Card of the Day: Four of Pentacles

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The Wild Unknown Tarot [/caption]

Welcome to Spring! This card to me highlights the Emperor—the fourth card in the Major Arcana. 2020 is an Emperor year (2 + 0 + 2 + 0 = 4). The Emperor, and this card, are about structure, stability, and order. This moment is showing us the weaknesses in the larger structures of our society, and the potential for new, smaller, more adaptive and creative structures that meet needs, that include everyone.

The image on the card shows a cross, or even a figure, a shrouded body, or a figure with “arms” outstretched. A stable figure can often be exactly what’s needed. The strings that are holding the four pentacles together are thin...are they just made of light? There is also usefulness in shapeshifting, adjusting. We can change and adapt our own structures—from our own personal practices to the care networks we’re creating among friends and community to the larger structures of society—to meet the current needs. (Google Lummi Nation field hospital for a beautiful example.) This card calls on us to create what’s needed while maintaining strength and stability.

In the last year or so, I’ve identified the tension between structure and freedom to be the fundamental creative, living dynamic of my life. Having spent the first 40 or so years clinging to external structures and discovering how rigid and fragile that made me, I am now learning to recognize and employ the many internal structures I’ve nurtured and nourished, and to deploy my natural comfort with boundaries and constraint to invite freedom and play into my explorations—creative, spiritual, and relational.

With no structure, we leak a lot of energy. It’s very easy to get lost. Too much structure and there isn’t any room for creativity, for play, for intuition, for discovery and exploration. This isn’t a tension that we ever permanently resolve. The dance between the two is the juiciness of life.