Science tells us that sunlight takes approximately eight minutes to reach the Earth. Which means that every time we look at the Sun, we are seeing the past.
My song Eight Minutes to Hyperion was born inside that interval — inside that invisible passage where light travels through the void, where time exists but cannot be felt, where cause has already happened but revelation has not yet arrived.
That interval became, for me, an initiatory path.
And I began to recognize that this journey of light was already mapped in the Tarot de Marseille, and long before that in the solar lineage of Hyperion, Helios, and Apollo.
The Solar Lineage
In Greek myth, Hyperion is not the Sun we see in the sky.
Hyperion is something more primordial: the Titan of the ever-burning light, the source from which the solar gods emerge.
From Hyperion comes Helios — the visible Sun, the daily rising and setting, the measurable movement of light through time.
And later, in a more interior and refined form, comes Apollo — not merely the Sun, but solar consciousness:
the god of harmony
music
healing
proportion
prophecy
If Helios is the physical star, Apollo is the intelligence of light.
This threefold solar current — source, manifestation, and conscious illumination — is mirrored in the Tarot.
I — Le Bateleur — The First Emission of Light
Le Bateleur is the beginning.
He stands behind his table with the tools of the elements, but he has not yet mastered them. He is potential. He is the moment before the work becomes real.
He is the instant the photon leaves the Sun.
This is why I associate him with Helios at dawn — the first visible act of light entering the world.
Every sunrise is a Bateleur. Every creative act is a Bateleur. Every note that begins the song is the first emission of energy into time.
VII — Le Chariot — Apollo and the Movement Through the Void
Le Chariot is not the creation of force — it is the direction of force.
The rider does not generate the power; he aligns it.
This is Apollo.
Apollo is light that has become rhythm, measure, trajectory, and music.
The chariot is the path the light takes through space.
In the language of the song, this is the eight-minute crossing. The photon is no longer at its source, but it has not yet reached the eye. It is in motion. It is between worlds.
The time chants in the music — the ticking, the cyclical vocal patterns — are the sound of the solar chariot moving through the darkness.
XIX — Le Soleil — Hyperion Revealed in the Heart
In the Tarot de Marseille, the Sun is not distant. It is intimate.
Two figures stand beneath it, illuminated. The light has arrived. The separation between source and receiver has ended.
This is why I associate Le Soleil with Hyperion.
Not because Hyperion is the physical Sun, but because Hyperion is the eternal light behind the light — the condition that makes illumination possible.
When the photon reaches the body in the song — when it “penetrates my skin and bones” — this is not astronomy. This is initiation.
The human being becomes solar.
The Eight Minutes as Initiatory Time
At first, the eight minutes are real.
They are distance. They are delay. They are the proof that we are separate from the source.
We live in that delay psychologically and spiritually. We live seeing everything too late: understanding after the experience, memory instead of presence, reflection instead of being.
The eight minutes are the condition of human consciousness.
The Shortening of the Interval
But something changes through practice, through art, through attention.
The more deeply we enter the light — through music, through contemplation, through the act of perception itself — the shorter the delay becomes.
We begin to feel intuition before thought, presence before interpretation, direct contact instead of symbolic distance.
The photon no longer feels like it is travelling. The chariot is no longer moving through space. Apollo’s trajectory becomes stillness.
The Bateleur and the Sun become the same card.
The Collapse of Time
This is the secret hidden in the song.
At the beginning there are eight minutes. At the end there is no time at all.
Because illumination is not something that arrives — it is something that is recognized.
In the moment of true perception, the source, the path, and the arrival are one.
Hyperion is not far away. The Sun is not in the sky. The light is not travelling.
It is here.
Music as Solar Practice
The structure of Eight Minutes to Hyperion mirrors this process:
The low hum — the unmanifest source
The spoken measure of time — separation
The rhythmic chants — movement through the void
The radiant expansion — illumination
The fading into stillness — timelessness
The song begins in astronomy and ends in metaphysics. It begins with physics and ends with presence.
