Sunday Reflection: The Tower
Yes, you read that right: The Tower. Again.
Hello, my friends! Welcome to this week’s Sunday Reflection, a series where I pull a tarot card to guide you through the week ahead. The intent is not to tell you how your week is going to go, but to give you a lens through which to consider your current actions, thoughts, and state of being. Please take from this reading whatever resonates with you and leave the rest.
I thought I would make this week’s reflection open to both free and paid subscribers since I talked about this card on the podcast recently. If you’re a free reader and you’re interested in receiving future Sunday Reflections, you can upgrade to a monthly or annual paid subscription!
If you can believe it, I have pulled the Tower again this morning(Lol! Lmao!)! And even though I want to cheat and pull another card to talk about, I can’t bring myself to do it because I know I have more to say on this particular subject. If you have not yet listened to the last podcast episode, I discussed the Tower and its disruptive themes on a mostly metaphorical level, using my recent loss of employment as context. How silly and naive I felt the next day when I learned of the wildfires erupting back home. It’s nothing new – the BC wildfires feel like a summer tradition at this point – but when your family and friends and friends’ families are evacuated from their homes and you spend days and nights refreshing the news for updates, the anxiety hits different. Having alluded to the abrupt loss of a job as disastrous felt hyperbolic and embarrassing compared to the harsh reality of people possibly losing their homes, loved ones, lives. So, along with the compulsive scrolling for news, I spent all weekend cringing at myself and wondering exactly who the fuck I think I am to be running my big mouth like this: a self-important little fool just hollering her thoughts into the wind, only to have them hurled back at her like so much piss.
This is a cycle I’ve lived before and will again: being knocked into a pit of self-doubt and insecurity, laying in the depths of despair for a little while, then gradually getting to my feet and making the long climb back to feeling okay, like I’m allowed to make this creative space for myself in the world, even if I sometimes feel like I’m being foolish. There are worse things than making a fool of oneself: allowing our fears to stop us from living the lives we truly want; imprisoning ourselves in comfort to avoid failure; denying ourselves connection with each other to avoid rejection. Lives lived in only half measures because we think holding back will protect us from pain and loss, that the walls we erect will keep us safe. They won’t.
We will pull the Tower card again and again in life. We will never be done with having our sense of the world and our security in it shaken up by tragedy and the chaos of existence. We are only truly defeated when we lay down and let ourselves be crushed by life and all of its sorrows. Yes, pain and loss are cyclical and unavoidable, but so too are joy and beauty, given enough time. We can let that hope drag us to our feet again, let it drive us forward when the days seem endlessly grey and relentlessly difficult, when it seems like the whole fucking world is doomed. We owe it to ourselves and each other to keep going, keep creating, keep making fools of ourselves in the one fragile life we’ll ever know because existence means either everything or nothing at all and both possibilities are pretty compelling when you think about it.