Sunrise Letters
Day five: pulling a bad card
This morning, after finishing my morning pages, I decided to pull a tarot card.
I am not a professional tarot reader by any stretch, but tarot has been a part of my life for three decades, if not longer.
For me, pulling a card is not a psychic prediction, but rather a means of checking in with myself and finding presence. Whichever card I pull invites inquiry and contemplation.
A few years ago I was given The Lioness Oracle Tarot deck, and it’s been my primary deck since then. Not only is it beautiful, but it also follows the template of the Ryder-Waite deck, which was one of the original tarot decks. This makes it easier for me to read, because the RW deck is what I learned on.
In most tarot decks, there are several cards that could be labeled as bad. For instance, in many decks there are death, the devil, and the fool. None of these sound great, but as my tarot practice has deepened I’ve learned that each card has its own gift to give us.
Death, for instance, can mean a new beginning. Tarot is a reflection of our inner selves, and we project ourselves onto the cards.
Tarot decks are decks of cards, and like a deck of playing cards there is a court. In tarot this is called the major and minor arcana. There are all the kings and queens, the world, the chariot, death, and the empresses and emperors— symbols and figureheads.
There are four suits: pentacles, swords, cups, and wands. Each suit has a vibe or theme. For instance, the suit of cups represents water, intuition, and creativity (amongst other things).
This morning, while I was shuffling my cards and getting ready to pull one at random, I kept getting distracted.
In tarot, like any contemplative art, presence is important. I’ve learned this through practice, and today was no different. When I split the deck, I took a card at random and flipped it face up. It was the Five of Pentacles.
Not great, y’all.
Or, maybe important?
Five of Pentacles often represents poverty, or a loss of material wealth. That’s the base interpretation, but like all tarot cards, we can always go deeper.
As I’d been shuffling, I kept getting distracted about money. I was worrying about my bank account and reflecting on my credit card debt.
So, when I pulled this card, I wasn’t happy. How in god’s name does one lose wealth when one is not wealthy?! A loss of material wealth, for me, could spell disaster.
I reminded myself: the card has other interpretations.
Opening my favorite tarot book, I looked up Five of Pentacles. The card, it said, can also represent an internal sense of scarcity.
How serendipitous. A reminder of one of my most profound internal struggles.
It’s particularly serendipitous because, over the past month or so (and really, the past few years), I’ve been doing a lot of work with my internal sense of scarcity and lack, which was calibrated when I was a child being raised by a single mom who had grown up in abject poverty and who herself struggled massively with overspending, to the point of her having nice clothes but us not having enough to eat or keep the utilities on.
Over the past month I started reading Letting Go by David R. Hawkins. Based in Buddhist philosophy, psychology, and drawing upon the author’s decades of experience as a psychiatrist, Letting Go is about releasing our internal cultural training, amongst many other things.
I’m still processing the book, but it was a profound read for me, especially in its concepts surrounding material scarcity and scarcity mentality in general.
I could go on here— but I won’t. Maybe I’ll continue these thoughts later this week. What I will say is that I’ve had a deep and visceral aversion towards the concepts of manifesting and the law of attraction, because they were incredibly harmful to my mom. The ways in which these concepts are interpreted in our culture has a lot to do with prosperity gospel, and I’m not here for centering my life around material wealth, or needing nice cars and houses to feel whole as a person.
My aversion to material wealth combined with an upbringing where money was scarce as well as my own propensity to feel undeserving of good things doesn’t serve me at all.
Because everyone deserves to have enough money. And there is more than enough money in the world for everyone. And I will not be poor for the rest of my life. Maybe I won’t be poor for the rest of the year. Maybe I need to reframe what wealth looks like to me.
The Five of Pentacles card reminded me that poverty is, in fact, a mindset.
This doesn’t mean that those who live in poverty are responsible for their own poverty— there are many, many social inequities at play here, as well as centuries of cultural conditioning.
But if someone in the world is going to have a million dollars, why shouldn’t it be me? Or you? Or all of us?
What would I do with a million dollars that some CEO wouldn’t do with a million dollars?
I’d share it.
And so would you.
So, my friends, that’s how I am beginning today. With the belief that I deserve good things. I deserve a living wage, and more. I deserve love and care. We all deserve it all.