NitN 44 -Three of Pentacles (Madison C Finds Hope Amidst Patriarchy and Alienation)
After drawing the Three of Pentacles, our conversation flows from what it’s like to be a woman online, to the invaluable mental health asset provided by nearby meatspace friends, to a few other topics Madison C knows well and Geoff knows hardly at all. Hah!
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Intro
In the post-corona era’s cashless, inflation-stricken economy, pennies seem slated for irrelevance.
It’s sad, and not just because it reminds me I’m getting older. I used to get a buoyant little lift from scattering any pennies I got as change face-up near random parked cars.
Why? Because when I was a kid being dragged to grocery stores, a memorable solace was finding coins in the parking lot to add to my collection. I’d smilingly recite the rhyme: “Find a penny? Pick it up! All that day you’ll have good luck!”
As an adult who can afford it, I choose to deliberately seed the good luck of strangers’ children.
I’d even say I can’t afford not to, although some struck with particularly vicious scarcity mindsets might be thinking, “But a penny saved is a penny earned!”
A penny saved is a weight atop my fridge.
Most people used to have a spare change jar somewhere in their house. More than a couple times, in dire straits and jonesing for a smoke, I tried to pay for a pack of American Spirits by busting into my own jar. Each time, as I counted the coins out on the counter, I endured the long suffering sighs and rolled eyes of the clerk. The impatient, back-and-forth weight-shifting of the people in line. It sucks.
Another option is kicking them down to my expensive area’s plentiful homeless… As if that could ever buy relief from the guilt I feel from playing a part in a machine that crunches lives in its impersonal, callous cogs.
But again, these small gestures of generosity might be essential to my well-being, whether or not they assuage guilt and whether or not I’m jeopardizing my own financial security.
In every tradition of which I am aware, charity is considered a virtue. In western occultism in particular, generosity is essential because reciprocity is considered a fundamental law of the universe.
You have to give in order to receive.
My last penny metaphor relies on those “take-a-penny, leave-a-penny” trays you sometimes see at liquor stores. They promise you can trust the universe to supply you with pennies when you need it to, provided other people adopt the same attitude.
That attitude can be called an abundance mindset: a disposition of openness to the Universe’s tendency to helpfully swoop in. Granted, it’s a view that can be reduced to absurdism and delusion by both pessimistic skeptics and well-intentioned practitioners alike.
Findings around confirmation bias, however, tell us we’ll only see what we look for, so why not decide what to look for with conscious intention? Won’t that lead to a more pleasant life with fewer missed opportunities?
The universe seems—and maybe is—as generous as you are.
