FOUR OF WANDS
Like all the Fours, the Four of Wands represents a natural pause. It’s a moment to breathe, to reflect, and appreciate your efforts thus far. Let’s face it - starting a new project or journey takes a lot of work and energy. It’s relatively easy to come up with new ideas and passing inspiration, but actually finding the motivation to put them into action is a feat in and of itself.
With the Wands in particular, the journey that we go on is largely self-driven. It’s not just taking advantage of opportunities that exist in the material world, it’s conjuring something up out of thin air, creating a vision where there wasn’t one before. That takes effort. And then turning that vision into something tangible? Exhausting. Exhilarating. Intimidating.
So once you’ve reached the point where you’ve taken those first steps, that plateau of creation, not only do you need to catch your breath, but you need to celebrate. You need to recharge those energetic and creative batteries by reminding yourself that though the road ahead might be long, it is not insurmountable because you’ve already crossed the first hurdle. Even taking that first step is a victory.
For this reason, in many more traditional decks the Four of Wands is portrayed as a wedding bower. Weddings are symbolic pauses in a relationship that simultaneously represent a beginning, a middle, and an end - the beginning of a new phase of intimacy, the middle of an existing relationship, and the ending of the “dating” cycle. There is both reverence for what led to this moment, anticipation for the future stretching out before the couple, and most importantly a chance to stop and take it all in, to celebrate the moment and its contradictions, and to throw a freaking party.
This is the energy that we should bring to all our endeavors. The way we should cherish our personal creative journeys, not by seeing them as a long slog from nothingness to success but a series of stages that we must cycle through as we move ever forward, and a reminder that we should cherish the process of doing so because it is beyond precious and the essence of being alive. It’s difficult to do that when you’re in the thick of it, so the Four appears now and again to remind us - stop. Breathe. Applaud yourself for all that you have achieved so far and all of your future potential. And then keep going.
Artist’s Interpretation by @bngtanctouts
Do you remember a time in your life when you knew that there was still a long way to your goal but you stopped to rest and enjoy all you had achieved? When Anna and I talked about the four I thought to myself that maybe that's what our boys felt when they won their first daesang! Imagine all the excitement? All the happiness? The overwhelming realization of all that was achieved? This prize was valuable not only for the musical achievement it implies but also because it was their first big wake up call on how big they were becoming. I just want to hug them and let them know everything is worth it! Like they say: You and I, we will win in the end. We will win so naturally that no one will see it coming.