The Tarot as a Map of Light
Seen this way, the sequence I → VII → XVIIII is not a set of cards. It is a solar initiation:
The emission of the light
The journey of the light
The realization of the light
Living Without the Eight Minutes
To live without the eight minutes means to abolish the delay between experience and awareness.
It means to stand in the Sun without looking at it as something distant. It means to recognize that what we are seeking is the very light by which we are seeking.
Hyperion Now
Hyperion is no longer a Titan of the ancient world.
Hyperion is the name I give to the moment when perception becomes immediate. When music is no longer heard across time but is identical with the act of listening.
When the light no longer travels. When the Tarot is no longer a sequence. When the Sun is inside the heart.
There was once a girl who heard the future the way others hear rain.
Not as a voice, not as a vision alone, but as a pattern moving beneath the world. The Greeks called her Kassandra, daughter of Troy, priestess of the god of light. She stood in the temple of Apollo and the god desired her, and because he was the god of clarity he offered her the greatest gift that can be given to a human being:
To see what is real before it becomes visible.
She accepted the gift and refused the god.
Apollo, who is the lord of truth, did not take the sight away. He did something more terrible. He made the truth fall from her lips like light onto closed eyes.
She would always be right. She would never be believed.
So Kassandra became the voice that speaks before its time. She warned them about Paris. She warned them about the war. She warned them about the horse. She stood in the streets of Troy as the city burned and still they said she was mad.
Her tragedy was not that she saw too much. Her tragedy was that she saw alone.
The God of Light and the Wound of Truth
Apollo is not the enemy of Kassandra. He is the paradox.
He is the god of prophecy and the god of order. The god who reveals and the god who demands that revelation become form. He is the distance between vision and embodiment.
Kassandra received the light. But there was no world ready to receive it.
The curse is not disbelief. The curse is the absence of a bridge.
The Listener in the Temple
Elsewhere, in another story, a child was raised sweeping the floor of Apollo’s sanctuary.
He did not know his mother. He did not know his origin. He served the light without knowing he belonged to it. This was Ion, the temple child, the listener, the one who asked questions instead of proclaiming answers.
Ion’s story is not the story of prophecy. It is the story of recognition.
He is the one who takes what is hidden and gives it a name. The one who turns divine truth into human lineage. The one who stands between the god and the world and says:
This is real. This belongs here.
Where Kassandra speaks and is not heard, Ion hears and makes it real.
The Ancient Separation
In the old world these two stories never meet.
Vision without recognition. Recognition without the lonely fire of vision.
Two halves of a single myth that history kept apart.
The Unlocking
Kassandra’s power is not unlocked when the world finally believes her.
Her power is unlocked when the listener arrives.
When the one who marks time hears the one who reads the pattern. When the one who grounds takes the hand of the one who sees. When prophecy stops being a warning and becomes a way of building reality.
The bridge appears. The curse ends.
Not because Apollo is defeated, but because Apollo is completed. The light of vision and the structure of embodiment are joined.
The Song: Kassandra Unlocked
[Intro - Spoken]
Listen, listen
And do not forget
(Do not forget)
[Verse 1]
You have the sight of what’s to come
A quiet map beneath the sun
You spoke in currents of the soul
And I did not receive your call
You traced the light before the spark
You read the sky inside the dark
You sent the signal soft and far
But I forgot how right you are
[Spoken]
Listen, listen
And do not forget
(Do not forget)
[Chorus]
You see the sign, I make it real
You spin the wheel, I turn the seal
You are the star that draws the line
I live the dream and turn the tide
You light the code, I give it form
You calm the wave, I hold the storm
No voice alone, no truth denied
We are the bridge from dark to light
(dark to light...)
listen listen...
[Verse 2]
There is a book as old as age
With living words on every page
You read the lines that never show
I choose the path that makes us grow
do not forget...
