As we jump into June…
This is a general collective reading of the energy of June. Below is my own interpretation of the cards that appeared before me.
As always take what resonates, and hurl the rest!
June has got us all turned around.
And I mean that literally. Four of the five cards in this spread showed up reversed. This is suspense made physical, a major life transition in which action in the outer world has been temporarily, and necessarily, suspended. You did the work. You discerned, you were present, you got initiated whether you signed up for it or not.
Now the doing in this way stops, because you cannot stay young if the view stays the same, and the view has to change, and change, it turns out, arrives breech.
There’s an Italian word, colpetti, that I keep thinking about as I sit with the card’s imagery. Small blows. The tiny, persistent strikes that, more than any single catastrophic hit, are what finally wear something down.
Not the lightning. The petulant drizzle. The dust collected and wadded into the corner. The Tower moment is the slow accumulation of everything that etched away at the stone one crack at a time. One day of diffident vantage at a time.
The Hanged Man with his thick, knotted cross. Dense, deliberate, wood that has grown into the shape of the thing it holds, however there is nothing accidental about the Hanged Man’s suspension. The cross is sustainable. It is not a temporary inconvenience. It was chosen, or at least accepted, under real weight.
And beside him, the King of Wands reversed, whose staff is almost comedically thin by comparison. Fire energy that has gone sideways, a king listing to the left, whose staff is pointed at the ground instead of toward the sky. Then The Tower: the densest object in the spread, a cement pillar on fire, struck in irony. And yet the energy above and below it asks us to sit, to mirror where we came from. To enjoy, if we can manage it, the view from upside down before we try to right ourselves.
I mean, it couldn’t hurt to get upside down for a minute, swap calves for finger pads.
The Hanged Man and The Tower in communion. One chose the inversion. One had it chosen for them. June is asking us which version we’d prefer to be. I know. These months keep asking a lot from us. The least we can do is keep answering.
The reversals here point collectively to areas of psychic imprisonment. The blocked energy of the King of Wands reversed. The avoidance of the Two of Swords reversed. The Tower reversed reminding us that chaos has either just passed through or is being held just barely at bolt. Either way, we’ll be pushed into knowing. Truth or forced action boiling at the surface, looking for any available exit. Resistance, in this configuration, is not a neutral act. It bares consequences.
The Four of Pentacles above and the Two of Swords below symbolize foundation. For stability that isn’t grasping, that isn’t born only in the face of danger, but that can be shared, built upon, handed to someone else as scaffolding.
We are coming out of some point of view, some fixed perspective that might have a tighter hold on us than we’d care to admit. And what we build next needs to be built on ground we’ve actually examined, with hands we’ve actually released.
The energy above and below requests we take a seat. To trust. To unfurl our tired knuckles, our sweaty palms. But only after we’ve enjoyed the view from upside down. To notice what looks different.
Quite a lot, so it seems.
In Kabbalistic terms, The Tower is the path of Peh between Netzach, victory, and Hod, splendor, Mars-ruled, the letter meaning mouth, the force that dismantles Babel not out of cruelty but because the fiction has become unsustainable. Which is just a more dignified way of saying it got tired of holding itself up.
Sallie Nichols writes that The Tower shows up when the gap between the persona and the actual person has grown too wide to maintain, and the ego, stripped of its familiar language, its roles, its working spatial definitions of itself, finds it has nothing left to say. Which is terrifying and also, if you can stand it, the first honest moment in a cool breeze.
The question is whether you’d like to begin the demolition yourself or wait for the building to decide.
There is a field I keep returning to,
both in my mind and each month
as I watch the labor of time.
The crocus came and went.
Some endings knew better than we did.
The lightning doesn’t consult you.
It finds what was always hollow
and it decides.
But look at what the storm had no use for.
That is not luck.
That is root.
This is what the field was doing the whole time.
Friendly PSA that for most of us it is strawberry season.
Numerology of the month: 29
Keywords: the abysmal, navigating danger, maintaining steadiness, staying truthful, radical resilience, following the flow, the abyss, sincerity under pressure, water finds its way, inner mastery, chaos reveals the victor.
In perfect comedy, this month’s numbers reduce to 11, same as May, which means we are, apparently, flipping everything around twice. The 29 comes from practicing I-Ching with this reading, where the coins tossed back danger, twice, for everyone in the room, which I am choosing to call a collective nod rather than a coincidence. What feels more dangerous than a tall beam on fire in free fall? Even more ironic that 29 is water over water, and one more hat tip to the blockage of Water of Fire carried over from last month. She said hit her with the trail by fire, then water, then water, then fire.
The number 29 is the old soul who has already tried the other way and has the receipts to prove it didn’t work, the number that contains both the 2 of sacred relationship and the 9 of completion and loss. It carries the weight of everything that has been learned and the grief of knowing it had to be learned that way. It’s giving very much eldest daughter.
In the I-Ching, Hexagram 29, K’an, Navigating Danger, is the only hexagram in the entire Book of Changes without a single word of good fortune, which sounds like a threat until you understand that it is actually a description.
Double water. The abyss upon the abyss. Danger that does not resolve but repeats, the canyon you descend into only to find, at the bottom, another canyon, and beneath that, a trench.
The teaching is not escape but flow: water does not negotiate with the ravine, does not panic at the depth, does not pretend the drop is something other than what it is.
It fills every available space and keeps moving, and nothing, not darkness, not the sheer fall of the continental shelf, not the waves barreling in, can make it lose its essential nature.
The I-Ching calls this sincerity. You already know what you are. The danger cannot take that. Commit and stay steady through the challenges that lie ahead.
In a world that moves quickly, choosing to pause, to reflect, to go internally, is no small thing. Whether you read every word slowly or skim what calls to you, I’m grateful you are here.
A Few Questions to Sit With
For those beholden of pen, the journalers…some questions to help guide you into the month.
- What am I holding so tightly it has stopped being mine and started caging me?
- Where has the fire of my actual vision gotten tangled up with the water of my anxiety?
- What decision have I been refusing to make? What do I already know about it?
- What structure in my life was built for a version of me that no longer exists?
- If The Tower took something tomorrow, what would I grieve most? And what would I, beneath the grief, feel relieved to release?
- What truth has been living in my body that my mind has been too busy to translate?
- Where am I confusing protection with imprisonment?
- What does it look like to open my hands, not in defeat, but in trust?
- Where am I being invited to begin the controlled demolition myself?
- What is growing in the root system beneath what looks like drought?
“See” you next month!
Mind The Mess On Mondays 