The Week Ahead
Collective reading for the week, July 7 - 13
The United States is a very large country, situated in a much larger world. What happens in one location is therefore not reflected elsewhere.
I can’t help but be struck by that fact given while me and my family were eating, drinking, and celebrating with abandon, people in Texas were suffering horribly. As I write this it is reported that nearly eighty people died, including twenty-eight children, forty-one remain missing, including eleven kids who were attending summer camp. One of those still missing children has a very distant connection to me.
I grew up along the river. I’ve witnessed the destruction that floodwaters can do. In 1975 I was there as my grandparents home was swept off its foundation to be lost forever. In the 1990’s I was caught in floodwaters, having waited a few minutes too long to evacuate. In the 2000’s I almost lost a second home, while neighbors who had been driven from their own homes huddled in my primary home and we all waited out a very scary night together.
I now live in a historic home that has never flooded, but it is surrounded by rivers. Sometimes it stands here as an island in my small city. Someday the flood waters might actually hit it.
Mother Nature is a powerful force that we only think we can predict.
All of these things were on my mind when I sat down with the Tarot Cards this morning, and I think that this reading is a clear reflection of that.
As I turned the cards, they fell into four natural groups to me.
The first four cards I turned fell into what I see as the first group.
Card 1 - Death.
Certainly the large numbers of deaths in Texas, while I and millions of others were celebrating unawares stands as a stark reminder that death is always present in our lives. We can’t escape it, and much more often than not, we can’t predict it. Sooner or later, death will come to visit us all.
Card 2 - The Hanged Man
But we need to hold a proper perspective of death. Death is the natural order, a transition from this life to an unknowable future life. We need not fear it. Indeed, without death, life itself would hold no meaning.
Card 3 - The High Priestess
If we can live our life with this proper perspective, we need not fear. We need not fear because we know that there is more. That we have descended from the divine to experience life in this form and in this place, but that when we die we will ascend to rejoin the divine, and what we felt was so important here will be seen to have been meaningless. Only the loves we shared, and the differences we made in the lives of those around us will remain.
Card 4 - The Magician
We are provided with tools that give us the ability to live our very best lives while here on this earth. And at the moment of our eventual death, we won’t really care about how much money we may have made, or the business opponents we may have conquered, what we will care about are the people we have loved, the good we have done, the compassion we have shown. By utilizing the tools we have been given, within our minds, we can learn how to lead lives of actual importance in our time here.
The second four cards I turned seemed to clearly fall into another group.
Card 5 - The Tower
Destruction. The plans we make, like the buildings we craft, may well be destroyed. We may feel perfectly secure just moments before our lives collapse.
Card 6 - Temperance
But no matter what might be happening in our lives or in the world around us, good or bad, we must always strive for equilibrium. For moderation. We must remember that light counters darkness, that joy counters sadness, that love counters hate, laughter counters misery. Our lives are checkered with good and bad, it is our quest to hold these in equilibrium, never letting despair overcome us, never letting joy close our eyes to potential dangers.
Card 7 - Wheel of Fortune
Rather we must stay open to that which we experience in this life. We can’t control things, no matter how much our hubris says otherwise. We can direct our lives to ensure that we experience more of the good than the bad, but the Wheel continues to spin, always directing that sooner or later the bad will come.
Card 8 - Judgement
In the end though, if we hold to our equilibrium, and live our lives in the most meaningful and just way possible; if we spread love instead of hate; if we seek to heal wounds instead of creating new divisions, well in the end we will get out of our lives that which we need. We will be rewarded for that which we do. Perhaps not in the way that we would like, but certainly in the way that we need.
Continuing in this pattern, the next four cards I turned seemed to be properly grouped as well.
Card 9 - The Hermit
We live our best life by looking deeply within ourselves. By knowing ourselves. By thoroughly searching our innermost being.
Card 10 - The Devil
While doing so, we will discover those things that hold us in bondage. Our delusions, our fears, our uncontrolled passions, our addictions, our false beliefs, and so much more. The Devil reminds us that we can free ourselves from this bondage. All we have to do is choose to remove the chains. To choose to see ourselves and our world clearly, and to choose to act upon that which we discover.
Card 11 - The Chariot
By doing these two things, by looking within ourselves in order to know ourselves, and by removing the artificial bondage that holds us back, we become able to move forward in our lives, traveling down the path that truly is our unique individual purpose here on this earth, in this lifetime.
Card 12 - The Emperor
And thus, we become the master of our own life.
The final two cards turned seemed to me to stand together as their own group.
Card 13 - Justice
But, if we do master our own life, if we do learn to see our innermost self clearly, and actually manage to remove everything holding us back from our true purpose, we might tend to become arrogant or heartless to others. Justice reminds us that we can not give in to those temptations. That we must be just to all, treating all others as we would hope them to treat us. We must not become so caught up in our own journey that we fail to bring light and good into the world for all of those around us.
Card 14 - The Lovers
In this way we will, when death does finally overtake us have “lived respected, and died regretted.”
Floods - Nature always bats last. And while we may always make honest efforts to understand the blueprints of The Great Architect, for that thumbprint is on everything in the Created universes - we will not always understand well enough to tamper with it, but might glimpse enough of the pattern to faithfully replicate and steward it for future generations. This requires modesty and humility. The Mortal Sin of Pride is always the snare.... the balance between good steward and desiring to be a master of something that is not ours to actually own, is delicate.
I grew up on the Missouri River, north of Kansas City. That river would routinely flood - Nature created Her from layers of limestone and sandstone - sedimentary rocks - wearing away at them, over the deep time of millennia. She's a Changeling river - her channels routinely shifted, making it hazardous for deep draught boats but navigable for shallow draughts. The old sloughs caught floods and slowed them down, blessing that land with fertility season after season. But the Corps of Engineers dredged the channels in the 1950s and '60s that's when the flooding became worse and less contained. The years it was really bad the floods came past the railroad tracks all the way to First street and just past the foot of the hill on Main Street.
But these floods today are differently made - trillions of gallons of waters dumping from the Heavens in very short spaces of time and that dumping stalled out and prolonged by blocked systems. The insurance company idea of a flood plains have to change. Personally - I wouldn't buy property anywhere below a 1,000 year flood line. Not on a bet.