Looking at the 6 of Pentacles with its abundant and autumnal imagery, I was struck by the fact that one prevailing attitude when I was a child was that there was never enough.  Looking at the apple trees blessing us with an abundance of fruit, I realized we didn’t baskets let alone trees.  We were often forced to move from an apartment because we were unable to pay rent.  I remember the most humiliating experiences were when I was sent grocery shopping and didn’t have the cash to pay for everything at the register.  For an adult that may be embarrassing.  For a 10 year old child it was excruciatingly, piercingly painful.  I still remember the humiliation of having to select items to return while the other folks on line stared, grumbled and glared.  I always swore I would never find myself in that situation again.  And yet in many ways, here I am.

It’s not about being unwilling to share or being stingy, it’s about feeling that I just don’t have it.  I would love to be able to help out others but that’s just not possible right now.  I also find it difficult to ask for help from others.  Being on the receiving end of charity stirs up those old emotions and leaves me feeling like a beggar.

I think the Queen of Swords is who I became as a result of some of these childhood experiences.  She is the intellectual, rather unemotional shell with which I surrounded myself.  She may not be the true me at my deepest core but she is the persona I adopt to adapt to that situation.  What makes me laugh is that the smirk on her face tells me she knows this.  She knows me better than I do.  This is also the part of me that forces me to face the truth; who cuts away the bullshit.

The combination of these two cards tells me that my childhood poverty and my preferred method of dealing with the world (intellectualization, rationalization, etc.) have combined to convince me that I don’t care about money.  I don’t need money.  It’s know important to me.  In reality it is very important to me.  Not that I need a lot of money but I need to feel secure and grounded.  My childhood had some very gypsy-like moments as we were forced to move around because we couldn’t afford the rent in our apartment.  As a result I often felt as though I lived on a fault-line.  You never knew when things was going to be some upheaval.

I think the Queen of Swords is also letting me know that I need to get to the truth of how I want my relationship with money to be.  I need to be honest with myself and realistic about how much money I need, what I’m willing to do to earn money and how much influence I want it to have in my life.