The Cup And The Tower

I give an awful lot of readings, but it's not often these days that I get one myself. Last night a friend of mine laid out an incredibly personal one. The first and main card was the Ace of Cups, and the card crossing it was the Tower. It was a Waite-Smith clone deck, and we were immediately struck by the symmetry of the two cards. We laid them end to end so that together they seemed to form a single bipolar structure, terribly concrete and finite on one end, spectral and eternal on the other.

This is the loop I am caught in lately. I feel an incredible connection to what I'll call the "subtle realities" I've discovered, which fill me with a great deal of hope and peace, but I am also painfully aware of the limitations of this material existence and all the ordeals and that lie in wait for me somewhere within it. I fly back and forth between these two modes of awareness lately like a yo-yo. They follow and chase and consume each other, and I get dizzy trying to accept both of them simultaneously. They do not negate each other, but neither do they dwell comfortably together.

The reading showed me the parts of myself that set all this into motion, focusing on elements of duality in my life that I am well aware of but understand poorly. I think I have an idea how to proceed, but the first thing I did afterward was create the image above, a literal conjoining of these two cards that illustrates what I've been experiencing. It's amazing how they fit together -- look at the little yods that flow through both backgrounds, notice how the spouts of water seem to extend the tower's dimensions, how the people fall or rise through the watery barrier into a bizarro-world.

My goal for the new year is to stretch out on one of those lily pads floating on the thin skin between worlds, and camp out there for a while.