Two of Pentacles

The Two of Pentacles shows a young man dancing with two coins, a ribbon looped around them in a figure eight, the sign of infinity. Behind him, two ships ride enormous waves. It's the card of juggling: two jobs, two bills, two households, and a grin that says he's got it under control. He doesn't, quite. That's the charm.

Stem rust keeps two sets of books. In summer it lives on wheat, where it breaks out through the stems as brick-red pustules full of spores that blow from field to field. As the wheat ripens, it switches to black, thick-walled spores that sit out the winter in the stubble. In spring those spores germinate and send a different kind of spore to a completely different plant, the common barberry. On barberry leaves the fungus mates, then makes little orange cups on the undersides. Their spores fly back to the wheat, and the ledger starts again. Grass, then shrub. Cereal gold, then barberry green. Two hosts, five kinds of spore, one fungus.

Farmers noticed the link between barberry and rust long before anyone could explain it. In the twentieth century the United States ran a long campaign to dig up barberry across the wheat belt, on the logic that if you close one of the books, the business goes under. It helped. But the rust can also cheat, carrying on through the summer spores alone wherever winters are mild enough. When a new, virulent race named Ug99 was found in Uganda in 1999, it went back on every wheat breeder's worry list.

When you draw the Two, notice the second host in your life. Most of us keep two books: the one people see and the one where we actually settle our accounts. The day job and the side project. The partner and the ex who still gets the texts. The opportunity of the Two is real flexibility. A life with two hosts can survive a bad season in either one. The risk is that you become the thing moving between them, never at home in either, and that someone will eventually work out which bush to pull up.