Noumenal Net

I evacuated New Orleans the day before Katrina was scheduled to make landfall. Our entourage - myself, two groups of neighbors, and our pets - fled first to Arkansas. When it became apparent that we would not be allowed to immediately return, we went our separate ways. I stayed with family in middle Georgia.

Shortly after my arrival in my family’s hometown, I visited a friend who owns an occult shop in the downtown area. I hadn’t seen her in around seven years. When I told her of recent events she nodded and said, “The Tower fell on you”.

Indeed.

The Tower is card number 16 in the tarot. Alternate names of the card include The Lightening Struck Tower, The Tower of Babel, or The Tower of God. Traditionally this card is illustrated with a violent scene of a tower, shaken by storms and struck by lightening, often with people falling from the heights as the tower crumbles.

A lot of people ask me “Well you’re supposed to be psychic, didn’t you see Katrina coming?” Actually, yes, in a sense I did, but you have to understand how psychic abilities work. The psychic sense works like your other senses. Lets say you turn on your radio and you hear music. You recognise the sound as music, but you don’t know the artist or the name of the song. You might have to do a little digging - calling the DJ, or looking up the lyrics online - before you have the full picture. But sometimes you do recognise the song, and things are very clear at the outset. Its the same with the psychic senses. You know there’s a message, but you don’t always know clearly what the message is.

A couple of weeks before Katrina, I did a tarot reading for myself. The Tower card showed up in my near future. At that point I began bracing myself for some kind of upheaval. This is what the Tower card represents - upheaval, radical and unstoppable change, change that is often violent in nature. At its worst, the Tower can represent blind and senseless destruction, but at its best, the upheaval clears the ground to make way for new growth, or it enlightens. And usually it depends upon one’s response to the Tower’s effects. We cannot stop the Tower from falling, but we can control our own reactions to it. We can either cower in a corner and bemoan the loss, or we can pick through the rubble to find our own personal meaning, then accept the change and build something new upon the newly cleared ground.

Not long after this reading, I was taking a walk in my beautiful New Orleans neighborhood. One side of the sky was very black and dark and rumbling with storms. The other half of the sky was clear and blue. The dividing line seemed to be right above my house. I walked up Frenchemen St in the direction of the river, which was underneath the storm clouds. There was rain, lightening and thunder above, the wind was blowing and the experience was invigorating. When I headed back toward my house, I found myself under blue sky again, with only one white fluffy cloud above me.

This deceptively fluffy cloud then spat out a thick bolt of lightening, which struck the ground very near to where I was standing. It was accompanied by a massive crack of thunder, and it set off car alarms up and down the street. My wrists itched for several days afterward. A friend told me lighting throws off a lot of radio-waves and maybe I was partially microwaved from the lightening. I’m not sure if this is what happened but since then, my wrists itch whenever a storm approaches. I was also left with a feeling that something big was going to happen soon.

Watching the news one day, I saw Tropical Storm Katrina forming over the Bahamas. Even though the storm’s path was then believed to take it to the western coast of Florida, I got a terrible and frightening twist in my gut. I knew it was coming towards us. Within days, the storm’s trajectory had been adjusted. It was heading for New Orleans, and was expected to become a monster category 5. And even though my intuitions and omens had been confirmed, I still didn’t want to believe it.

If one good thing has come from my personal experience of Katrina, it is that I have learned to trust my intuition more. But actually, a lot of good has arisen in the aftermath of Katrina. Yes, I did lose everything. When the Tower strikes, its thorough in its devastation. But I’ve also learned a lot since Katrina; a lot about my own strengths and limitations, a lot about the goodness and generosity of people, and a lot about values. I now understand that my most valuable possessions are those things that I carry inside me - my creativity, my intelligence and my compassion for others. And those are the things that can’t be taken away.

And sure, I’ve spent as much time bemoaning my losses as I have trying to rebuild. I’ve taken the time to grieve but I haven’t ignored the opportunities that have been granted me. Especially the opportunity for spiritual renewal. I have been in need of it since my divorce, and it is possible that all those boxes of belongings I lugged with me from England after divorcing my husband had too much “emotional baggage” attached. Maybe I needed to lose that stuff in order to be free to renew myself.

But I’m also in no position to tell other people how to view or respond to Katrina. It was devastating for all of us. Finding meaning is a personal process. Ultimately, Katrina was a big-ass storm, a blind force of nature with no purpose. Any meaning that can be found in it must come from within. I’ve found my meaning, but others must find their own.

In the tarot, the card directly following the Tower is the Star - hope, guidance, a little light in the darkness that pulls us toward our destiny.