monday, sixteen august: five of pentacles
The first card I drew today looked very sad--it's a drooping rose dropping petals--and I thought, no, don't want that. So I put it back and drew another, the Mother of Pentacles. A devoted and patient mother, maybe a little too wrapped up in her children. But I went back and looked at the original card, the drooping flower, it's the Five of Pentacles and the guidebook says it represents illness and sadness, but mostly unproductive anxiety. Worry that takes over and becomes more of a problem than the thing you're worrying about. These two cards in combination do a pretty decent job of describing what it felt like travelling with a young child in the late summer of 2021, so yeah, I'll take it.
In any event, being back from a trip is disorienting in a different way. We have to unpack the suitcases but we've also started packing up the apartment for the move, so it's all chaos and obstacle courses in the apartment, more than usual. We have no food in the house--Matt had suggested that we plan for a grocery delivery for the morning after we got back, which would have been smart, but I was so convinced that something would go wrong with our flight home, delays or cancellations or whatever. In the end, our flight home was exactly on time, no schedule dramas, etc. (This is a marked difference from our flight out last weekend, though, which was cancelled three hours before it was supposed to depart. That was a hell of a schedule drama.)
It's hard getting back in the flow, but we'll figure it out.