,

9 of Pentacles

From left to right: The EveryDay Tarot, the Mucha Tarot, and the Radiant Ryder-Waite-Smith Tarot

Oh, what a great card for October! October, harvest-time, moving from the slower pace of summer to the routines of fall. The Nine of Pentacles has all that. This card speaks of awareness, success, certainty, fulfillment. Time to harvest what we’ve grown, time to enjoy our success.

How do you define success? Pentacles speak of the tangible, so it could certainly include a solid career, home, sufficient finances. But not everyone reading this post will have all – or any – of that right now. So how else can we read this card?

From Rachel Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom:  “ ‘Success’ here means not so much worldly achievements as success in ‘creating’ ourselves out of the material given us by the circumstances and conditions of our life.”

Isn’t that great? We create ourselves in collaboration with what life dishes out. This can apply to anyone, no matter what your particular circumstances. While we can influence the events in our lives, we certainly don’t have perfect control over them. Sometimes, shit just happens. Then we have a choice: stay there with it and bemoan how awful it is, or use it to grow.

As any gardener knows, manure (aka shit) is good for plants! What is true for plants is also true for us. It’s the hard parts of life teach us how strong we are, and make us stronger still. They give us compassion for others. They stretch and grow us.

So the Nine of Pentacles asks us to evaluate our success. But we’re to do that in a compassionate way. We are not looking for ways we’ve fallen short of some imagined ‘Success Point’. We are to look into ourselves and see what successes we’ve had.

Have I become a little more patient with the irritants in my life? Have I stood up for myself in a conflict? Have I laughed at least a few times each day? These are all possible measures of success, and should be celebrated.

What successes can you celebrate?

/66 Comments/by
66 replies

Leave a Reply

Want to join the discussion?
Feel free to contribute!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *