The Tower

Only a flush of cards finished in this journey of learning the tarot by creating it and I was knocked on my back! I asked the deck for one of the major arcana and pulled the Tower. This is the card everyone fears seeing as it connotes catastrophe- sometimes small sometimes large but always lightnight fast. Or it is a tower that we have built up- in our minds or in the banal world. The card says you will be struck down and no matter what you do it is out of your control. But like the death card it also suggests rebirth and new beginnings. This card is painful. What do you mean I cant do anything to change it?! Especially for us control freaks out there. Still I started to build it, reading and researching its history and symbols. I had about five concepts all mixed up - a tower cocktail: The tower itself as one's psychology, built up notions of ego or desires, slammed by a bolt of lightning (also meaning inspiration or purification or divine retribution) cracking apart. A man jumping from the window of the tower holding a small fig tree, but smiling as he falls towards the earth, returning from his intellectual pursuits to plant the seeds of spiritual growth. And a wildfire burning across the background, clouds blackening the sky, a broken frame, a paradigm uncontained. And then I was lost in details- mental and physical. Should there be a fire or lightning or both? How then will he plant the seedling, will he fall for nothing? Should the tower be on fire too? Should the tower represent my ancestor who somehow escaped the fires of the Triangle Shirttail Factory, where young immigrant women were locked into the upstairs room of the factory, unable to leave when the fire broke out except by jumping to their deaths? My great grandmother somehow escaped- went home still in the horror of that tower, and tried to save her baby from the flames haunting her mind by trying to throw the infant out the window. Should I depict the wildfires of california that tore through my city in 2017, leaving only ash of many of my friends homes? And remembering all this trauma and looking at pictures online, why was I crying again and again? Was it ancestor memory, passed down somehow by blood from my paternal grandfather who saw his mother put into a mental hospital, or my father who went to visit her on the train again and again, though she remained catatonic the rest of her life, never raising from the catastrophe of that tower? Or have I somehow inherited a drop of her memory of the horror and so, when my city burned all in one dark storm, I am triggered by these images of flames? And I thought, is it out of our control then, as the Tower might suggest? Those young immigrant women were in a literal tower- not reaching towards the gate of god (Bab-El) but towards our all to human tower of greed to which many pray these days. And was the fire that burns through the west coast of the US and the brazilian rainforests, and Australia out of our control or did we create it? We build and build and build: into areas where houses fall into the sea again and again, or where fire is driven by wild wind over dry california hills. We heat the earth and we neglect the earth. How can I say we had no control over this catastrophe? And so I was at an impass. Lost, I pulled the eight of cups, a card that says to walk away, to loose the details. So I plant my spring garden and cook for grown children and stop building towers. Daily life is a meditation too. When I come back to this card I find the only hope I can give us is the seedling fig tree, growing in the light of flames. Buddha found enlightenment meditating under a fig tree. And my great grandmother is the tower. Our ancestral memory is the only one we seem to have as we make the same mistakes again and again, building the same towers in our plight of being all too human. And I hope.

Ten of Swords

Six of Wands