No place like home

Shining Tribe Tarot, Pollack 2001

I am working from home today, yay! It is one of the few perks of my current day job. One day a week, I don't have to go in to the office. I enjoy working from home. Lots of people say they don't think they could do it, that they would find themselves too distracted by chores around the house and so on, that they like to keep a clear division between their home life and their work life, etc. But I actually like working from home. I get up in the morning, and I can start as early as I like -- which of course means I can finish as early as I like. I have no distractions such as exist at the office. People are less likely to telephone me from the office, so the phone isn't ringing all the time. People aren't walking up to me to ask questions or give me something additional to do. I can actually focus on tasks and steadily work through them. I can have a nice cooked lunch because I can just get up and go back and forth to the kitchen stir and check on things and keep right on working. Then there's no commute at the end of my allotted hours (an official work day is 7.40 hours, but I am on flexi time so as long as the hours work out to 37 per week over a four week period, it's all good.) And that means if I pack up at 3:45, I'm already home. Done! Seriously, I wish I could work from home every day. Only not on the stuff I currently work on -- on something else. :)

Today's card from Shining Tribe Tarot is a work card. In RWS, it is the 3 of Pentacles, and shows a craftsman working on a cathedral detail while a monk and a patron watch and discuss. I often interpret it to mean craftsmanship, skill, artistry, and sometimes team working. In an actual reading I have interpreted it as taking pride in skills and also as being oversupervised. In looking at Rachel Pollack's 3 of Stones, I don't really see these meanings. I've looked at it for a few minutes now and can't quite a fix on what she's going for. Taking it from the top, a blue circle on the left, a yellow circle on the right.  Could they be the moon and sun? Then a downward pointing triangle hovers over a low range of pointy hills. The triangle points toward a cave door in which a figure stands. On top of the triangle is a shining people glyph. A striped snake descends the left side of the triangle. Multi-colored birds fly up the right side. In the middle of the triangle, a turtle clims up toward three colored spirals connected by wavy lines.

There is a sense of motion in the image, as the snake moves down and the birds fly up, and the turtle moves up. When you stare at it long enough, it begins to look rather like a machine. Perhaps it is a sort of machine cranking out life. So there is a sense of creating here. The shining people glyph seems very happy up there. He's the master mechanic, perhaps. I can begin to see a relationship to the RWS (I'm not surprised, as Pollack is a great fan of RWS and has written about it extensively). Let's look at the book:

triangle = creative power
snake = energy of imagination
birds = realisation, the joy of realisation
rondels = life, death and mystery, joined

So it is a sort of machine of creation. The energy of the imagination and will descends to the meditator in the cave (the 6 hills represent the 6 of the Lovers card, according to Pollack) and then specific ideas emerge.

'We believe that to succeed we must put all our energy and attention - indeed our whole lives - into our goals,' Pollack writes. 'People who practice meditation, or the detached action of tai chi, often discover they can accomplish more, and at a higher level, when they keep a calm center.'

Perhaps this is why I enjoy working from home. I am certainly calmer and more focused here.