Our scene is a golden afternoon, bathed in warm sunlight. Our heroine’s golden robe glows. Fat red grapes hang ripe all over her fertile vineyard.
She matches the King of Pentacles: both mature, wise about their self-made professional lives, good in their skins, calm about their relationships with the world, and both ultimately responsible to no one but themselves. However, although her values, her drives, and the results she ultimately achieves harmonise with his, she acts as his polar opposite. His masculine energy is soldierly, linear, stone and armor as his foundation, building on what has already happened and is known, and going out into the world, thrusting himself forward. Her feminine energy, while equally active and equally successful, draws the world in to her; she is magnetic, staying in her vineyard and pulling what she wants in to her own center, and she operates more through questioning and following the organic growth of a process, like her grape vines.
The King of Pentacles’ vineyard is a hard-earned retreat from all his work. The mistress of the Nine of Pentacles vineyard uses hers as the hub of operations. Although she works just as much as the King, she does not put her effort into pushing out into the world herself. Rather she strategically trains her falcon to hunt for her, and bring his results back to her. Less out-there grind, more in-here cleverness.
What would your business, your material world, your lower-case-”r” relationships look like if you acted like Mistress Nine of Pentacles? Can you figure out what questions you need to ask yourself, in order to train an algorithm to hunt in the world for you and bring back useful results? Or to figure out what kind of resume you want to send to whom, or what kind of client you want to attract for what service? Can you send out strategic business feelers that act as your agents and bring their results home to you?
If you were Mistress Nine of Pentacles, what would your falcon be? How would you train it? What would you want it to hunt for? And once it brought home its loot, what would you do with it?
How would your business / creative venture be, if the slow, patient, everyday work that you did to create your vineyard was not about slogging but instead about patiently developing the utility of unique-to-you tools that would do the work for you?
What would that look like for you? What kind of “tool” would you invent to help your current situation?
Another way to tell the difference between the Nine of Pentacles and the King is that the kings and queens represent fully-fledged forms of being. The fully mature state of a character. (They’re also about lifelong constants; innate qualities separate from circumstance, because as we grow up we become more ourselves.) Number cards are more about circumstance, steps in the journey. So, in this card, unlike the settled solidity of the King, still has that forward drive; less set-in-stone, more about growing things, still evolving, still that delicious ache of “not quite there yet” drawing us ever forward….
If you’re having a Mistress Nine of Pentacles Moment, it’s also a chance to enjoy how far you’ve come. You’ve already built up a fat portfolio of expertise, experience, resources, and connections. You have valuable and powerful stuff to play with at this point in your journey, even if sometimes you forget that. What do you want to do with the mature and uniquely cultivated resources available specifically to you?
Because while Mistress is serene like the King, unlike him she is busy doing stuff. She’s at work and she likes it that way, because by now she knows how to incorporate as much stillness and ease as possible into her playwork. She’s sending out tools and drawing the world in, and this is how she has accrued her own rich bounty of experiences, connections, and knowledge.
If you were she, what would your next move be? You’re enjoying the active peace of being in the flow, doing that thing you do, that is So You, and the world is playing ball with you. You’re in the Zone.
What are you going to do now, Mistress Nine of Pentacles?