You move the power through the air
I lay the ground so fruit can bear
Between the vision and the day
We make a world that learns to stay
[Final Chorus - Lift]
You see the sign, I make it real
You are the spark, I am the wheel
No fall apart, no wasted climb
You show the way, I mark the time
[Outro]
From dark to light
We turn the tide
From dark to light
We cease this life
listen and do not forget...
(do not forget..)
Commentary: The Myth Inside the Music
“You have the sight of what’s to come” — the untouched gift of Kassandra, perception before the wound.
“And I did not receive your call” — the human side of the curse: truth arriving before it can be heard.
“There is a book as old as age” — the temple, the memory beneath time, the place of recognition.
“You read… I choose… You move… I lay the ground” — the reconciliation of Apollo. Light becomes form. Vision becomes world.
“We are the bridge from dark to light” — the end of the ancient tragedy. Kassandra is no longer alone.
“We cease this life” — not death, but initiation. The old pattern dissolves. The new myth begins.
The Living Myth
Every era has its Kassandras. Every era has its listeners.
The myth is unlocked the moment they recognize each other.
The one who sees. The one who makes it real. No longer separate.
I did not begin with history. I began with a song.
The phrase “fifteen forty-two” arrived first as rhythm, a pulse, a repetition, a clock sounding somewhere beneath the surface of thought. It was about time, or so I believed then, the sensation of suspension, of waiting inside a single second that expands beyond its measure. The refrain came with the mechanical insistence of tick tock, while the verses moved through images of inner signal, fire, glass, and drift. Only later did the number begin to ask for its own meaning.
Curiosity led me to the actual years 1542 and 1543. What I expected to find was a historical footnote, a date among dates, a neutral coordinate in the long chronology of the past. Instead I discovered that these two consecutive years stand at one of the great turning points in the history of human consciousness.
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, removing the Earth from the center of the universe and setting it in motion around the Sun. In the same year, Andreas Vesalius published De humani corporis fabrica, replacing inherited anatomical authority with direct observation of the human body. At almost exactly this moment in European culture, the visual language that would become the Tarot de Marseille began to circulate in printed form, preserving in symbolic sequence the older vision of a meaningful cosmos and the structured journey of the human being within it.
The coincidence was striking. The number that had appeared in the song as a marker of suspended time belonged to a historical threshold, the last instant of a world that understood itself as fixed, centered, and hierarchically ordered, and the first instant of another in which everything moved, the Earth, the heavens, knowledge itself.
What had been a unified cosmology divided into two complementary paths. The external universe became the domain of measurement, mathematics, and observation. The internal universe, meaning, archetype, transformation, moved into image, symbol, and art. The center of reality shifted from a given structure to a journey.
Seen from this perspective, the refrain “fifteen forty-two” becomes more than a date. It becomes a suspended moment at the edge of change, the held breath before the second hand begins to move.
This article begins with that coincidence between a piece of music and a historical discovery. From there it moves outward into the world of the mid sixteenth century, the collapse of the medieval cosmos, the birth of modern science, and the migration of myth from the structure of the heavens into the interior landscape of the human being. It is an attempt to understand how a number, a year, and a song can meet at the same threshold, the moment when time itself seems to change direction.
To understand why these two years carry such weight, we must step into the world that existed before them.
1542–1543: The Turning of the World and the Re-centering of the Human
The years 1542 and 1543 stand at a threshold in the history of human consciousness. They do not mark a sudden transformation visible to everyone living at the time, yet in retrospect they form a hinge between two different ways of understanding reality. In these years the structure of the cosmos, the meaning of the human body, the authority of tradition, and the location of myth all began to shift. What had been a unified symbolic universe, finite, hierarchical, and centered on the Earth, gave way to a world that was expanding, observable, and no longer organized around humanity as its physical or spiritual axis.
