Fruits of Our Labor
Today’s spread is one I created while focusing on healing work. In particular, the question driving it was “what needs healing before you can manifest healthy things in the world?” Perhaps another way to put it would be to ask what needs fixing in the tree before it can put forward fruits that are sweet and healthy rather than bitter or poisonous.
The spread uses five sets of pairs, or ten cards. Although eight is traditionally the number associated with manifestation, adding the extra two that bring it up to 10 represents the full cycle of fruition, one that doesn’t just stop with what you got out of something. The first four pairs describe 1) your starting point, 2) the light that you find yourself growing towards and your relationship towards it, 3) the heart of the matter, and 4) your ideas or interpretation about the process. The last pair of cards describes 5) the spirit that imbued the manifestation process throughout and so reveals the full picture of where that process takes you. In each pair, the bottom card represents the underlayer or interior part of the pair that drives the action, while the upper card represents the exterior manifestation or outside force that affects the interior.
Today’s draw
1. Eight of Wands & The Chariot
2. The Empress & The Queen of Pentacles
3. The Hanged Man & Judgment
4. The Queen of Cups & Four of Cups
5. Four of Pentacles & Four of Swords
Deck
Standard Smith-Rider-Waite
The very first card in the lower left represents our personal magic. Taken across the whole of mankind, this is an almost (almost!) endless capacity to make things happen. Unfortunately, it seems like we’ve hitched that energy to a poor charioteer, one who either does not know or care to harness it wisely and with a balanced hand so that the energy takes us where we’re meant to go.
In this relationship, we are like the Empress. We have an almost boundless abundance of material, energy, compassion, and wisdom to share. And we have laid that ….at the foot of the queen of pentacles? This is a perverse relationship. The Empress traditionally represents the Earth, Gaia, or otherwise is the goddess of creation. To make her subservient to a worldly queen who represents the accumulation of material safety is a gross transgression, but it clarifies the meaning of the first two cards. We have given ourselves limited earthly masters and put the entire resources of the earth and ourselves, which are sacred, at their disposal.
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In the bottom of our hearts, we seem as a species to really only be satisfied by learning things the hard way (the Hanged Man). The necessary consequence of this is that we are always setting ourselves up to be judged on the basis of our successes or failures. This isn’t bad per se, but it does set us up to have to be careful. We could, for instance, find ourselves constantly turning that judgment on others since it seems to be so hard-wired in us. Or we could constantly turn it on ourselves, in which case it could either look like healthy self-reflection and course correction, or it could go too far and end up looking like self-flagellation.
In our case, collectively, it looks like we’ve made a different error. We’ve judged ourselves too generously. In our own minds, all of this process is about being magnanimous with our gifts, overflowing our cups of love and goodness onto the world and showering them with gifts from the goodness of our hearts like the Queen of Hearts. But we would do well to look at how that looks in reality all around us, where, rather than gracious and satisfied, people seem to be bored, tired, burned out and unsatisfied, unable to see others’ gifts right in front of them (the four of cups). Collectively, we’re all too busy thinking about all the things we’ve done for everyone else that they can’t see. See the vicious circle here? We try to give and give and give endlessly only to resent others for not appreciating those gifts, which we then refuse to recognize they also offer because we’re too busy licking our own anger. We fantasize ourselves the queen, but in practice we’re the sullen, ungrateful and pathologically dissatisfied turd under the tree. He keeps asking for cups that he gets, and then he asks for more because they aren’t good enough. At base, he’s mad at himself for getting duped into giving away so much, and now he’s trapped in a loop of refusing anyone else’s gifts as a way of projecting out his own anger at himself.
The spirit of the whole is exactly what we could have expected from the opening pair. We’ve built our foundation on serving earthly, miserly hoarders who take everything those around them have to give without returning that in an equal exchange of energy, goods, care, and recognition. As a consequence, we find ourselves collectively burned out and empty, everything having been taken with nothing returned. The next round of ten cards will begin at this point, with our own personal magic that of the hoarding miser.
Perhaps it is time to ask whether we care for the bitter fruits we’re eating today, or whether it isn’t time to try and cultivate something we can actually subsist on. Maybe even enjoy. Where in this set of cards do you see opportunities to heal your relationship to yourself, your boundaries, your work, or your relation to others? Where is there space to let go or start again while learning from the lessons of the past?
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