Meaningful work, or the meaning of work; Capricorn season ponderings

Capricorn season with the added intensity of Venus’ retrograde journey into the underworld, the approach of Pluto to meet my natal Venus in Capricorn and the return to the routine of work after the holiday season for many of us have got me thinking about what work means, and what that implies for how we do it. The concept of work, and what it means these days, is something I come back to over and over. Having spent the last eight years or so as a stay at home parent and then a work at home parent, I get annoyed / triggered (!) when folk assume I don’t work, have lots of time, can do what I like, etc. etc. Somehow work has become defined as sitting behind a desk between 9am and 5pm, or something equally structured. But of course work is anything which involves effort - all of us are working when we clean and maintain our homes, raise our children, care for our loved ones. But society says that all of those things only count as work if someone else is paying us to do them and anyone who chooses, or cannot avoid, a deviation from that mainstream view will always have some feelings of judgement from others, not to mention inadequacy from the self, to deal with.

In spiritual circles, we talk of “doing the work”. Meaning doing inner work, working on ourselves to grow and develop, to be our best selves. But living in a capitalist productivity oriented society as most of us do, this soon becomes problematic. “Improving ourselves” can become just another pressure we put on ourselves, just another stick to beat ourselves with - and the pressures of earning enough money to live on in this money-obsessed world bring us quite enough of those. Mainstream capitalist patriarchal thinking says that growth is linear and never ending, that achieving goals is the only way to prove our worth. And so instead of talking about working on ourselves, maybe we need to shift our perspective towards making space for change or for healing, for a spiral journey which allows us to release personal development as yet another chore.

But. None of us, surely, can deny that we live in an imperfect world, that there’s work to be done to change life for the better for many people, human and otherwise. I’ve been getting messages and prompts from my allies in spirit about doing the Work for a long time now and what that means shifts and changes, of course. In the last week or so, the Eight of Pentacles and the Temperance cards have been stalking me, speaking to me of a need to practice, to do my tasks with discipline and focus - and to find meaning in them. In the Tarot of the Enchanted Forest which sits by my bed, the Temperance card is the Forge and I love this image, that through my work, the Eight of Pentacles (shown as a blacksmith in the Tarot of the Hidden Realm which I’ve also been working with this week - love some layering up symbolism!), I’m forging a new sense of self. Temperance calls us to find a balance between an active approach - what am I able to offer the world and how am I doing that? - and a receptive approach - what is the world asking me to do? what does the world need and how can I offer it? Instead of “doing the work” I’m playing with ideas of “active discipline”, a practice of doing what needs to be done from a place of love rather than a place of needing to prove something. From a place of connection rather than a “should” or an “ought”. From a place of being rather than doing.