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What Change Requires
If you’ve ever seen a tarot deck, one of the cards in it is Death. People who don’t know tarot assume it’s the worst card you can draw.
It’s not. That would be the Tower, Reversed. (It’s primary meaning is “utter catastrophe.”
The Death card doesn’t mean a literal, physical death. It means the death of something within your life.
It means, in other words, change.
A Breaking Down to Build Up
The kind of change it means involves a loss. A breaking down in order to build something up. I think we’ve all been living under the Death card for the last year. Too many of us, sadly, literally. As of the time of writing, August 4, 2021, over 4 million people have died in the pandemic and it is not over yet.
Some of us have barely been touched by that. Instead, we’ve been thinking of other losses. Canceled vacations, birthdays celebrated without cake or candles. The very real and in some cases paralyzing fear that this is the end of everything we enjoyed and loved. For some people, the social isolation has created or aggravated mental health issues. Others have been glad to have the excuse to avoid people.
And I would never dismiss the literal deaths, the reaper stalking the land. At this point, in the west, these deaths are preventable. In the rest…