Looking back at towers

Finding humor in what fell apart

I went out for a hike in the woods the other day. I use the word “hike” lightly, as usually my hikes consist of me spending about five minutes on the trail before veering off to boulder jump up a creek until I simply plop down amid the sound of rushing water for a few hours.

I went to maroon myself on the creek in preparation for a class I was teaching called Illness as Teacher. It felt big. It’s a class I’ve been wanting to offer for eight years—a look at how chronic pain and illness come in as initiators and teachers in our lives. Even though I had been through several large cycles of illness, I didn’t feel ready to teach the class—until my chronic pain came back in the early days of pregnancy.

It was the beginning of a new, very challenging passage.

As I jumped from stone to stone upstream, I thought about these cycles that we move through in life. How, no matter how much we grow or evolve, there will always be seasons when we feel like we’re swimming upstream. Times where the giant bodies of dead trees will be broken away from the shore and carried by storm currents until they wedge themselves into the stones and become a place for waterfalls, a footbridge to another shore.

After twenty minutes of climbing, I found a mossy spot on a boulder and settled in to review the notes for my class. I had a bag of freshly roasted nuts in my pack, along with a blanket and my Wildwood tarot deck, so I decided to pick a few cards while I got situated.

A mantra came into my head as I shuffled. So I followed the flow of the words and laid out a card with each phrase…

From here, I look backwards
From here, I look forwards
From here, I look inwards
From here, I look outwards

I picked four cards, then I sat back and looked. It was all there. In the way that things tend to be “all there” when you let go of trying to see anything at all— Where I’m at. Where I’m going. And where I’ve been.

In the position of “looking backwards” was The Tower.

And it hit me—from where I’m standing in this moment I’m no longer in the crumbling. No longer in the leaping. No longer in the fire. I was looking down the rushing creek, and back at The Tower…and what a viewpoint it is.

Early on in my pregnancy I picked a card asking about the coming birth and this passage I was moving through. I got The Tower.

As per usual when people get The Tower when they’re in the midst of their world crumbling, I denied it. This is a big passage for everyone right? So maybe it’s totally normal to get The Tower. Perhaps, when it comes to pregnancy and birth, The Tower is just a given? Right?

I can laugh at it now. I can laugh, because now I’m looking back at The Tower.