Tarot Card of the Week: The Eight of Pentacles

This week the cards drew the Eight of Pentacles.

We are six days past the New Moon that asked for small daily practice, and Saturday morning, 19 September, brings the First Quarter, the point in the cycle where a new thing gets hard.

The deck has answered with the card of doing the work anyway.

Once again the chart and the cards are speaking the same language.

Look at the image.

A craftsman sits on a plain wooden bench. He has a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other, and he is carving a pentacle. Six finished ones already hang on the post beside him. One more lies on the ground at his feet.

Behind him, off in the distance, there is a town.

That picture holds most of what anybody needs to know about mastery.

Start with the six on the post. He did not make one good pentacle. He made six, and each one taught him something the one before it could not.

That is how every skill is actually built, by repetition that looks boring from the outside.

Now look at the one on the ground. He is not sitting there admiring his finished work. He has put it down and started the next.

And look where he is facing. His back is to the town.

The recognition is out there, and it will come, but nobody can do the work and watch for applause at the same time.

So he has chosen the bench.

Here is the part I think people miss with this card.

The Eight of Pentacles is unglamorous, and that is the whole point of it. It is the card of the ordinary middle, the stretch after the excitement of starting and before the satisfaction of finishing.

That is exactly where Saturday’s quarter moon is going to find most of us.

So the practice for this week.

Pick the thing you started, and do one more repetition of it. Just the next one, and it does not have to be your best.

Do not check whether anybody noticed. Do not stand back and evaluate.

Sit on the bench and make the seventh pentacle.

No single one of them makes you a craftsman.

The pile does.

What are you on the seventh of right now?

There is more teaching like this in The Library, and every daily post is in Daily Posts. If you would like guidance on your own path, see Readings.