Scaling The Tower
Setting a time frame for a card reading is incredibly important, especially if you read for yourself. Time gives us a sense of scale. Let’s take The Tower for instance. In it’s very simplest interpretation The Tower is Catastrophe with a Capital C.
The Tower can signify escaping from your vehicle as it bursts into a flaming inferno or the natural disaster that drops the neighbor’s fifty year old pine tree through your roof and all your treasured possessions.
Does this mean it’s time to duck and cover everytime you see The Tower ?
Of course not. First of all, it is almost impossible to predict what The Tower will be. If The Tower drives you to hide in your home for months on end, you’ll probably discover your home has mold and you have mold allergies. Not to mention the loss of income from lack of work.
While I am not inclined to anxiety over The Tower as a subject of meditation or appearing representing my psyche or even in the sphere of relationships, The Tower in an ambiguous position of What’s Coming Next leaves me looking for pianos hovering over my head just like anyone else. Take for instance my 38th Birthday Reading, which had just that. It took a lot of discipline to even write down and study the other cards in the reading.
However, scale is important. And while timing a reading to three months or six months doesn’t create immunity from falling pianos, it does mean when that time frame passes you have a clear idea what The Tower was and you’re not spending the next two or three or five years wondering when the pine tree or the piano is going to drop.
As it turns out for me, it was lack of immunity The Tower defined. Since October I’ve been prey to every virus in a hundred mile radius. While that’s not comparable to some other truly frightening and traumatic experiences in my life, during the time frame I gave my birthday reading, the thing that has shaken my life to its core and left me needing to reshape and rebuild has been the inability to become and stay well.
Knowing The Tower would be present in my life caused me to question many experiences in that light. Getting turned down for a festival was hard. Major structural shifts in an organization created a fair amount of stress. But I was also able to keep perspective on the fact that they were not life changing events, because I was thinking in terms of The Tower. It made it easier to get through those days.
Taken with a sense of time which lends scale and taken as a scale to measure the troubles along our way, The Tower, appearing in the future, can remind us to go bravely forth. Pianos and all.