The Tower and Surrender

Bedlam. The breaking point. Collapse, lightning, fire, and falling to one's death.

The Tower, from the Rider Waite Smith deck.

When this tarot card comes up, astrologer Aliza Kelly always points out that the tower in this card is built on an extremely steep, narrow cliff. There's no good reason to build there. The tower falls because it was never meant to stand.

How do we accept the Tower with grace? How can you meet destruction with faith and ingenuity? How can we let ourselves be unmade, and trust that one day we will rebuild in a better place?

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I'm a little over two years into my middle-aged fascination with astrology, and with a bit of study, I'm starting to find my place. The podcasts I listen to have been supplemented with Aliza Kelly's Constellation Club, Molly McCord's programs, and several books. The more you learn, the more you figure out how little you know.

Not long ago, I said aloud, I want to understand astrology as well as I understand English. It's a high bar, and one I don't know that I can clear in this lifetime. At 41, I believe I am more than halfway through my years on this earth, but maybe I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong.

What I have going for me is that I have embraced surrender. In astrology, Pluto signifies the type of creation-through-destruction that we see in the tarot card. When I started to look at how Pluto has affected my life, I saw major transits around major life events. Most notably, Pluto passed the degree of my natal Venus the week my mom died.

I'm going through the classic middle aged transit of the Pluto square right now. While Pluto is in Aquarius through 2044, it is going to square my natal Pluto, square my ascendant, oppose my moon, conjunct my Mercury, square my Mars and Saturn, and eventually conjunct my sun while squaring my Chiron. (TL;DR: I am not waiting for "things to calm down.")

Surrender is so powerful. Last week, I was watching an episode of the Astrology Podcast about whether Christianity and astrology are in conflict, and the Rev. Nate Braddock was talking about Christianity's radical origins, and how it is extremely hard to politically intimidate a group of people who are not afraid of death.