Reverse Princess of Pentacles

No crystal ball. Just an ordinary office and hidden in the back of a drawer somewhere. Between appointments, and making sure the office door is closed, he pulls a single card from the shuffled deck. “Is it just confirmation bais?” he wonders, as he reads about a possible loss of funds and getting stuck in laziness. After a morning of being splashed with the ice cold water of his accounts, and talking himself into a more energetic state, it’s a good question.

The card is also about the importance of the creativity and play that should follow hard work. “What am I doing now?” he asks, “Why did I get out the deck? To look for inspiration for creative writing.”

in a shady corner
a jungle of bright comfrey
and the sound of bees

Richard Rohr said that God loves things by becoming them. The Bodhisattva Gadgadasvara vows to appear as whatever is needed to enlighten us. In Shintoism they believe that after one hundred years human made objects gain a spirit. 

hazy moon
an owl calls into the night
another replies

The Great Exceeding

Having received hexagram 28 from the I-Ching


a small lace spider
the shovel held very still
in my callused hand

I rifle through the second hand shirts in Oxfam. I am waiting for a spark of joy, and the right size. A white shirt covered in flecks of pale pink and deep magenta catches my eye. In the dressing room I hold in my stomach for a moment, as I look into the mirror. Exhaling, my gut hanging over my trouser belt, I smile at my reflection. I like the look of the guy smiling back at me.

The six spot burnet caterpillar has black leopard spots. The cocoon is a pale yellow hammock hung from a stork of grass. The black wings of the moth are speckled with colour and six big red spots.

Another layer of doing other people's work drops away.

Having received an invitation to go outdoors, and enter into relationship with something other than human

I wander through the garden imagining myself into conversation with the grass, the flowers, the just coming into bud trees. Who will speak to me?

Between two fallow vegetable plots there is a stack of bricks. Here, my intuition says, or the bricks do, this is the place for relationship.

I sit on a low wall, and give my attention to the bricks. There are a dozen or so, not neatly stacked but more or less made into something square. A bramble curls across the top of the pile, is whipped by strong winds. The bricks don’t move.

A melancholy comes over me. The bricks were red clay in the earth and have been dug, and formed, and fired, and carried here, and stacked up. No one asked the clay what it wanted, or the bricks. I have some sympathy for things moved and made by others.

The strong wind nearly takes my hat. Branches clatter against one another in the high hedge at the gardens edge. The bricks don’t move. They are beautiful in the bright sunlight.