seven of discs: feast or famine?
This card popped up for me the other day when I was cogitating on what project I should focus on with the new year. Being that it was in the Outcome position, it threw me for a bit of a loop as I’m struggling to figure out what it represents for me.
In my Sun & Moon deck, the card shows a woman standing in the sand, wearing a knee-length maroon dress and drawing ever-widening circles in the sand around her feet with a two-pronged stick. She holds the stick in her right hand and her left is tucked between her knees to support her weight. There’s absolutely nothing else in this card. The card’s keyword is “failure”. The LWB that came with the deck describes this card as follows:
Fear of failure. Limited productivity and performance. You need to patiently evaluate the process and persevere in order for something to develop. Let go of fear of failure.
The card in the Universal Waite Tarot deck shows a man standing in his garden, leaning on a hoe with its blade sunk into rich, well-tended soil, and staring at seven discs growing on the lush foliage he’s worked so hard to grow. The LWB states
…these are exceedingly contradictory, in the main, it is a card of money, business, barter — but one reading gives altercation, quarrel, and another innocence, ingenuity, purgation. Reversed meaning: anxiety about money.
Both my Tarot of the Magical Forest and Housewives Tarot decks depict similar RWS images and meanings. The TMF card is defined as representing “active work reaps satisfaction“, while the HT card – showing a perfectly coiffed woman carrying a basket piled with fresh cut flowers in her right hand and a green hose in the left — suggests that this card is about
…patience, investments, and growth. You’ve planted the seeds of success and your investments are firmly rooted in the soil of sensibility. The only thing left to do is wait…
Patience is a Virtue
Perhaps the lesson I should take from these, or how to combine them for an overall meaning of this card, is that patience is a virtue.
I abhor waiting. I’m the queen of impulse decisions, impulse buys, gotta have it now, me me me. I’m blessed to be able to indulge most of my cravings (except for that Porsche Cayenne… and I’ll just have to start playing the lottery if I ever want to do anything about that one).
Work hard. Tend to your garden. I know too well what happens in May when I don’t water, don’t weed, and in general ignore my vegetable garden. When I do finally get out there, it takes half my day to get everything back in shape. If I’d just puttered around for thirty minutes every couple of days after work, it wouldn’t be nearly the undertaking it always ends up being.
I should never shy away from “elbow grease,” as mom calls it. It’s so easy to throw in the towel on something, or give it up… but I also need to know when it’s okay to do just that.
The woman drawing circles in the sand around her feet? Maybe she’s decided to keep drawing and drawing and scratching and carving circles until something comes to her: an idea is jostled loose, or that magical tree bearing golden discs sprouts from the bare ground.
What does this card mean to you?