If there’s one card I never want to pull for myself or for anyone, it’s The Tower. Yes, more than the Death card or even the Ten of Swords.
The Tower is the 16th card of the Major Arcana, preceding it is the Devil - 15 and after it, the Star - 17. A tall tower’s golden crown dome is struck by lightning. Flames stretch out their fiery wrath outside its windows. Outside are 22 tongues of flame, which look like flying embers from the Tower fire, and two residents jumped for their lives, reminiscent of the iconic 9/11 photo, the Falling Man.
The first time I saw the image and read the word “Tower” I thought of the story from the Old Testament, the Tower of Babel. People, who then were of a single language, came together and thought that they could create bricks, put them on top of each other, build a tower to go high up into the sky. It was truly ambitious, thinking they could build a structure that was “So high up because they wanted to reach God. To be at the same level as Him.”
Of course, God didn’t have any of it, struck and toppled the tower down along with the creation of all the different languages of the world. “Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they cannot understand one another. Yahweh scattered them thence all over the world, and they stopped building the city.” Genesis 11:7-8.
In the Tower card, the lightning was the cause of destruction. It is nothing man made, but rather a force of nature. We may think we are our own puppet master, but often we forget that there is the wind, the stage, the audience that impact our performance of a lifetime. We exert all that we can, “pull ourselves up by the bootstraps” as they constantly parrot here in America, but there are still a thousand and one factors that are simply beyond our control.
We do not exist in a vacuum, in complete and utter isolation to not be impacted by nature, family, friends, society, government, religion, the economy and more. We are not all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present like God, whom we may have imagined as The Chess Master and we, simply the pawns, He moves around on the board.
Is it heresy to even say that God does not have complete control over us, humans, who were given free will? We continue to assert what we think is our god-like power to later realize that we cannot be and are not God. We heaved-ho, reached our earthly limits later to be reminded that there is something else - A mess that is also a message.
Two years ago, the Tower I built collapsed and today, I am still reckoning with it. In fact, I pulled this card for myself a few days ago. And it also appeared in a tarot reading I received from someone else. It is a reminder that I still am in this mess, one that I may have made, but somehow it wasn’t built as what it was meant to be.
Yes, I cried over this loss, day after day, night after night. But as the well of tears dried up, I stared long and hard at the debris. But life goes on and so must I. But how? Is one able to pick up the pieces and build the same thing back up again? Can you imagine piecing together bits of dust?So should I not even bother to try and start all over again from scratch?
I remember the mythical creature, the Phoenix, repackaged in more recent times in the Harry Potter universe through “Fawkes.” (The bird, in Albus Dumbledore’s service, whom Harry once saw molting, dying, eventually rose from his ashes, and helped him in his utmost time of need, swooping in to drop the Sorting Hat, where Harry pulled out Godrick Gryffindor’s sword to kill the basilisk. Sorry, I digress.) But the Phoenix is not only a figment of our wildest imagination, but a metaphor of our reality - the endless loop of death and rebirth in our lives. That from the ashes, glory rises. The end is not simply, THE end, but also a chance at a beginning.
Of course, I wish that going through endings into new beginnings were easy. Can I say with confidence that I’ve completely ended things?
I wake up each day wondering what’s in store for me a month, a year or even a few more down the line. And I still dread the answer with a nagging disappointment of not having my sh*t together: I don’t know. I really don’t. But who even absolutely knows what is ahead? Nobody.
I pull up my big girl panties, pull up those bootstraps and try all that I can to move forward. And yet, the reappearance of the Tower in my recent card pulls is a reminder that there are forces beyond me. That I am OK doing all that I can do to with my chance at a new beginning. That I give myself the Grace to appreciate what is in front of me now. That Time will come when all the stars align. That God lines up all the particulars to create the most fertile environment for me to rise up again like the Phoenix.
Patience, my child, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” The same goes for me, you and everyone else.