When Life Gives You the Tower, become the Hanged Man

After drawing the Tower today, I decided it might be wise to know what I needed to know for the year to help promote the happiness and health of my heart. I drew The Hanged Man.

According to Joan Bunning and learntarot.com, "The main lesson of the Hanged Man is that we "control" by letting go - we "win" by surrendering. The figure on Card 12 has made the ultimate surrender - to die on the cross of his own travails - yet he shines with the glory of divine understanding. He has sacrificed himself, but he emerges the victor. The Hanged Man also tells us that we can "move forward" by standing still. By suspending time, we can have all the time in the world." The Hanged Man is a koan, the most profound and perplexing of teachings, for me at least. It has been what this last year has been all about. It may be what all the years leading up to this moment have been about, what all the years to follow will be. Give up, give in, flow like water, for any and every plan you make will surely alter, change, and your deepest desires will change with them. Why is this lesson so hard for me?

In the Jane Austen Tarot, the Hanged Man is depicted by Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park. She is helping hanging the curtains for a play she does not approve of. In a few pages, her world will be turned upside down as will the world of the others at Mansfield Park. She will be farther from her dream of Edmund than she ever was from the moment she first set foot in that realm. She will return to her origins, everything gone, and try to find her place there, try to go on. She will in fact, go on, even as those she loved, those she has parted from, will spiral into their own despair and realize what the loss of her means to them. She had to let go before they could realize that.

When the Hanged Man appears in a reading, the feeling may be one of being suspended in time. You hover between action and no action and realize, perhaps for the first time, that non-action is an action, a choice, your choice, for now. There is nothing you can do. Nothing you should do. You hang from the tree at peace because this is your season for sacrifice, for reflection, for wisdom. It must be done and there is no cheating the span of time it takes. This is the price and you pay it willingly. A different face of Equanimity, but equanimity just the same. Be careful what you wish for. "You can't always get what you want/ You can't always get what you want/ You can't always get what you want/ But if you try sometimes you just might find/ You just might find/ You get what you need."