Today is the day of the Solar Eclipse, the only total eclipse I know of until my generation is expected to die.
The week preceding the eclipse has been a challenging one personally, with health issues in my family and the end of a potential relationship before it got off the ground.
All that retrograde sh^%.
Professionally, it’s been booming: a book fair event in West Linn, a tarot card event at the day job in Lake Oswego, and an author panel at my favorite bookstore, discussing YA markets and HistFic trends.
Tarot is an interesting practice. Or art, I should say.
I am a dabbler in many things, and this year, tarot is one of them.
I don’t believe a certain card can predict your future but I do believe we often hold the key to fixing our own issues, it just lies buried deep beneath a whole lot of emotional gunk. Tarot cards are simply one way to reflect on what we need, what we want, and how we are going to go about getting it.
The Tower is the card that sums up this week for me.
“The Tower shows a tall tower pitched atop a craggy mountain. Lightning strikes and flames burst from the building’s windows. People are seen to be leaping from the tower in desperation, wanting to flee such destruction and turmoil. The Tower signifies darkness and destruction on a physical scale, as opposed to a spiritual scale. The Tower itself represents ambitions built on false premises. The lightning bolt breaks down existing forms in order to make room for new ones. It represents a sudden, momentary glimpse of truth, a flash of inspiration that breaks down structures of ignorance and false reasoning. Notice the lightning bolt is oriented left to right (from the perspective of the card), from heaven to earth, and from Spirit to material. The falling figures correspond to the chained prisoners in the Devil card. They fall headfirst, because the sudden influx of spiritual consciousness represented by the lightning flash completely upsets all our old notions about the relations between subconsciousness and self-consciousness.”
(from Biddy Tarot, a great site for beginners)
As you’ve read in my previous two posts, I am ratcheting up the Launch Trebuchet at the same time I’m madly scurrying to finish edits for The Grasping Root. I am delayed in getting out copies to my Early Reviewers, and alternately cavalier and crazy about the amount of time left before my Launch Party at Another Read Through on October 12th.
Does this sound at all like ‘ambition built on false premises’ to you, dear readers?
And yet. The silver lining to the Tower is that this shake-up of all my boundaries and certainties makes me more resilient. The proof lies in the list of hours logged in the chair, at the computer, rehashing those developmental edits.
Forty-four hours and counting.
My series Remnants involves people scratching a living from the soil, much like Chris Guthrie in Lewis Grassic Gibbons’ Sunset Song. I watched the first half of this beautiful movie last week before needing to return the DVD.
I read the books when I was first falling in love with Scotland, and had to go into a sort of trance to understand the meaning behind the dense Aberdonian lilt.
But the image of the plough, returning to the earth, carving it up–I think that fits pretty well with this week.
