PicoBlog

A woman I used to be acquainted with had the shocking experience a few years ago of her living room ceiling caving in while she was at home -- thankfully in another room of her tiny rental apartment, which was on the second floor of an old building. 

Although she wasn’t physically hurt, the experience devastated her, understandably so. The destruction dented and dirtied not only her belongings, but her sense of well-being and security. 

I experienced similar feelings last year when my landlords took a chainsaw to a beautiful lattice gate I’d paid a lot of money to have installed on the property, despite having received their permission for it in advance. Without a word to me, they simply showed up one day and destroyed the new addition, which had allowed my dogs a safe space to run in the back yard under my supervision. 

When our homes don’t feel secure, it’s hard for us to feel secure. And owning your own property doesn’t necessarily provide an ironclad sense of safety, either. Roofs cave in, pipes burst, floodwaters rise, rainwater soaks drywall, termites munch.

My acquaintance referred to her ceiling cave-in as a “tower moment.” 

In tarot, the Tower card represents destruction, a crumbling, a dramatic ending. 

“All that you held to be true is suddenly…not true. The world looks different, and it can feel like a disaster,” Little Red Tarot explains. 

A tower moment could be the unexpected end of a relationship, the loss of a job, a sudden move, or any other cataclysmic event that forces us to start over. 

Tower moments, on the surface, can seem bad. But sometimes, a dismantling or a crumbling of an old structure is necessary to allow space for the new. 

When this happens, we hate the feeling of not being in control. Our instinct may be to resist it or fight against it. 

Something I understand now, that I didn’t understand when I was younger, is how vital it is to not only allow destruction and decay, but even to embrace it as best I can. Nothing new can blossom without being nurtured by the remains of that which has died. 

It’s part of the cycle of nature and cannot be any other way. That’s what makes a baby, bird, butterfly, or flower seem so precious: their overwhelming beauty is so temporary. Everything that lives is just passing through the stage of life and must be allowed to wither away without undue fear of the process. 

That’s why, when the roof over your head literally or figuratively caves in on you, it may sometimes help to ask whether this is a tower moment. If it’s a major shake-up but not necessarily an outright tragedy, could it be possible to acknowledge that, on some level, it had to happen? That the crumbling and destruction are making way for something new to emerge? That the more it’s denied or resisted, the more painful the experience can be?

I could write an entire book on the wisdom that began slowly seeping into me as I experienced the menopausal transition. Understanding tower moments is just one facet of this deeper, crone knowing. 

At 53, I now have an ability to dance and flow with the changes of life in a way I wasn’t able to even a few years ago. I’m learning how to do so with more ease and grace all the time. 

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