Not quite finished yet...

I've been very productive this month. Finishing The Moon has really fuelled me forward and I've already started sketching out two more cards. I also dove straight into painting The Hermit and the card I'm now nearly finished:

The Tower

This card is one that makes me uncomfortable. I've only ever had it in one spread and it was confusing at the time but made perfect sense a few months later.

The Tower is about false heights. It's gaining a place by deception or building a foundation from nothing more than straw and thinking that will hold you in place. It's the moment when the foundation begins to crumble, knocking you from that tower, that place where you thought you had everything worked out. Below you however, all the materials you used were cheap, weak and inevitably going to collapse.

As I've spent a lot of time looking at this deck from a Buddhist perspective and as I began painting this oft dreaded card, I've tried to think about it differently. It could be said that it signifies a loss of ego. It's letting go of all those words or objects that we use to convince ourselves we're someone great and facing up to the fact that we're all on the same playing field.

It can also be about dismantling the walls or barriers we put up thinking we could paint every relationship, every job, every experience with the same brush.

I'm still thinking about it a lot, although the card is nearly done. I've com to realise that it's only a scary card to get because it's a far more forceful representation of the need to change. It's the change that happens when our actions are causing harm to ourselves and others. It's about waking up to the ever shifting ideas that shape us as people. Holding onto something, no matter how much it might have made sense at the time, can do more damage than good. When we are resistant to change we do nothing to slow it down. If anything, it hits us that much more full-on, forcing our hand and forcing the idea that groundlessness isn't actually such a scary place to live.