Card of the Day: XVI The Tower
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The Wild Unknown Tarot [/caption]
I pulled this card this morning in my personal three-card spread, and noted my visceral reaction: fear. It’s definitely my least favorite card to see, and my flash thought about it is always: life rupture. Which is sometimes true! But what else does this card have to say?
Working with the image, we see, against a black background, a towering white coniferous tree—a tree old enough to have borne witness to many seasons, many kinds of weather. Here, its crown is ablaze in two places, where bolts of yellow lightning have struck it. Something stable, secure and strong has been broken. Before rushing to wonder what will happen next, can the tree survive such a strike...we can pause in the moment that this card depicts, and let ourselves feel the weight of seemingly random, unexpected destruction. Unwished-for change. Fear, grief, awe. Powerlessness.
We can build a life around avoiding ever having to feel these darker feelings. It takes a lot of energy to do that, and makes for a small, numb, confining life, but I know I’ve done it in small and large ways. And I’m certainly not beyond doing it again. We’re biologically programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. We can have compassion for our avoidant strategies; we come by them honestly.
This card depicts what happens when we run out of line on the spool of our avoidance. Life arranges a rupture of the energies we’ve been skirting and stuffing, and the result is usually pretty messy. Again, we could view this as something other than a mistake or a failure. Sometimes we have to do it like this. I can tell you, when we do, the lessons can penetrate very deeply, as can the healing.
Darkness and conflict are not signs of failure. Death is not failure. In a culture centered on growth at any cost, profit at the expense of care and justice, we can expect big rupture. As Beltane approaches later this week, we’re invited to connect with the Earth and her cycles of birth, growth, decay, death and rebirth. Nothing grows forever without some pruning, some culling. What are you pruning to make room for new growth?
