A Major Arcana Acute Sinusitis

This happens every time. It took me a while to notice the pattern, but now that I have, it’s impossible to ignore. In Tarot, we call it the Tower – when everything we’ve built catches fire and burns to the ground, crumbling in hot debris around us, leaving us foundationless in the dark. It sounds dramatic, but it is the major arcana of Tarot after all.

I’ve been asking for a shift, begging the gods for a change of direction, a breaking of the dawn, relief. Movement. Change. And I keep asking “how close am I? when will it happen?”

I suppose I should be grateful that the thing I’ve identified as the “change sickness” has come for me at last? This happens every time: a sinus infection (acute sinusitis). Whenever there’s a Tower moment in my life, my head and face swell up from the inside and I spend a couple weeks battling whatever virus is haunting my sinuses, forced to hole up, rest, and contemplate why things are The Way They Are.

There’s a lot of self-blame in all of it, too, because I could have caught the infection sooner and cured it as a cold, as an earache, as a whatever-started-this. But I didn’t. I let it fester and ignored it and pushed ahead until it put me on my ass. Again. Always.

Being The Way I Am, I look for the spirituality in all of it. Sinuses and headaches are the top 3 chakras: throat, third eye, and crown. They’re our connection to truth, intuition, and god. I genuinely keep thinking I have “mastered” these chakras, since I do after all spend the majority of my daily life connecting to and expressing my truth, intuition, and spirituality . . . but the body keeps the score, and right now it’s saying I have fallen way out of alignment.

It’s not as bad as the last couple times, when Big Things Happened. This one, I’m catching early and feeling relatively confident I can fix the natural way . . . but it still hurts, and it’s exhausting, and it brings along with it a myriad of wounded thought patterns I have to continuously correct.

This always happens, and usually it’s during Major Life Change: a divorce, a job loss, family trauma (missing nieces and custody issues and deaths and the like).

This time, I really felt like I had it all under control. It’s been a slow burn, this Tower. Not at all like a controlled demolition – a free-falling mass of steel and glass that stood only a second ago. This has been more like what I imagine would happen if the earth tremored, and repairs were made – but then, a storm came. And then another one. And the foundation was cracked, and the walls lost their sturdiness, and then lightning struck and the fire started at the top until the whole thing finally just fell.

That’s where I am now: in the rubble, trying to salvage the bits that I can take with me into the Next Thing.

I felt the earth shake, I weathered the storms, I put band aids over the cracks, I prayed to the light between the clouds. I saw the Tower crumbling but I thought my faith was strong enough to fix it.

That’s the thing about faith, though, isn’t it? Faith means Trusting, rather than Thinking. I begged the gods to fix the Tower, but they kept telling me there was something on the other side even better than I could imagine. They say I need to let this fall and trust that the Next Thing will be so good, so big and strong and safe, I will never again have to stand inside of a Broken Thing begging it not to fall.

I can’t be totally sure, but I’m beginning to think the sinus infection is their way of making me stop fighting, sit down, and let it happen. The pressure in my head makes it difficult to think, let alone overthink. The congestion in my sinuses makes it tough to speak, let alone scheme and negotiate stop-gaps. The exhaustion in my body makes it impossible to run, to rebuild, to frantically fight a fire that is, after all, dying out on its own.

Know what makes it feel better? Crying. Crying relieves the pressure. And it’s funny, because I tend to wait until the end to cry. Cry when it’s over, cry when the poem is written, cry when you can look back and see the Whole Big Thing.

This happens every time . . . and then, the Star comes out to write a New Story. Then, the day finally breaks, and we begin. Again.