The Tornado (4-15-24) (Patreon)

For a long time, I set my Balance Card deck aside, for reasons I can’t articulate… and that’s probably in keeping with the concept of decks, anyway. That they’re tools for dredging the subconscious and the intuitive, so sometimes they excuse themselves without explaining their absence. Recently, though, they’ve floated back to mind, which… is probably also in keeping, and suggestive.

I pulled them off the shelf today: same simple white cards, blank except the quickly scrawled pencil title on the bottom. They felt familiar as I shuffled them and I thought, “Why not share what comes up with everyone, and we can consider it together? A theme, or a catalyst for reflection.”

Here I am, then, with the card that came up today, and it was the Tornado.

It’s been long enough since I used these that I no longer know their exact, original meaning, but did I really need to look up my explanation card to know that a Tornado is ‘violent decay’? As opposed to the soft, slow decay of its opposing card? Tornado is part of a pairing describing forms of change that destroy, and of course, it feels appropriate.

When I think about tornadoes, I think of three things: that they show up so quickly it’s hard to predict them; that you can prepare for them anyway; and that after they’re gone, you rebuild, and there’s opportunity there… to rebuild something different. You always wanted that bigger bathroom… well, you’ve got no bathroom, might as well do it right this time. We do tend to pick ourselves up after catastrophe and keep going.

There are a lot of things going on right now that feel Tornado-ish to me, personally and on a civilization-level. In some cases, I’ve decided to become a storm chaser, out of a desire to better understand the consequences of the weather. In others, I’ve settled for building a bunker and hoping what I’ve stored in it is enough, or of the right kind, to get me through the aftermath. This also feels significant: that you can have more than one reaction to the threat of violent change, and sometimes at the same time. We can contain contradictory multitudes, and more than one approach has the potential to teach us faster than trying one single thing, and to teach us the most important thing: to be adaptable.

Tornadoes spin up quickly and often, especially if you live, as humans do, in a perpetual Tornado Alley of change, progress, decay, and inspiration. But you can build for them, plan for them, survive them, and learn from them. And if you’ve done all that, maybe you can have a moment, standing in the stairs of your bunker, where you stare out at their distant, writhing shape and marvel at their power… before you close the door.