Well, that was a thing

It’s hard to believe that just one year ago, the youngling graduated. Oof has it been a year.

Since January, I’ve put most of my attention on the main blog over at SageWordsTarot.com. I don’t know if re-branding is the exact right way to say it since I’m not approaching things from a marketing standpoint. I’m just making this Tarot gig fit into the rest of my life a little better.

I hope you’ll drop by to check out the new look.

This, of course is part of it. This is where I’ll put all of the off topic musings. Thank you for reading along. I just wanted to give you fair warning about all the randomness that is about to commence.

I’m thinking about reviving my “Vampire Diet” idea from a few years ago and putting it here. Don’t worry, there isn’t a darn thing healthy about it. It is about fun. If you want healthy, check out How to Holistic over on blogspot. I hear it is interesting and reliable and going to be growing in the near future. If you want mainstream, the Mayo Clinic, nutrition data and healthline are good resources. If you want woo woo esoterica and snarky bit of fun…come with me.

For now, I just want to run through it all here. If you read this and it sounds interesting, please, by all means come visit the Tarot site. I’d be honored if you follow both this blog and that one too. I’ve had both for a long time under various names, but this time around there won’t be duplication between the two. It’s named Sage’s OTHER words for a reason. Or at least there won’t be as much duplication as there was during the process of rebranding from Modern Oracle to TaoCraft Tarot. Everything is all under Sage Words Tarot now, so that piece of it doesn’t matter.

But really, I’m writing this post for me, to get my head around everything that I’ve done to my Tarot work between January of 2023 and now (mid-May).

To borrow a phrase from Abraham Piper on TicTok – come along if you want to.

Seriously, I get it. I’m prolly talking to myself right now. It’ll be a wonder if anyone sees this and a bigger wonder if anyone reads this.

Based on the baseball movie principle of “if you build it they will come” I –

1. Will post here more often just for kicks and giggles and pure random chaotic energy. If I let the life-squirrels rave here, maybe they’ll leave the other site alone, metaphorically speaking.
2. Continue to hold the vague ethereal hope that this blog will spark some interest in my Tarot writing on the other blog or, even better, spark some interest in getting a private email reading with me.

I may be rebelling against marketing advice, but I still like to get paid work.

I like buying groceries and such.

Anyway – here is the big backstory.

I’m using a pen name again.

On the private side of this, for a string of psychological and spiritual reasons, I’m done with my old identity. At one point I seriously toyed with the idea of legally changing my name. But that’s expensive and I have every right to use a pen name or nickname. I’m no lawyer, and I’m certainly not a great historical figure, but if Ben Franklin can Silence Dogood it, so can I.

On the very public side of this, this is America in the 2020s. Evangelicals have been annoying judgy fascist assholes my whole life. Now white Christian Nationalists are a very real threat to everyone’s civil liberties and arguably to American democracy itself.

The first time I used an online handle, it was intended to shield myself and my work from online snooping and the torrents of negative energy from my fundamentalist family or anyone else of that ilk roaming around in cyberspace.

Now it has metastasized and gone national. If you look at the extremist insanity of MAGA loving evangelicals that are currently in the news, you get a glimpse of the culture in which I was raised. Welcome to my world, America. It’s taken me 50 years to shake off the emotional damage. I hope you do better.

To once again put a sliver of distance between us and them, and in order to preserve a bit of privacy for everyone – hi, I’m Sage.

You can read my bio on the main site. At least insofar as it applies to Sage Words Tarot. I do other work under that other name, but that won’t cross the boundary into this space and vice versa.

Why Sage? I had been thinking about the name thing for quite a while. Someone I know has been going through a similar name evolution albeit for different reasons, and that was an inspiration to move ahead with a change. I really wanted to symbolically sever ties with old, unhealthy things and fully embrace who I am now. But what name to adopt? After changing from Modern Oracle to TaoCraft Tarot just four years ago, wouldn’t another re-branding amount to business suicide?

Honestly, Sage just dropped into my head suddenly one evening. I just happened to have my tablet in my hand, so I opened up the handwriting input and signed the name. It flowed as natural as can be. I could imagine autographing a book that way at a book signing, it slipped into my ego so easily.

Using New Years Day as the springboard, the great re-naming and separation began. Here is the basic structure of Sage Words Tarot as it stands today:

• Sage Sips Tarot blogs on WordPress, Ko-fi and Substack all with both free and paid content.
• The Sage Sips podcast still exists, but is on hiatus until late in 2023, maybe permanently depending on how things evolve since wordpress and spotify dropped their text to speech interface. If it returns at all, it will only echo free blog content.
• Email Tarot is still my specialty. As a writer, this is the most intense and intensely private style of Tarot I can offer. I love to write, I love to work with Tarot, so I can fit email readings around everything else pretty seamlessly. You can order email readings 24/7 no appointment needed.
• Ebooks: PeaceTarot is still available for instant download in the shop. TaoCraft: Portfolio is available to download for FREE. More titles to come.
• In-person and online/phone readings are available by appointment, but on a limited basis. For in-person we meet at a quiet public place in my service area. SageWordsTarot@gmail.com is the best way to contact me for an appointment. I check it multiple time a day so you should get a decently fast response.
• Email readings still include a photo of your real-world card layout, general patterns, card by card interpretation and psychic summary with crystal energy and aromatherapy suggestions.
• Policies and disclaimers have been reviewed – contacting me indicates that you have read and agree with them
• Party and event appearances are currently closed.
• With the ko-fi page, I gratefully accept tips (a virtual “cup of coffee”) I love the taste of coffee in real life so the whole cup of coffee tip metaphor and the Sage Sips motif actually fits.
• The S-owl logo is the official one. It is copyrighted as is all of my writing except readings of course and blog posts which can be used with an attribution non derivative noncommercial creative commons license. Anything with triquetra or TCT-owl logos is old, but still my copyright.
• I’m Sage Words Tarot on all the socials (sagewordstarotYT on YouTube)
• Prices this year are the same as last year, so get ’em while they’re hot before any potential 2024 changes.
• No more Reiki, meditation or other health / healing topics. Its all Tarot, oracles, and intuition development on the main blog. This blog is for random related conceptual, metaphysical, philosophical….stuff. I don’t know what all this blog will turn out to be.

Let’s find out together.