This week’s theme is RESILIENCE represented best by the Nine of Wands.
Each week I’ll explore a theme in depth.
🎧 Feel free to grab your deck and hit play above if you’d just like to look at the card and listen.
We’ll explore this theme via Monday’s pick-a-card reading, lessons from the mini homestead, themed spreads, essays, and a deep dive into the card associated with the theme.
This week we’ve covered:
-How to Access Resilience When You Need it Most?
-A Powerful Two-Card Resilience Pick-a-Card
-Check out other cards I’ve covered here.
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The Nine of Wands & Resilience
This card signifies resilience, perseverance, and overcoming obstacles. It is the moment when we can taste completion or attainment, but we’re not quite there yet.
It may also represent our boundaries or lack therof.
In the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith depiction, the Nine of Wands shows eight wands standing straight up and down, as if stuck in the ground. The sky is blue and there are rolling hills in the distance.
The ninth wand is held by a strong man looking to his right, a tired and concerned look on his face. His bandaged head suggests the challenges he has endured to make it this far.
To me, he grabs the ninth wand as if he’s standing his ground in a way that is part exhaustion and part pride. He has worked hard for all of those wands behind him and isn’t going to move easily.
Nines represent the imminent end to a long journey but acknowledges that there are still steps left to take.
The question is: how will you proceed?
This cards recognizes a time when we’re ready just to throw in the towel and give up, but the goal is so close! The Picatrix’s wisdom says that this card brings with it “fear, lamentations, grief, sadness, misery, and troubles.”*
The darker emotions that the Picatrix associates with this card mirror the weariness etched on the man’s face and the defensive posture he takes.
So, how can we notice these darker emotions yet move forward to finish what we’ve been aiming for?
This is the essence of resilience.
I’ve noticed for myself that proper boundaries enhance my own level of resilience, and weak or poorly communicated boundaries make things feel a little uneasy, similar to the expression on the man’s face.
“While a proper boundary should give us a break from the need to always stand guard, a porous one keeps us incessantly scanning the horizon for incoming threats.” -Jessica Dore
This might be a good time to reassess boundaries, as it’s likely that they will help or hinder the advancement towards finality that the nine so clearly seeks.
Wands are associated with the element of fire.
When we look at the wands as part of our own human experience, this is what I like to call our life force, the stuff that pushes us to create, achieve, pursue love, and live our lives.
When this energy is stifled or blocked we tend to feel low, unmotivated, and drawn toward procrastination. The nine offers a choice: stand your ground or seek an alternative way.
It’s okay to ask for help.
In this nine, we find the subject taking a defensive rather than offensive position. In life, this can feel exhausting. It may also nurture feelings of suspicion, mistrust, or perhaps even paranoia.
I believe there is a deep call from this card to learn to trust. The seeker in this position is striving for control, even though in most cases in life, control is mostly an illusion.
If the seeker continues down the road of defending, fearing, not enforcing boundaries, and not softening to surrender, they might be stuck at “nine” for a very long time.
There is a portal near, (as I imagine it, to the man’s left if he’d just turn his head the other way), one that offers a way to see it through to the end. One that says, “You don’t have to do it all alone.” But based on the sequence, that’s not a lesson this man is ready to hear.
There is also medicine here for those of us caught in a time of grasping. Clinging to our belongings, our partners, our habits. Guarding our “things” for fear they might be taken from us at any moment.
That is a long and tiring road, as the Ten of Wands will show us.
Resilience is not just about holding on but knowing when to let go. To finish the journey, we must loosen our grip, trust the process, and make room for help and support.
As an elder of mine once said, “You can’t put a trailer hitch on a hearse.”
*From Tarot Deciphered by T. Susan Chang | M.M. Meleen
PS: When you’re ready, here’s some other stuff you might like:
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