It’s All I Have
On the Four of Pentacles we see a seated person holding tightly to four large coins, with a facial expression that says, “Don’t even think about trying to take these away from me.” So it’s an easy read that this person is closed off and miserly. The indication is this person is clinging to material possessions represented by the pentacles, or he is blocked at the crown, heart and root chakras, so pretty much closed off to every other thing in this world and the next. Misanthropic much?
But as synchronicity would have it, I have recently had opportunity to widen my perspective on this card and see that, while standing behind everything I said in the first paragraph, there is more to this story. The person on this card is actually quite vulnerable. The attitude suggests otherwise, but look at the environment. The scene is set outside of a large town or city, and this person is seated on a stone bench, or perhaps just a block, along what looks like a road. By that description we can start to see that maybe he has fallen on hard times. Let’s remember that we are only one card away from the Five of Pentacles, a card in which people feel so hopeless they cannot even see the help that is available to them.
Judging by the clothes, this person is used to the finer things in life, even if they are looking a bit ragged. So why is he sitting outside like a bag person? Surely if he had a home he would be keeping his coins there and not clutching them on the street where he is a sitting target for a gang mugging. Maybe he is recently homeless and maybe this is all he has left. We could interpret this to mean that perhaps his world has changed so much, he is grasping the few remaining things that remind him of the way things used to be when he was in his prime and life was good (for him anyway).
The fact is, change is one of the few things you can count on—it will happen and you won’t escape it, one way or another. The person on the Four of Cups seems to be trying to stop it, but I hope we all know that effort will do him no good. You can roll with the changes or you can get rolled by them. If this person doesn’t find another way to deal with the change he’s trying to avoid, then we will no doubt see him in the next card.
Reiki Flow 