Let’s stitch together our resources
so that we may lessen the load and sit in shared ease with one another more often
The spider’s web is web of protection around art-making, around play, and around intentional community. It is an offering for spaciousness from social media. This work is meant to bring hope back into creation. This work allows me to take time with my daily practice, with myself, and with my communities that feels easeful in my body. I hope that these offerings will bring you more ease and consideration in your own body.
Y’all are welcome to share this offering with your communities. I just ask that you credit my work. You can find me here, on my IG @meredithannewhite, and my website. Thank you so much.
The 10 of pentacles is a card that keeps coming up, and Brandon pulled this same card as my card for the year. It’s hard to believe that’s what wants to come through with the external realities that face the collective right now. We’re watching a power-hungry world built on hierarchy and greed completely dismantle. We’re of witness to “world leaders” expend resources as tools for further division, when in reality many of those resources could be put back into the hands of the people that are the most impacted by the ongoing conflicts to begin with.
The 10 of pentacles highlights a deeper understanding of resources. Pentacles are related to the element of Earth. The pentacles on the card may seem financially auspicious, and to a degree they are. These resources can involve material objects like money and clothes and possessions. However, the pentacle represents far more than money in my book. It’s become a symbol of what actually categorizes something as a resource. Many of these resources are slowly built, like planting a seed and waiting for the land and rain and sky to nourish it to harvest. It brings to light that this is not just a card of my own resources. This is a card representative of community where shared resources fill the hands and pockets of the many.
Rider-Waite Smith tarot deck illustration of the 10 of pentacles.
I’ve previously prided myself on individualism. I’ve prided myself on standing out from the crowd. I’ve prided myself on working hard to acquire every single resource I thought I could need and somewhat hoarded things that are now irrelevant to my practice. Thinking that this, this signified stability and wealth. And now? Now I don’t know that I believe that at all. These last few years have challenged me to take off my rose-colored glasses and reorient myself around entirely new belief systems.
I ran into my friend Melissa recently IRL after having connected digitally via quilting and Marlee and grief work. We were able to delve further into how the practice of sewing and mending and quilting is absolutely grief work; it’s ancestral; it forces us to remove the label of “my work” in exchange for “work that is coming through us.” It’s absolutely amazing that our practices are finding similar threads to tug at both internally and externally.
It reminds me that this practice is coming through my body, and yet it is so much more than me. It’s a compilation of all of the sewers and quilters and menders before me. It’s guided by my ancestors and my grandmother who passed and the birds outside my window as I sit down at my sewing table each day. This practice is guided by the podcasts I listen to, the words I read, and the activists that have lead these discussions long before I was born into this lifetime. It is able to take root as I deepen my relationship with the land that I live on and the efforts of community-work around me that I’m able to learn from. It is, and will forever be, so much bigger than me.
How might we redefine what our collective abundance looks like?
The 10 of pentacles reminds me that the intricate colors and patterns on the card are woven together from everyone’s stories around them. Maybe the card signifies a world built on stitching communities with quilts and plants and homemade meals and hand salves. Maybe this card allows us to see the evolution of learned wisdom, of playful banter, and everything in between that takes the many to achieve.
I want this to be my world.
This is a world built on knowing that just because my partner is off on tour doesn’t mean that I have to rely solely on myself for food and company and shared space. If I didn’t have fabric for my next sweater or a dinner-time plan in place, what might it feel like to reach out to a friend and see if they had some to share? What would it feel like to leave my front door open when the breeze teases me with its warmth of spring? That way I can hear when my housemate Paul is outside working on the herb beds. I can thank my mail woman as she drops off my letters. I can share my newly sprouted seeds with my neighbor Deb as she checks on her hives and asks for a hand.
The 10 of pentacles reminds me that the card I’m pulling isn’t just about me. It’s for all of us. I am continually reminded that the individual mindset only gets us so far. This practice takes my full presence and the every day breakdown of my own scarcity. I don’t want to live in a constant state of fear that if I let something go, it will never return. I want to live in a space of knowing that if I let something go, it means something new and unfamiliar and different is trying to come through as an alternative. And just because that something doesn’t feel like the previous something of before, it doesn’t mean that it won’t entirely break me open with awe and wonder and expansion.
I released my partner for tour with the full moon, as I sat back with a full bleed. It broke me open, and yet it brings me so much joy. It allows us both to float into this next season with a bunch of gratitude for what we’ve built together. I’m really proud of that. So when I become unwavering, I’ve got a house full of our shared belongings and CDs and books and quilts and an immeasurable amount of coffee mugs to remind me that I am not alone at all. I am completely surrounded by intentional belongings and creations from the people in my life that show up for me, and I for them.
Perhaps this card has come to mean for me that relationship is the key to unlock all of the other resources we seem to be missing. It means that I devote myself to be in practice with relationship with all of their twists and turns and “stickies” as Steffi says. It means that the pentacles represent breaking bread and having conversations and taking time to know your neighbor. Maybe it means that we allow ourselves to be surprised by how and where and when people and spaces and community show up for us. I don’t always know how my resources will find me week-to-week, but the more I look up and around into my immediate surroundings, the more I’m reminded that the resources have always been here.
As always, thank you for being here with me. I am slowly being asked to come out of my deep hibernation and emerge into public-facing spaces. I will have prints of the illustrative work included in these newsletters, hand-stitched sweaters, and energetic practices. There is space to ask about commissioned textile work with sliding scale and payment plan opportunities. Please come and see me, I would love to see you there.
I will be at Heartspace Holistic on March 13th from 12-5pm with so many other lovely humans. I have been in energetic training with Amy for a year now, and I am sharing what some of these practices look and feel Iike for me (this writing being one of them).
On April 2nd from 9am-3pm, I will be at my dear friend Didi’s coffee shop, Tic-Tac. I will be offering a select few tarot slots with this market. There will be other makers with food, art, vintage, ceramics, and astrology.
If you are not in Atlanta, I am available in other ways. Please reach out with any inquiries.
With gratitude,
You can find me here, on my IG @meredithannewhite,and my website. Thank you so much <3