By Sarah Taylor
“Completion,” “Happiness,” and “The Star.”
A threshold has been crossed permanently and honoured as such. Now you have an opportunity to focus on the new experience that you have crossed into, which may feel so different as to be at first unrecognisable.
Like all the Fours, the Four of Wands stands as a marker on a particular part of your journey. The Fours are pauses. Last week, there was the Four of Swords, which refers to time out that is prescribed, with the admonition that if it’s not taken now, it might be enforced more strongly later. Here, the Four of Wands is also a pause before another threshold — a stepping into an agreement that has a sense of finality to it.
Often, the Four of Wands will indicate marriage or some kind of commitment ceremony. Here is the agreement; from here, life moves forward, but somehow differently. If there is no marriage, it is the acknowledgement that one phase has passed, and you are contemplating the next step into a new paradigm. The position in this week’s reading refers to what has just happened, and which has a strong bearing on the present: the Nine of Cups.
I love the Nine of Cups, and yet it also has the tendency to frustrate me a little: it is light and wondrous, and whimsical. How, then, to put that whimsy to practical use in a world that can often be anything but light and wondrous? Perhaps it is to take to heart (Cups being associated with our emotions) that you are operating in an environment that you have come to view in a particular way — stolid, intractable, heavy — yet maybe it is you who has become somewhat stolid, intractable and heavy in a world that is waiting for you to lighten up a little. Or to lighten up a lot!