Five of Coins

This card classically portrays scenes of penury and misery, often with mendicants groveling out in the cold. While care should be taken to immediately tend to any material concerns you may have been neglecting, turning over the Five of Coins doesn't automatically consign you to the poorhouse. It's likely, however, that certain areas in your life are cut off from the attention and support they desperately require in order to function smoothly, and if left unattended the penalties will be severe. You grow desperate for help, but others may not even notice how dire your straits really are. Imagine yourself functioning inside like a great clockwork, five large gears left untended, grinding against each other without any lubrication: eventually the friction causes them to wear each other out, and before you know it you're the kind of clock that's only right twice a day.

Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz have captured this strange sense of isolation and unease in their wonderfully detailed snow-globe scenes, in which tiny carved figures roam frigid terrain encountering one misfortune after another. Some of these globes contain more optimistic impossibilities than others, but even under the best circumstances, there is an all-too-real physical barrier that shuts us out as participants in the scene, forcing us to observe passively as a tiny figure in another world struggles to comprehend their isolation, perhaps quite aware that the warmth and safety they long for isn't even possible, and too small to crack the glass that seems incredibly delicate in our own huge hands.

Whether these fears are all in our heads doesn't matter; they still threaten to strangle our hopes or drive us off the path that leads to security. However, there's solace to be found built into in the very natural order of things. In our world, winter inevitably turns to spring, relentless summer cools into autumn. Plain endurance may not seem like much of a strategy for conquering hardship, but if you remain permeable to changes, you may find that the season changes faster than you ever dared hope. [Via]