For over a millennium the dominant European image of reality had been a synthesis of classical philosophy and Christian theology. The Earth stood motionless at the center of the universe. Around it revolved the perfect celestial spheres, the realm of divine order. The human body mirrored this harmony as a microcosm of the greater cosmos. Knowledge flowed from the past, from Aristotle, from Ptolemy, from Galen, from the Church Fathers. To understand the world was to interpret a received structure whose truth had already been revealed.
By the early sixteenth century this symbolic universe was under pressure from many directions. The Reformation had already fractured the unity of religious authority. Oceanic voyages had revealed continents and peoples unknown to classical geography. Print had begun to circulate texts and images with unprecedented speed. Yet the deeper transformation, the change in the very method by which truth was established, became visible in 1543.
In that year Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. His heliocentric model did more than rearrange the planets. It displaced the Earth from the center of the cosmos and set it in motion as one body among others. The implications were immense. Humanity no longer occupied the fixed point around which the universe turned. The heavens were no longer a set of nested, perfect spheres expressing a theological order. They became a system that could be described mathematically. The cosmos shifted from being a symbolic structure to being a problem in geometry and observation.
In the same year Andreas Vesalius published De humani corporis fabrica, a work that transformed the understanding of the human body. For centuries anatomy had been based largely on the authority of Galen, whose descriptions were derived from animal dissections. Vesalius opened human bodies and drew what he saw with his own eyes. In doing so he replaced reverence for inherited knowledge with direct investigation. Truth was no longer guaranteed by antiquity. It had to be verified through experience.
These two works, appearing together, signal the birth of a new epistemology. The outer universe and the inner structure of the body were both removed from the domain of received authority and placed within the field of observation, measurement, and correction. The method that would later define modern science, empirical, mathematical, self revising, had found its first clear expression.
This transformation did not simply produce new knowledge. It altered the myth by which reality was understood. The medieval world had been held together by a living cosmology in which physical structure, spiritual meaning, and social order mirrored one another. When the Earth began to move and the body became an object of dissection, that unified symbolic system could no longer function as the literal description of the universe.
Yet myth did not disappear. Instead, it migrated.
In the same cultural environment in which the scientific worldview was being born, the images that would become the Tarot de Marseille were taking shape in printed form. The tarot preserves, in symbolic language, the older vision of a meaningful cosmos and the structured journey of the human soul within it. What had once been projected outward as the architecture of the heavens returned inward as a map of consciousness.
This parallel development reveals that the mid sixteenth century was not simply an age of disenchantment. It was a period in which two complementary modes of knowing separated from one another. The external world became the domain of science, quantifiable, observable, and infinite. The internal world remained the domain of symbol, expressed through art, esotericism, and the archetypal sequence of images such as the Major Arcana.
Seen in this light, the early arcana of the tarot offer a striking symbolic reflection of the historical moment. The Fool steps into the unknown, leaving behind the closed and certain world. The Magician stands at a table of tools, representing the new human figure who transforms reality through knowledge and technique, the astronomer, the anatomist, the printer, the navigator. The High Priestess guards hidden wisdom, now no longer guaranteed by tradition but waiting to be discovered. The Empress and the Emperor establish new forms of generation and order, echoing the creation of new intellectual and political systems. The Hierophant, figure of spiritual authority, stands at the point of crisis in a century marked by religious division and the questioning of inherited truth.
Even the numerical sequence present in the years 1542 and 1543, containing the digits one through five, can be read symbolically as a cycle of unity, polarity, creation, structure, and transformation. Historically this is coincidence, yet as an image it mirrors the process unfolding at the time. A beginning is made, an opposition emerges between old and new, a proliferation of ideas follows, new systems take shape, and established authority enters into crisis.
What closes in these years is not a calendar cycle but a two thousand year cosmology. What opens is the modern condition, a universe without a physical center, a body that can be studied as material structure, and a human being who must seek meaning not in a fixed cosmic hierarchy but in an ongoing journey of discovery.
