The Four of Pentacles — The Gift of Limitation

The Tarot Primer 32.1
FOUR OF PENTACLES

Written for the week Monday 12th – Sunday 18th June

The Fifth Spirit Tarot (first edition) by Charlie Clare Burgess

✉️ Four as Missive

🌏 The four relates to physical limitations — the limits of our body, our personal resources, the physical world. The limits of reality.

💎 It is a pause to consider what you hold close in that space. What/who is treasured. Adored. And the degree to which this is supportive, nourishing and life affirming.

🤝 Here you observe your behaviour around holding. Do you clutch and cling and hoard? Are there roots of fear or lack driving this? Or do you cradle and embrace? Are there roots of confidence and connections underpinning this?

🙏🏻 Do you trust time? And life’s divine timing?

🧭 If your values are points of a compass, what anchors your heart, body, mind and spirit. Do you know your anchors?

🧮 The four offers a chance to stocktake your personal resources — especially the less tangible of them like time, energy, agency, and love.

🗼Foundations are required to build solid and enduring structures, but if we build on the wrong foundations, we risk the long term integrity of our hard work.

🌱 The seedling that grows in fertile, cultivated ground grows differently to the one in the harsh wildness.

🪨 In the four, healthy stability and security can calcify into stubbornness, rigidity and barrenness.

🦷Our roots connect past-present-future.

☠️ Sunk deep in the past, they connect to a rich source of learning and empowerment. They can also draw up the poison of wrong turns, missed opportunities, doubt and regret.

🪴The four reminds you, plants struggle to thrive when they are root bound. It offers you secateurs to cut away what holds you back.


📖 Journal Prompts

✍🏻 Who/what/where do you treasure?

✍🏻 What word anchors/defines your heart energy?

✍🏻 What word anchors/defines your physical energy?

✍🏻 What words anchors/defines your mental energy?

✍🏻 What words anchors/defined your soul energy?

✍🏻 When combined what kind of compass does this provide for navigating a life congruent with your values?

✍🏻 Where are the drains on your money, time, love and agency? How can you make one small change to redirect the flow?

✍🏻 Where do your roots bind you? What needs to be cut away?

✍🏻 How can time act as a friend, collaborator and instigator of possibilities? If you loosen your grip, what happens? Look for the synchronicities this week.

 

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Happy Day of the Horizon

 

Happy Day of the Horizon — my latest nerd iteration of the plethora of new year variants.

Over the weekend, I commented to a friend who I met through astrological circles, that I was fascinated by the fact that I was literally running a week behind with everything. Deadlines I had set for the previous weekend, were finalising this weekend. I spent most of the week feeling disheartened, running a failure narrative, at my inability to finish everything I wanted to complete before the equinox.

You know, if I’d just tried harder. Been more focused.

If the energy of the equinox portal had fucked me up so completely.

And dozens of other opportunistic bullshit.

A few minutes later, my friend messaged to say the transiting sun wouldn’t hit my first house for a few days… and boom! I checked in with my chart and saw that the sun would cross the threshold of my first house on Tuesday (yes, exactly a week after equinox!)

I wasn’t running behind schedule at all.

I was powering along in perfect alignment with my own intrinsic energy, cycles and timing. Yet again I’d worked hard to undo myself with an arbitrary date (one of the fixations and self sabotaging behaviours I’ve ben unpicking since January).

And Breathe

The most remarkable thing happened next — the shifting of my timeline suddenly freed up all the stuck, shitty energy I’d been caught in. I mean, we never completely wipe clean the slate, but I was clear about the energetic ties I wanted to cut moving into this new year. And gifted a moment of insight, I received a powerful reframe (and you know, an extra 36 hours grace!)

I could breathe. I could move. My world suddenly bloomed with possibilities.

I relaxed into the final moments of finishing a two year ghost editing project with Leah.

I turned up with excitement for the final few poems of a poetry project with Christina (not un-ironically called “Thresholds”)… and just generally enjoyed the feeling of what I wanted: a new year that felt like it had a clean slate.

Happy New Year

Just before 5am today, the sun kissed my horizon and my new year begun.

I don’t think it’s a “thing” (not like solar return charts are) but I cast a chart to see what the moment of “emergence” offers for the coming year, and there is plenty there to excite me professionally and creatively.

Especially in a year where my debut solo novel comes out.

My client books are shut this week. I’m not doing the Poetry Primer.

I’m giving all of me, to me.

I also postponed the beginning of The Poetry of You to open the necessary space to download the shape and nuance of it (which I knew had been patiently lingering in the wings waiting for everything else to finish).

The Coming Week, Prelude to the Underworld

Over the next few days I will share more specific details of what The Poetry of You will have in terms of shape, concept, context and content as it comes through.

I downloaded several exciting pieces swimming this morning.

What I can say at this point, there will be strong elements of Underworld mythology via Inanna (who, if you’ve read Postmarked Pipers’ Reach, you’ll know Ella-Louise was obsessed her), Persephone (who is on the wall of the room I get network chiropractic) and Psyche (who is my current obsession — what’s not to love about a woman who takes the back door into the underworld with cake to fed the hell hound!).

These stories are symbolically rich.

