Card Cartography: Day 2
This week (the week of June 23, the first full week of summer, with all the ripeness and flourishing promise that summer brings), I’m conducting an experiment (here’s how it came to be). Each weekday, I will:
pull a tarot card, focusing on the question How shall I work today?
see how that card guides me throughout the day
write a short blog post (30 minutes only, exactly 500 words) about how it felt
single out my favorite word from that blog post at the end
OK, 500 words for Day 2 starting below the line.
10 of Pentacles
the culminating card of the journey from ace to 10 for the pentacles (suit of earth & worldly goods)
abundance will come in the long term, leaving a legacy behind
I appreciated the suggestion of long-term abundance today, and while it wasn’t a day all about financially-focused abundance (the pentacles are often associated with material goods and wealth), it was a day that felt saturated and satisfying.
First off, the heat was saturating. The thermometer read 110º F at one point, and it was humid as the inside of a ziploc bagged wet bathing suit left in the sun.
I hosted a co-working hour for CARE in the morning, working downstairs with air conditioning and shade in my favor. Abundance and legacy felt like nice guides to think about this community I grow and tend.
The final call of Reimagining Leadership (which I mentioned previously) is tomorrow, which means I’ve spent a chunk of the day reflecting and writing about how I view leadership after focusing on it for the past few months. I’m sure I’ll be writing more about that in future, but overall, I’m currently seeing leadership as being a node in a network.
Good leaders need to
listen with openness to experiences beyond their own
discern which solutions may work for a given situation
not always provide the answer themselves
move ahead with clarity and conviction along their chosen path
The kind of leader I want to be is a connector: of people, ideas, opportunities, genres, spaces.
I’ve picked the mycorrhizal network as an image of leadership to hold to. Mycorrhiza are the relationships between fungi and photosynthesizing plants, that let them exchange nutrients, live symbiotically, and come to each other’s aid in the face of drought, predators, and unexpected changes. The mycorrhiza aren’t the showy, visible part of the growth. They’re the connections that allow the growth to happen in the first place.
That’s a kind of legacy and abundance I’m happy to leave behind.
I took care of some errands that have piled up: picking up a goodie from the local Buy Nothing group, mailing a birthday present to my brother, buying some groceries, returning an unneeded good.
I’m about to be a featured subscriber in the newsletter of one of my favorite thinkers (he highlights subscribers periodically), and in sending him some photos for that post, I felt a great appreciation for the abundance of earthly things that is my collection of eclectic tchotchkes currently on my shelves.
The heat sapped my will to keep going at that point, and I came back to the air conditioned indoors to take a small nap and write this.
I couldn’t help but feel earthly and heavy in all the heat, which was very pentacle-like. If a day like this—balanced between earthly connections like family care-taking and business effort and cycling objects from one hand to the other without being thrown away—is a marker of the kind of legacy I’ll leave, I’m not mad at it.
Favorite word of this post: tchotchkes
