I've been drawing today's card a lot lately (twice this week!) - and it has me kind of loving the Wildwood Tarot's take on the three of pentacles:
3 of Stones
A traditional take on this card would have us thinking about work - specifically collective work, work that joins you to your community or is a harmonizing effort of all the parts of yourself. But I think that emphasis tends to get redirected in our cultural focus on work as linear, directed, goal-oriented, productive, and commodified - our thinking that work is about what you produce, and its value, and how that defines your value. This particularly trips us up, I think, when we feel the lack of creativity in our lives. I often hear people say "I'm just not creative," "I miss being creative," I need to be more creative," and they tend to be talking about making things. Making artistic things, maybe, but making things nonetheless. Producing.
The 3 of Stones offers a different view: work as process. Work as connection to being. Work as being grounded. Work as being in the flow - the flow of the earth, the flow of intuition, the flow of inspiration. The flow that roots in its own place - and gives energy back to its own place, becomes part of the ecosystem. The flow that communes with what cannot be seen. The 3 of Stones reminds us that all of these process are themselves creative, and part of what it means to be creative.
I love that this card challenges us to just get into our flow, whatever that looks like today - whether giving or receiving, connecting to nature, dancing with intuition and ideas, taking care of our physical needs, meditating, connecting to source, drawing strength or inspiration up from our roots - and say: "I'm being creative."
Because a dimension of "work" is recognizing or attending to the ways energy flows through us, connecting us in partnership with the living and more-than-human world around us. Our deep connectivity is a font of creativity. How does your work change when you send roots down into this place? What dimensions of creativity open up to you when you see this image?
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Kaeti is a therapist, teacher, and dreamer based in Long Beach, California. All of her work (and play!) is interested in dismantling intersections of oppression and breathing magic and radical healing into all the daily corners of her life, into all the spaces of community she helps weave.