A man chisels at a stone sculpture; he’s finding the beauty of movement and life, a living being, in stone. He’s in a state concentration: relaxed and focused. He’s dressed in the garb of labor, but unlike the four of pentacles, his clothes look worn with use. Two people stand on the other side of the statue, a man and woman, watching, observing. The woman grasps a green ball with both hands and the man holds a piece of paper, as if they were instructions or plans. All hands are engaged in some way, for the worker’s hands too are each grasping a tool. Three pentacles are worked into stone above them.
A meaningful piece of art takes the work of labor, intuition, and rationality. Here they’re all working to achieve a high task, for the sculpture is elevated off the ground. This card’s story is one of working together to achieve something beautiful. Anything could be beautiful. I remember a few coworkers I always looked forward to working with at a wine bar while attending undergrad in Asheville. We had closing shift together, 4 or 5 to midnight, and there was something in our chemistry that made the bar vibrate. The customers were happy, tucked into corners with their books and a glass of wine or frothed latte, and even when a line stood waiting at the coffee bar, we three or four tending the bar kept everything moving. There was beauty to our movement, our dancing around each other with wine-filled trays and cheese-laden boards. Up and down the stairs, completing other halves of another’s order when one got behind because a glass of wine spilled. These nights, the shift flew by; but some nights when even one other person worked who couldn’t fit into our balance of energies, the whole night clogged up. It’s not that they were a bad person or poor worker, the energies just didn’t mix the same way. Those nights were long and laborious.
I am speaking here of movement; and the card I drew today is reversed. What of a practice of holding still? A practice of waiting gives us the opportunity to stop and examine the situation from a new perspective, without the headlong rush of a bull to get something done, our way. When the effort of work is imbalanced, driven by ego, the work fails to reveal truth or celebrate beauty. It becomes about something else. The work isn’t worth completing when in a state of disharmony among the elements. There’s a tension that’s easy to forget when in a state of motion; we forget about the part that keeps that tension steady, the holding still phase, the waiting. It’s somehow in the idea that we are waiting for the state of both coming and going. When coming and going meet, there’s an instance of stillness, a holding of the breath. And a release. But we forget to cherish that stillness, we think once we’ve started a task we need to finish it, even if sometimes it needs reevaluated.
The man working reminds me of Alexandria Peary’s description of writing flow. In her book Prolific Moment she talks about writing as a meditation practice of sorts to enter the flow of writing. She distinguishes her writing strategy from Buddhist meditation for she is goal oriented—to write—whereas “a meditation practitioner eschews such an agenda” (17). Nevertheless, she urges a kind of mindlessness as “a fundamental part of mindful writing, for “even this binary of awareness/lack of awareness is subsumed inside a radical groundlessness. Mindlessness and mindfulness coexist” (16). The man poised before his work of art is both mindful of precisely what he’s doing and how he’s doing it and he’s mindless in an intuitive sense. He’s flowing through his whole body, rationality, and creativity, and not simply through one of them. The pause that this card reversed suggests is something like Peary’s first challenge: remembering to remember.
(Peary, Alexandria. Prolific Moment. Routledge, 2018.)
(My Tarot deck is Llewellyn’s Classic Tarot by Barbara Moore and illustrated by Eugene Smith.)