Less than two hours before Mercury entered Aries, the oven in my apartment caught fire. With Mercury having been in Pisces since February, this transit certainly went out with a bang (not literally, goddess bless).
Between the fire and everything else, I hadn’t pulled daily cards in a week. Today I finally decided to sit down and just do it, reminding myself that my daily rituals don’t have to be perfect or complicated. And I pulled the tower.
It’s kind of funny to me when the cards take my life literally. Standing inside a smoke-filled kitchen with a fire extinguisher you can’t seem to get off the wall, trying to read the instructions through the burning haze, trying one last time to fix a situation that’s literally going up in flames–this is what I imagine it would feel like to be inside the tower.
Themes of collapse and rebuilding are present throughout the tarot, but nowhere is the collapse quite so fiery and dramatic as in the tower. When you’ve reached the tower, you’re far beyond problem solving. The oven is already on fire and the kitchen might be next. All you can do now is call the fire department and try to escape unharmed.
When I first started reading tarot, seeing the tower brought up a deep sense of dread. I couldn’t imagine surviving the kind of life-altering, world-shattering collapse the card pointed described. After I experienced one of those collapses, then another, then another, I tried to romanticize the tower. After the tower comes the star, after all.
But the star isn’t the fool. This isn’t the sort of cleanslatefreshstart that you see in the beginning of the movie. Even if there’s no real damage, there’s a lot of cleanup after a fire. Fire extinguisher fluid turns to dust when it dries, which I learned recently. After the firefighters left, after they opened all the windows to try to clear the smoke, every surface in my kitchen was covered in dust. The star is phoenix-like rebirth. Someone has to clean up the ashes. You have to clean up the ashes.
Radical acceptance is an idea from DBT that involves fully and completely accepting life as it is. It’s about knowing what you cannot change and choosing not to resist whatever comes into (or out of) your life. As simple as it should be, radical acceptance is incredibly difficult. Some of us try to fix problems even when they’re far beyond fixing. Some of us want to place blame so we can hold something or someone responsible. Some of us ruminate on what could have been or how our lives would be different if something had gone a different way. There are so many ways we can become trapped in non-acceptance.
Radical acceptance asks you to let go of all of them. Radical acceptance asks me to take a deep breath, though the air smells smoky, and accept that there was a fire in my apartment. It asks me to look around, clean up the dust, accept what is, and figure out what to do next.
In order to reach the rebirth of the star, we have to take stock of the tower. We have to see what’s been broken and allow ourselves to mourn the loss. Radical acceptance doesn’t mean you’re not angry or hurt or scared. Radical acceptance acknowledges these feelings and says “I hear you.” When we radically accept what is, we allow ours
You can radically accept and still feel those feelings. I’m still scared about the future and upset about what happened. I’m angry with myself and with the whole situation. But my anger can’t put out a fire. Releasing the fantasy of everything going how you expected it to go is the first step toward transcending the collapse.
It’s tempting to want to rebuild the tower. The landscape looks empty, the ground is charred, and where there was once a great structure there’s now just smoke and rubble. You can step back to the devil, to attachment, but you know where this leads. When you hold on too tightly to what was, you’re forced to learn the lessons of the tower all over again. After the tower comes the star, but only if you choose it. To begin anew after destruction is not a necessity, it’s a choice. You can’t change the facts, but you can choose how to tell the story.