Ripe for retellings that strip away the patriarchal bullshit (where women only excel at beauty — or running away, only to be turned into trees).

These stories are also gentle and empowering structures to write our stories within. I’m excited to use them as spaces reorientation for (re)discovering our selves past-present-future.

If this sounds like something you’re in for now … sign up here.

Or join me here this week, as it unfolds for both of us in real(ish) time.

My Favourite Superpower

Opening doors for people and helping them step across the threshold is my favourite superpower as a depth worker.

In the process of doing this with myself right now, as I kiss the horizon and face al the fears, as I prepare to descend, I’m readying myself to be the best companion for you on your journey into the depths.

 

PS: *deep breath* I am experimenting with writing more and holding less tightly to it … freeing my time from the constraints of perfectionism (which is the antithesis of what being a writer is often — but perhaps more attuned with the energy of a word witch?) Closer to “clean skin” wines … this is a one-and-done and beautifully imperfect. All grammatical and spelling errors are on me and this crazy first-pass effort.

The Ten of Pentacles and Mercury Postcards

I wanted to cultivate a closer relationship with Mercury (and myself) this year and I set out to create a set of postcards that I could write and mail to myself, as kind of markers for how the year unfolded.

Covid in June disrupted a lot of things I had ticking away with clockwork precision and among the things which fell after June were my monthly tarot journal and with it, the Mercury postcards I’d committed to making and sending.

This week, in the Tarot Primer, we’re working with the 10 of Pentacles and the “In Action” part of the download for this week is to write out the aspects of the year that made it possible, with the option to write and send yourself a postcard of celebration.

Maybe it’s something you’d like to try also?

Or maybe on the other side of the festive season, you’d like to reach out and connect with people as one year flows into the other. Postcards are a time efficient way to say hello; I was thinking of you.

Below is a repository of downloadable postcard templates. All you need once you’ve printed off the template is some cardboard, scissors and glue. They take less than five minutes to complete.

Download The Mercury Postcard Repository

 

Grow Your Idea – New Coaching Sessions

Years ago I sat in a Greek Restaurant in West End with a multi-passionate friend who was telling me all about a new idea she had for the salsa studio where she danced. I ate and drank heartily, as much in the sharing of her idea, as the food and wine.

When the night came to a close, I jokingly said my dream job would be to sit and listen to people share their ideas. I’d do it in exchange for dinner.

It lit me up, the notion I could be a first-time sounding board for something new. To support a fledgling idea, in a grassroots way, where just being there and listening, energisesd and shaped the idea.

Where I could see myself asking the right question, at the right time, and something shifted in a powerful way. Or I offered a unique perspective that threw a hidden door wide open and the idea appeared on the other side, transformed, and one step closer to tangible reality.

I especially wanted to witness ideas where I had no background knowledge. They were the ideas that excited me the most and where I felt I could be of greatest assistance, in the very early stages.

This all flashed through my head in the time it took to stand up, gather my stuff and say good-bye to my friend. As I walked off, I filed the idea away as a pipe dream, until last week.

Grow Your Ideas Sessions

On  the 5th Day of Simone Seoul’s Summer Camp and my insomnia-riddled, over-wrought central nervous system finally calmed enough (thank you Jaime Durso) to get excited about something in the playbook of activities.

As I read about the play dates activity, the bright shiny idea I’d never have had the gumption to consider as part of my business, shimmied across my path and sang: me me me!!

You know the endearing but relentless way small children do it.

See, the thing is, I rock the shadows. I’m so fucking good there; as a soul having a human experience that’s my default place of comfort. And I’m exceptional as a word witch shepherding clients through those same dark spaces. But I’ve been summonsed in the last fortnight to honour the light in the same way I do the dark. And to step up, right up, and into it.

What do you create in the starlight and what do you create in the sunlight?

~ Chris-Anne  on The High Priestess (The Muse Tarot)

It’s been something I’ve been sitting with and gently exploring in my own soul work. With the sun frolicking in Leo it’s time to step forward with something sun-drenched for the world.

I am offering ten Grow Your Idea sessions for anyone who’d love to come and talk about a new idea with me for a special introductory price of $33.

I want to hear what is inspiring you.
Calling to you.
That thing that’s been nagging you and no matter what, won’t go away.
Your heart’s yearning.
The spark.
What you promised yourself you’d make time for this year.

 

It can be related to work. It can be related to pleasure. Maybe it’s a side hustle. Maybe it’s a dream. It doesn’t have to be serious. And actually, the less Big and Important it is, perhaps the better?

All ideas start as an energetic spark of something simple before our humanness complicates them.

In a Grow Your Idea session you’ll get 45 minutes with me to chat.

If you want, I can walk you through the compass points of collaboration, joy, heart break and direction to help you know your idea better.

Or we can just let the idea guide the conversation—after all, it is the main event and it’s what I want to hear all about.

For an extra $33 you can have unlimited support via text message to explore your idea further.

And if you’re in the Brisbane area, and you know a brilliant establishment that supports winter al fresco dining, we can honour my original idea of dinner in exchange for idea incubation. Drop me a message via the contact form.

In Sunlight and Starlight.

Jodi xxx

Book a Grow Your Idea Session

*This offer is valid only until the end of Leo Season (22 August)