Just under two weeks ago, I drew The Tower for my personal card to reflect on for the day at 7 am. I took that to mean unexpected and unwanted surprises and for me to focus on emotional resilience and being prepared for something to wreck my routine, going with the flow of that. Something outside my control would be happening and I needed to let that be okay. Sure sure, I could work with that daily tarot.
At 9 am my life partner called from the living room "Laurel, why is the carpet wet???"
... I hadn't been to the living room (where his electrical hospital bed, wheel chair, medical equipment are) yet that morning. It was him and his morning caregiver who discovered the spot.
My eyes widened and I went out there and it wasn't just a spot. It was a growing puddle of water seeping up from the carpet. I soon learned that the neighbor's water heater had exploded (sometime just before or after my daily draw) and they had over an inch of water in their apartment and it was coming straight at us.
Hours spend scrambling to move his bed, medical equipment, streaming equipment and cleaning up. Waiting for six hours for the carpet people to come and hoover up the mess. Renting steam cleaner and doing the entire house. Partner and me deciding to move furniture back to different places, then deciding as long as we were doing that, we'd completely de-junk the closets. Pushing both our physical limits every day for over a week, laughing and crying as we uncovered forgotten treasures and threw out over 8 garbage bags of broken, unwanted, no longer needed stuff we hadn't looked at since at least 2017-2018. Feeling bizarrely grateful to that exploding water heater because we never would have done everything else without that as a catalyst.
This is the Tower. This is how it manifests in our lives. I could not have whipped out a more apt example from my imagination. This is so clear only because it JUST happened and I'm still recovering physically and basking emotionally in the results.
The Tower is typically the card I least want to see in a spread but invariably one of the most needed because it represents the kind of change way outside our control that destroys in order to create.
I love it. I hate it. I've learned to stop being afraid of it, but I am still boggled even after 30+ years with tarot how uncanny accurate it predicts big, unexpected event that hit like a bolt of lightning every. single. time for me at least.
(( talking about the RWS imagery itself tomorrow probably unless someone beats me to it ))