Where do you stand when everything changes?
Where do you stand when everything changes?
Roughly twice a year, I sit down with an oracle card deck I've used for a very long time and do a comprehensive card pull for the next six months. I did this over the weekend, and I want to tell you what came up, because it connects to something I shared back in the winter, and to what I've been writing about lately.
At the start of the year, I wrote about a card I'd pulled for the query "where I am in present time?" It was the Hanged Man, a card of forced stillness, of surrender, of being made to stop whether you want to or not. And then, days later, I got sick, the kind of sick that flattens you and cancels everything, and I found myself living that card whether I'd chosen it or not. The whole first quarter of this year became a long, unchosen pause.
So this week, I was quite curious what would show up when I pulled again for that same question, "where am I now?" And the card that turned over was the Wheel of Fortune.
If the Hanged Man was the enforced pause, the Wheel of Fortune is the thing beginning to move again. It's a card about a genuine turning point, about momentum, about fortune rising or falling, and it's definitely a card about change. And it does feel fitting, since I've been doing my own deep-dive study on change this past year, why it's inevitable, and yet we're all pretty much wired to resist it. After a season of being held in place, something is turning. And I felt the truth of it before I read the interpretation, the way you feel the weather change before the sky does.
But here's the part of the Wheel that stopped me, because it's so much the opposite of how I was taught, or conditioned, to meet a turning point. The whole teaching of the card is not about pushing the wheel. It's about holding the center while it turns. Standing at the still hub while everything around the rim moves. In times of good fortune, you stay centered. In times of difficulty, you stay centered. You don't grip the outer edge and try to force it faster, and you don't cling to it in fear when it dips. You hold the middle, and you let it move. This is a trust walk, and it sure can bring up a lot of fears and old patterns around always needing to control. And if you are able to trust-walk and hold the center, the Wheel's wisdom reveals that you can find relative balance in the midst of what might otherwise be extreme reactions in the roller coaster of life and its ups and downs.
I don't know about you, but trust and surrender didn't come naturally to me. I used to get it conceptually, and it wasn't until experiencing a debilitating illness in 2020 that I truly understood that I have no control over anything (except how I act and respond) and that acceptance is truly the way forward. So my past knee-jerk response at a turning point was to grab the rim. To grip it, to manage it, to lean my whole weight into making it go the way I've decided it should. To live out ahead of myself in some imagined future where everything has already worked out, instead of standing right here, at the center, where the actual power is. In the last few years, I've been more intentional about staying in self-trust and doing my best to hold the center, but I've slipped many times, and it remains a conscious practice for me.
And so this reminder of where on the Wheel we live when it goes up and down is connected to what I've been writing lately. First, the cost of staying somewhere that no longer fits; then the disorientation that comes right after you finally choose to move; and now this recognition that once the wheel is turning, the work isn't to force it. The practice is to find your way to the hub and hold your center there while it does.
I am still unpacking this guidance, and how it pertains to the next six months. My initial instinct is that it has less to do with doing and more to do with being. And how our being, both figuratively and literally, impacts the doing. I may be getting ahead of myself here, and I wanted to share these insights because I suspect some of you are standing at your own turning point right now, gripping the rim with both hands, certain that if you just push hard enough, it'll go faster.
Maybe the invitation, for both of us, is to trust ourselves enough to let go of the edge and find the middle, and just be for a bit.