We ended the monthly forecast for July with everyones favorite agricultural-themed tarot card: The Seven of Pentacles. It features a person tending to their garden, resting their chin on their hoe as they gaze at a tangle of vines sprouting golden pentacles. Lovely stuff, but certainly not the scene that greets me when I walk into my backyard to water my garden.
I suspect that many of you may be in a similar position - this summer has been a lot to cope with. An enduing pandemic, political turmoil (and that’s putting it lightly), and all the other challenges of a full life… it’s a lot. And so, to put it bluntly, my garden has gone to shit.
We have an attempt at a “three sisters” planting gone wrong. Beanstalks teetering here and there, crushing scraggly corn. The zucchini? It didn't take. Magenta puffs peek out from the parched ground here and there - amaranth that self seeded from last year - while yellow dragon’s egg cucumbers valiantly fruit in the back bed, my single successful planting. I’m not even sure what’s happening with the Japanese winged beans I “planted for fun.”
Some backstory: A facet of the pandemic/existential/life stress I’ve been dealing with is a flare-up of hand eczema. Even with gloves and steroid creams, I can’t get my hands wet or dirty without setting off a new cycle of unsightly itchiness. That means no digging, no watering, no weeding, no harvesting without gloves, and even then I have to be fast.
But still? My garden’s growing. It’s strange, yes. Most definitely not what I’d envisioned or wanted. I go out every morning with my son to water it, the least I can do in the sultry-hot North Carolina weather. We pick beans, look at the bugs that make their homes in the leaves, wonder whether those winged beans will appear and make a comeback.
All this makes me think about the Seven of Pentacles. That maybe our bounty this summer is more about how we’ve tended to ourselves, known our limits, and let some things go wild because we had to. And that’s the think about tarot - everything in it is a symbol. Those pentacles don’t have to be actual vegetables or even actual achievements; they can also be decisions we make so that parts of ourselves can grown despite whatever difficulty we’re navigating.
Wow, this could not have been more timely… thank you :-)