Be The Star

As I looked out into the night sky, across all those infinite stars, it made me realize how insignificant they are.” ― Peter Cook

I love this quote because it makes me laugh, and the profundity of the Universe is best expressed through laughter. We've entered Aquarius season, whose card is The Star, one of the most gentle and beautiful cards in the Major Arcana. The Star is here to help us laugh, heal, and celebrate the infinite. To understand the work of The Star we must first understand the preceding card, The Tower. The Tower comes to remove an obstacle to our spiritual growth that we could not remove on our own. The Tower is depicted with an actual tower being struck by lightning. The top of The Tower is a crown, representing both material wealth, hierarchal structure, and the mind. One individual falls and retains the crown on her head while the other figure is without a crown falling face forward. Without question, The Tower is an arresting image, but the 22 yellow raindrops are actually yods - blessings of grace from god. Remember that we are now in the Third Line of the Major Arcana, the final stretch in a cycle of spiritual growth.

As a society, we have plenty of Tower moments we can look at. The insurrection of the Capitol was a very literal Tower moment last year. It exposed the deeply rooted divides in our nation's foundational beliefs. Most recently we have seen that we are indeed a house divided and there is a very real possibility that the American democratic experiment will end because we have built our nation on the foundation of racism and erected the walls with the most inhumane systems of capitalism. In my last post about The Devil, I used examples of addiction. As individuals, The Tower is a logical next step to addiction and The Devil. The Devil brings us into an awareness that we are engaging in behaviors that keep us unconscious, but self-will is insufficient to change our thinking and behavior. This is when The Tower arrives to say, "You know that your ____ (job, marriage, drinking, family, mortgage, etc.) isn't what your spirit came here to do. You also know that it feels too big for you to change or remove on your own. No problem. I'll remove those structures for you." There are multiple levels in The Tower, and while they are almost always accompanied by some loss, The Tower never takes anything away that's supposed to come with us. The Tower is there to expose the places where we built upon an unsuitable foundation. Enter The Star.

The Star is the calm after the storm. The Star bathes us in light and healing after the upheaval of The Tower.

The Star is the first time in the Tarot that our attention is directed toward a cosmic perspective. The destruction that takes place in The Tower makes way for an unobstructed view of the cosmos and we can feel our right-sized place within them. Like Temperance, The Star is able to defy gravity with one foot on land and the other on the water. In the card Temperance, the angel is dressed in robes, standing upright, and pouring water both up to and down into her cups.

In The Star, she is relaxed, unrobed, and has a calm and somewhat playful demeanor. Temperance is measured and controlled, while The Star is natural and free. The symbol of Aquarius is the Water Bearer, and like Aquarius, The Star empties her vessels in endless streams. Aquarians are credited as being creative humanitarians, capable of envisioning and distributing the greatest good to the collective. In the experience of The Tower, any illusions that we could control or avoid unplanned changes are removed. In their place, we are humbled into receiving from the Divine. We are reminded that our perception of loss is not unique, it is what makes us human. The pool that her foot rests upon represents both the individual and the collective unconscious. She can safely balance there. Her other jug returns water into the earth. Seedlings grow around, new life emerges, and healing begins. The Star is able to give from a place of overflow because by healing herself, she is healing the world around her. We also see a bird in the background, a Crimson Ibis. This bird is the symbol of