Nine Of Pentacles

my open eyes
my orchard ground
my ships
my harvest
my open hand
my body

your sky
your sea.

my open hand.


This is my tenth card article; I have nine completed ones sat on the blog front page. Three a day, every day, I hope, though tonight I am very tired; yesterday and the day before, I felt full of life when I was done, ready for a fourth, but I really don't want to burn this out. Harvesting feels nice. Writing is a harvest - a harvest of thoughts and feelings that were sown long ago, left to grow as you read, as you turned your earth over.

That this is so much easier than writing fiction maybe tells me what I ought to be doing with the words in my head. But it's good to rotate, to avoid monoculture, and to let your mind run fallow for a year at a time.

As with all things Pentacle, a good harvest does not spring out of nowhere; neither does it disappear when you put the hoes away. [...I'm sorry.] Whose orchard is it - whose harvest? There's this beautiful idea, I think in the first appendix of ILLUMINATUS!, that it's absurd for a human being to claim to own land, or a building - how can something far older than you, which will live far longer than you will, be your possession? It is better to see oneself as steward to the harvest rather than the owner of it. For a more Pentacly footnote, see how much power, privilege, and capital gains tax plays into the owning and using of land.

And that harvest needs managing, has to last through your winter; and from what I know of winter, it would be good to share around some of what you have brought forth from the earth, so that the same will come to you in time. A real Pentacle would stab me for saying that, though.

So if there's a flaw, a reversal, here, it'd be taking your fruit for granted, rather than seeing why it's yours and where it has to go next. And as I hope the above stream-of-consciousness crap hinted, I fear there's a desire, in the Intuitive image, to think it natural to own the world.

(It's not come yet - though my guess is it'll be sooner rather than later, I'll jot this down in case it slips away: The Nine of Swords is reaping the whirlwind. (And the Nine of Cups is here, and has brought the spring tide)).


Images of the Nine of Pentacles:

Ripeness - the Osho Zen Nine. Great name, because it makes it about timing and about the fruit being ready for the harvest, rather than the harvester being ready. By removing the human character, the deck makes the natural process of harvest more clear.

The traditional hawker of the RWS. Why a hawker? The Intuitive card takes quite a nod from this one, only with more sea and no hawk.