Card of the day: Four of Pentacles
In this season of coming and going,
I keep alive by holding still.
Guard your stillness and your quiet as the man in the Four of Pentacles guards coins.
Today is the day of most coming and most going: The dark has come, the light gone, and in this coming and going the sense of holding still bubbles up (yes, even in holding still, we move). It’s the season of constriction and ice, stability and stasis (the sign of Capricorn); we flow underneath with life.
The Old English rune is (say “ice” with a long eee sound) described in “The Old English Rune Poem” encapsulates (freezes and reveals) the riddle of coming and going. Here’s Miller Oberman’s translation:
Ice is over-cold and immeasurably slippery
It gleams glass-clear most like precious gems
Or a floor worked over with frost fair upon seeing (p. 33)
It carries movement in its slippery quality yet the ice does not move, but instead causes movement, causes something to slip across it: our fingers, our eyes. (Even the title of Oberman’s book of poems The Unstill Ones, an homage to an Old English love for saying the opposite of something by adding “Un” to it points to how one thing always contains its opposite.) The Old Icelandic poem about this rune suggests a similar movement-constriction: “bark of rivers/and roof of the wave/and destruction of the doomed” (trans. Bruce Dickins). In the midst of our holding still, we are still alive.
We forget this.
We think winter is death. It is change, as death is change. And as the frigid waters of a river slow to sludge by the “over-cold” of winter, a tissue of bark forms on top. The river has the appearance of death, but we trust that it continues to flow beneath. As the skin on our bodies keeps hidden all the movement of blood flow and organs pounding and renewing and changing.
The Four of Pentacles was the first card I examined in this series. That day the card, to me, was more of a question of what to save, whether to save; a goal perhaps.Where here on the Winter Solstice, on this day that marks Midwinter, there is no question, but simply an offer to embrace this time where, for once, we are allowed, indeed must, hold still.
A beautiful poem for today is Pablo Neruda’s “Keeping Quiet.” He begins:
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much (p. 26)
He calls this moment of stillness “exotic;” and how exotic indeed, to “all be together” in this quiet, this “sudden strangeness.” He warns we should not confuse this with inactivity, for it is not about stagnation; “Life is what it is about.” When we keep quiet for just a moment, we are saying yes to life-death-change. Our scrabbling for movement, he says, is what causes our “sadness/of never understanding ourselves.”
In the podcast “The Astrology of Carl Jung’s The Red Book” with Satya Doyle Byock and astrologer Carol Ferris, Ferris says in episode 26 or 27 (I think 26), “Yang without yin is a ghost, yin without yang is a corpse.” We are ghosts and corpses without a balance of energies. But balance doesn’t mean maintaining constant equality for that would be stasis. Rather, we swing into periods of yin then swing into periods of yang. Thus, there’s always movement between them, and there’s yang inside of yin, yin inside of yang: movement in stillness, stillness in movement.
I will count to Midwinter.
Snow will fall, fall, fall heavily upon the earth.
Then it will lie there and hold still the earth
while the earth holds it. When I count to Midwinter
we will all keep still,
held and holding, for a little while.
Bibliography
Ferris, Carol. “The Astrology of Carl Jung’s The Red Book.” Episode 26 I think?! “Together like Philemon and Baucis in the Age of Aquarius.” https://www.carolferrisastrology.com/podcasts.
“Icelandic Rune Poem.” Trans. Bruce Dickins. Runic and Heroic Poems. Qt’d in Ragweedforge. https://www.ragweedforge.com/rpie.html.
Neruda, Pablo. “Keeping Quiet.” Extravagaria: A Bilingual Edition. Trans. Alastair Reid. Noonday Press, January 2001, P. 26. https://www.bu.edu/quantum/zen/readings/keepingQuietNeruda.html
Oberman, Miller. “The Old English Rune Poem.” The Unstill Ones. Princeton University Press, 2017.