. Thanks for your patience!
Originally posted on Modern Oracle Tarot:
I’ll be sprucing up the website around Sept 21-23, and redoing several pages to reflect Fall specials, hours, prices etc
If by some change there are technical gremlins running amuck, and the website isn’t available those days, please don’t hesitate to contact me at modernoracletarot@gmail.com. You can still order email readings or schedule other readings that way.
I’ll be introducing a new look to my email readings starting then. A handful of people have had a chance to preview the new format, but I haven’t gotten any feedback to far. I hope to update the examples to reflect the card graphics in the new email readings.
Wish me luck. I don’t expect any problems, but a heads-up in advance is a very Tarot way to do things, don’t you think?
Appearing at Carnegie Library, Oakland Branch, Pittsburgh PA
Originally posted on Modern Oracle Tarot:
I’ll be appearing at the Oakland Main branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh on October 17. I’ll be doing one-card daily meditation readings for attendees, just like the ones you seen here in the blog and just like the ones you can LEARN to do for yourself in my book #PeaceTarot. Details about the event are below
#PeaceTarot does not give you the skills you need to do readings for other people, but it does give you a way to find a peaceful moment when modern life isn’t. The $0.99 special summer price ends in 10 days! Click the cover, click HERE, or visit amazon.com to order for Kindle today. Don’t have a kindle? No problem. You can download a kindle reader app for your pc, mac, tablet or smartphone for FREE from the amazon site.
Cirque After Hours
@ the Library Friday, October 17 from 7 –…
View original 86 more words
September 8, 2014
Merry Monday: Mindful Mindlessness
…Meaning meditation
I think that is a new personal best for alliteration.
But by now you might be wondering what th’ heck is mindful mindlessness. Today I’m thinking in terms of Mary Poppins again. Remember the famous “spoonful of sugar” scene…where cleaning the nursery was turned into a game? That is just a whimsical way of talking about a shift in perception. It isn’t just for kids. In fact, Eastern philosophy has been talking about just this sort of thing long before Mary came around.
One aspect of shifting perception is just as playful as stories and games and fiction. Call it Brain Candy. When your mind has been up to your eyeballs in work, stress, and the physical workaday world, it is good to shift to the mental sugar…to do something mindless and playful. Literally play. Read a good book. Immerse yourself if a movie or a walk or some other thing you enjoy. That’s easy, and doesn’t take a lot of deliberate attention to do most of the time. It is just a mindless rest for an overworked attention span.
There is another kind of relaxation and mental recouperation. Mindful mindlessness. That is where you turn any old workaday, boring repetitive task and turn it into mediation. Meditation isn’t about sitting on a rock and communing with your belly button. It is about turning off the monkey chatter in your head and fully, quietly, 100% being where you are and 100% paying attention to here, now, where you are and what you are doing. You can whip that kind of brain candy out anywhere, anytime, no matter what you are doing. You can’t check out on the mindless kind of mental vacation just anywhere. The mindful kind of mental rest is go-anywhere. It can improve whatever-it-is that you are doing.
Brett Dinelli, author of “Jimmy the Buddha” (sequel to be released this month…squee!) made that light bulb click on over my head when he tweeted something on the order of “I just realized vacuuming is like raking a Zen garden. I am free” (forgive me @ThatBuddha if I got it wrong)…but you get the idea. Anything and everything is an opportunity for meditation, and no-mind. It’s easier said than done, an takes some practice to get the hang of it, much less hang ON to it for any sustained amount of time, but try it: just knock of the brain-chatter and pay attention to what you are doing. Let all the thoughts be what they are and let them go floating on by. Turning the mundane into meditation is like making a game out of a cleaning the nursery. It takes something we might want to avoid and turns into something soothing and stress relieving.
Thoughts are natural. Holding onto them too tightly is stress. Letting them float by is meditation. Letting them float by while you pay attention to what you are doing here and now is mindfulness.
It is a little easier to do if you start by being mindful of doing something mindless and repetitive, like vacuuming, washing dishes. That is why some people find knitting and stitching to be so relaxing. After some practice it doesn’t take a lot of effort to do, but you have to pay some degree of attention so you don’t make mistakes in the pattern. That kind of activity is very conducive to mindful mindlessness.
Meditative mindful mindlessness makes a merry Monday
Enjoy
September 5, 2014
Friday Abide Chapter 1 (Putkonen)
In May of 2013, Amy Putkonen began “Tao Tuesday” on www.TaoTeChingDaily.com. She would post a chapter from her excellent version of the Tao Te Ching, give her commentary on the chapter, and invite readers to do the same, and linked all the ‘Tao Tuesday” comments together. If you have any degree of interest in the Tao Te Ching, I Ching or Taoism, I encourage you to visit her site to explore it all. They are up to chapter 61 I think.
The summer being what it was, I dropped out of “Tao Tuesday” for a while, and it looks like Friday will be the day I can spend a little time with the topic. My general plan is to back up, restart, and re-visit the Tao Te Ching chapters in order…and then continue where I left off last spring. After exploring Amy’s version, I may repeat the process with my other favorite version, the Victor Mair translation. We’ll see. That is a LOT of Tao Te Ching.
I’d also like to explore what I call “one thing” topics…like the “one thing” from the City Slickers clip we talked about last Friday. These posts will really touch on the mind / spirit aspects of holistic health. That is the realm where stress does the most damage, and the realm that also holds the antidote to stress. My one thing, I’ve learned, is that there is no one thing other than the one I create…I have a weird shaped peg that doesn’t quite any existing holes. So my “one thing’ is actually a bunch of duct taped things that have proven themselves true to me over the past almost-50 years. In other words my “one thing” is that I have the ability to recognize truth, and do what is right for me, with or without anyone else’s approval.
Friday Abide is where I want to explore all sorts of abstract concepts and philosophy that might give us all something to lean on when it’s just one of those days. Or maybe even when things get really serious.
But let’s start with the easy stuff first: my commentary to Chapter 1 from Amy Putkonen’s version of the Tao Te Ching via her Tao Tuesday challenge from 5/13.
The Tao that can be told is not the Eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name.
Nothingness is the Origin of Heaven and Earth.
Beingness is the Mother of the Ten Thousand Things.
When you are free of desire, you will understand the Essence of your life.
When you identify with your desires, you will observe the manifestations of your life.
Both contain the deepest secrets arising from the dark unknown, the Doorway to the Mysteries of Life.
Language is a wonderful, miraculous, essential thing, but it is not everything. There are some things so profound, so large, that they escape words. They are even beyond pictures. Some things are only accessible through direct, wordless experience. Some things have to be seen with our heart looking with our mind’s eye.
And so it is with many of the ideas held withing the Tao Te Ching.
The old Zen example is the best one: think of someone pointing at the moon.
Desires, things, hopes, memories…they are all symbols. There is nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with any of them, any more there is anything wrong with fingers, or pointing at pretty things. All those words, things and mental energies that are outside of the here-and-now are no more the larger reality than the finger pointing is actually the moon.
Even the moon is just a manifestation of the greater indescribable being of the universe – it is part of the larger cosmos, as are we.
The Tao is beyond the words describing it just as the moon is beyond the finger pointing at it…but it is not beyond our ability to see. Look up, and you can see the moon for yourself. Point to it for yourself, if you like. Just don’t start staring at fingers and miss the moon altogether.
