Learning from Mistakes

For the April 'poem a day' challenge this year, I'm writing haibun to explore and reflect on my new Tarot deck, Forests of Enchantment. 

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At first glance this seems a gentle version of the usually dramatic Tower card. Then I notice the broken top of the tree and the crowd of disturbed birds spiralling up, and realise the apparent gentleness is more a matter of the subdued colours. 

It’s still not as horrifying as the traditional image of people falling to their deaths. When a client gets The Tower, I always  reassure them that it points to an apparent catastrophe, which is really a blessing in disguise. 

‘Heavily disguised,’ I tell them, ‘and dramatic – you won’t miss it. At first you’ll be going, “Oh my God, how am I ever going to get through this?” Down the track, you’ll be saying,”Thank you, God. Best thing that could have happened.” Remember what I’m saying, because when it hits it will not look or feel like the best thing!’

I tell them this with confidence because when I have read this card for people who are in my life, so I can find out later if my reading was accurate – or for myself – it holds good every time. The apparent disaster breaks down old, rigid structures we have built up, to clear the way for positive new energy to come in.

In this deck the author has woven a fable about a rich man deciding to hollow out a great tree to build himself a folly, disregarding advice that the tree would not stand the strain. Sure enough, it dies from the inside and the slender top cracks and falls. This, we are told, ‘signifies the ending of indulgent and worthless vanities.’ Finally, a question is posed: ‘What folly needs to be destroyed so that the true and the beautiful can return?’ The birds in the image are rooks. The collective noun for them, we are reminded, is ‘a building of rooks’ – carrying, here, the suggestion of rebuilding.

As we have often heard, when you’re so far down that you’ve hit rock bottom, the only way is up.

Just don’t repeat the same mistakes! 

after fire and flood

the community rebuilds –

and moves back in

I'm sharing this, many months after writing it, with Poets and Storytellers United, for my own prompt at Friday Writings #92: Triumph or Disaster?  The Tower card in the Tarot epitomises both!