Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel...

Desperation is a draining feeling. Eventually even your heart and soul get tired of staring at their own cracks, and they start craving for a certain numbness. A faux peace that allows you to go on with your life even though, if you stop and think carefully, you don't really know why you are doing it in the first place.

This is a dangerous Neptunian moment. At the bottom of the Wheel of Fortune, as it ever so slowly prepares to go round again, we are pretty much treading in the lands of the Moon. Here be dragons. This is a kingdom of illusion, delusion, madness. Walking here we get lost in fantasies of revenge and of cure. We touch the highest inspiration with the tip of our fingers, but with a mere thought we are plunged deep into despair. We crave for a miracle with the same intensity we crave to forget everything.

In moment like this, people may look for help in drugs, alcohol, food, fantasies, isolation - ways of getting numb. Hence the danger: in the journey through the Moon lands, the darkest part of the Wheel, you must not drink the fairy wine nor taste the fairy food, lest you stay in the night forever. You must trust something you cannot see, hold on to an invisible lifeline, find power and strength and reason where there's none. And that's where the learning begins - only in the dark we find our deepest power and most primitive survival instincts. Only from the ashes we can be reborn.

What all this has to do with the Wheel? Everything. The Wheel is a card of cycles... wheels within wheels, picking you up and dropping you down. And this card has been appearing to me so often I am forced to meditate on it, understand it. Right now, the Wheel seems to have stopped for me, and I'm hanging somewhere close to the lowest point. I urge it to move, move, but it seems to stand still, waiting.

I have always had a problem with waiting. I am a choleric person, my first instinct is if I don't do it, if I don't fight, nothing will happen. It is true to a point, but it is also true that sometimes we are forced to wait for life. Certain things can only grow in silence and stillness.

When asking about the Wheel of Fortune in a tarot community, I received the most interesting advice from another reader:

"...we give our power away by holding events in our head and trying to fix what has happened by going over what has happened. Sometimes stepping forward happens when we stop trying to work out what went wrong and how it can all be fixed. The natural reaction for someone who has a desire for action is to try and do something (react), but it sounds like more action is going to happen by not doing and following your intuition/gut feeling...which sounds to me like it's saying that you need to practice patient and stillness. By trying to act you maybe going against the direction the wheel is turning in...that will stop it from moving."

It struck a chord within. Yes,  I have been giving my power away. In my urge to control, to fix, to act, I have done a few stupid things. I have given away a lot of my pride, self-love and hope. I have allowed myself to be a constant victim to one of the most uncontrollable and unpredictable forces in the universe: the actions, thoughts and feelings of another person. I struggled and fought against my own powerlessness, against my own inability to fix and change things, becoming weaker with each effort.

And now, here I am. Weak and not much wiser, so full of a strange melancholy that resembles emptiness. A small cloud of hopelessness creeps in, as I realize my fantasies cannot come true. It seems my already ordinary life cannot become more stagnant without defying the laws of Physics. While others find new beginnings for themselves, I seem to be stuck in a swamp between the River of Remembrance and the Forest of Illusions. 

Still, I am a firm believer that we all have within us a core of diamond that can survive almost anything, as long as we don't give up. When all around us fall apart, this core remains, its gravity slowly pulling the pieces back together, forming something new. Although I cannot see nor feel this inner jewel right now, I know it is somewhere inside me. That is why I am alive - that is why I go on without any apparent reason. There is a reason, and it's hidden deep inside me.

And perhaps the Wheel is just waiting for me to find it, before spinning silently towards the dawn.


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