Card of the Day: Four of Pentacles

Fours in the pip (numbered) cards of the tarot are about stability and structure. The Emperor is the fourth card in the Major Arcana, and that’s his whole jam. (2020 is an Emperor year, btw: 2 + 0 + 2 + 0 = 4). The pentacles are about our resources, internal and external—from the Earth and our body to money and home, to a felt sense of security and inner stability.

This card shows us about our innate need to make sense of life’s chaos. Life isn’t actually “chaotic,” that’s just what we call the 99% of things we can’t control: chaos. But truly, if our brain didn’t filter out some sense information, we’d be paralytically flooded all the time. So we’re wired to create categories and structures to make sense of our experience, to make it navigate-able. This has a lot of use value. Setting boundaries with people who would otherwise use up all our energy or harm us? Super useful. Creating detailed action plans after a period of creative brainstorming? Ditto.

As a triple Capricorn (aka Structure City), I’m a fan of structure. Lots of structure makes me feel safe and secure. But I think some of growing up for me has meant being able to withstand a certain amount of chaos, internal and external. I think 12-step recovery has a great approach to this, with the Serenity Prayer providing a pith teaching on asking for “the wisdom to know the difference” between what we can and can’t change or control.

I’m enjoying experimenting with structure, working with what is “enough”—enough money, enough time, enough work, enough solitude. It’s been helping me work through fears of not-enough, my tendency to grip and fixate, to stockpile (even [especially?] just in my own mind).

Every morning I sit at my desk for my morning rituals, facing an artwork that Robyn Love gave me for my ordination. It says: “Give Way.” (Not: “My Way.”) I’m hoping that if I spend enough time exposing myself to that teaching (literally), and bringing it to mind in moments when my whole being grips around the way I think things should be, it will make its way inside.