Digging for the Roots of Lack

A meditation on capitalism, winter, and the mind

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

When I feel broke, it is a physical sensation. The jolt I feel when my bank account’s contents dwindle too low to has a tactile quality, a shape and density I can feel in my body. Sometimes, it’s a pressing weight, holding down my chest, constricting my throat. Other times, a palpable absence, a dizzying lack of ground like missing a stair in the dark.

It’s always worse in the winter — fitting, somehow, with the scarcity of the season, but still harsher and more menacing. In the summer, there are so many places to go and things we can do for free. Public lands, for as long as we still have them, afford us at least one potential resting place that we don’t have to pay for. In the winter, like in a city, that openness turns to constriction. There’s hardly anywhere to go that doesn’t cost money.

There’s a card in the Tarot I think of whenever I feel this insecurity. It’s the Five of Pentacles, a minor Arcana, which depicts two careworn figures tramping through the snow. One is usually drawn with crutches and bandages, symbolizing some recent injury, while the other is wrapped in rags, head bent against the cold. Behind them, a warm light streams from the other side of a stained glass window, a world of abundance and grace that seems inaccessible to the struggling…