Five of Wands

Please note that this series of interpretations is intended to assist specifically in personal healing and shadow work. There are many incredible websites that offer traditional meanings and correspondences. I am not a mental health professional; these are my personal reflections and experiences that I hope you will find helpful.

The Five of Wands plucks us from our joyful celebrations at home in the Four of Wands and drops us right back into our creative venture. In this card, we can potentially find the “too many cooks spoil the broth” scenario playing out. Our project has grown to the point where we have a small team in place and suddenly everyone wants their voices heard. This card is often depicted with five individuals holding sticks and entangled in battle (sometimes playfully). It can bring to mind holiday dinners where everyone is talking over each other and not much is being accomplished.

In the Five of Wands, our “baby” is being picked at by everyone involved. It may be tempting to shut this interaction down, grab that “baby” (book, play, recording) and run screaming back to the drawing board. Don’t. Not yet, anyhow. This input from a variety of individuals can prove to be invaluable. Fives often represent change, and this stands to change the course of your project but this may be a beneficial new path!

It can be challenging to have someone criticize our grammar let alone our deeply personal creative work. If we can view this input as a gift from other minds who come from different backgrounds with a range of experiences we have not shared, we invite diversity, contrast, and depth to a project. This becomes even more complicated when it is our own internal narratives that scrutinize our work.

This card may also indicate competition. In this way, there may be a parallel project being developed that causes us to hold ours up for comparison. 

When was the last time you had created something and had this challenged by others? How did you feel at the time? How did you respond? How did you feel after the initial shock had worn off? Often criticism can cause our shadows to rear their ugly heads. For many of us, that critical voice is internal–either ours of the voice of someone who has previously made us feel “less than.” I encourage you to learn to work with that voice of criticism before we react to it. We can choose what to do with this feedback but the willingness to consider this input is a gift to our work.

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much”
― Helen Keller

“Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.”
― Ray Bradbury

Until our paths cross again…