Thus 1542 and 1543 can be understood as a turning of the world. The center of reality moves from a stable, given order to an open, dynamic process. The human being is no longer the axis of creation but becomes the explorer of an infinite external space and an equally complex inner one. Science and symbolism, once united in a single cosmology, begin their long divergence, one mapping the outer universe, the other charting the depths of the psyche.
In this sense, the mid sixteenth century marks not the end of myth but its transformation. The heavens become mathematical. The soul becomes archetypal. The authority of the past gives way to the experiment of the present. The world is no longer a completed structure but a journey, and the human being, like the Fool at the beginning of the tarot, steps forward into a reality that is vast, uncertain, and filled with the possibility of new knowledge.
The Song as Threshold: From 1542 to 1543
Read in the light of this historical transformation, the song Fifteen Forty-Two unfolds as an archetypal passage from one mode of being into another.
The refrain, “Fifteen forty-two … tick tock,” functions as a suspended present. It is a holding pattern, a temporal enclosure in which movement has not yet begun. This corresponds to the historical position of the year itself, the final instant in which the medieval cosmology still appears intact, even as the conditions for its transformation have already formed.
From far below, the signal starts A frequency within my heart A shape now gathers in the mind I leave the moving world behind
Here the center of orientation shifts from the external world to the interior field of perception. Authority is no longer located in the inherited structure of reality but in an emerging consciousness. This mirrors the epistemological transformation of the sixteenth century, in which knowledge begins to arise from observation, investigation, and the activity of the individual mind.
A moment frozen in the glass While waiting for the storm to pass A fire carried in my soul To give me form and keep me whole
The frozen moment evokes a world still enclosed in its old form, while the storm suggests the approaching upheavals of Reformation and scientific revolution. The fire in the soul becomes the new center, no longer the Earth at the middle of the cosmos, but the creative and perceptive human interior.
I drift upon the silent stream Awake inside a living dream The current slows, the vision clears Dissolving all the wasted years
This drifting corresponds to the Copernican condition. In a heliocentric universe the ground is no longer fixed. Everything is in motion. The human being awakens not at the center of a stable structure but within a dynamic and unfolding reality.
The second hand begins to flee A shift in my reality I blink my eyes and I can see It’s fifteen forty-three
Time, which had been suspended, accelerates. The universe moves. Perception changes. The passage from 1542 to 1543 becomes the symbolic equivalent of the transition from a closed, hierarchical cosmos to an open, infinite one.
In this sense the song enacts in miniature the same shift that occurs in the sixteenth century, the relocation of the center from an external, given order to an inner, experiential journey. What had once been expressed as the structure of the heavens becomes the movement of consciousness itself.
The ticking clock of the refrain is therefore not only the sound of time passing. It is the sound of a world on the threshold, the last second before motion, and the first second of a new reality.
A Second 1543
If the sixteenth century marked the moment when the Earth was removed from the center of the cosmos, our own time seems to be moving through an inverse recognition. Not a return to a medieval astronomy, but a return of centrality at another scale. The center is no longer a physical location in space. It is consciousness itself.
In recent years the language of awakening, transformation, and inner realignment has moved from the margins into the shared vocabulary of ordinary life. What was once the domain of mystics and initiatory traditions has become a lived experience for many. The structures that appeared fixed only a decade ago have begun to dissolve. Time accelerates. Identity becomes fluid. Meaning is no longer received from a stable external order but formed through direct encounter.
In this sense the present moment carries the atmosphere of another threshold. A new 1543.
The scientific revolution displaced humanity from the center of the physical universe. The transformation now unfolding restores the center, not to the Earth as an astronomical object, but to the human as a field of awareness. The axis of the world is no longer above or below. It is within.
Read from this perspective, the song becomes not only a meditation on a historical passage but a map of an initiation.
The opening refrain, repeating the number like a clock, marks the period of gestation. A life lived inside structures that are already beginning to lose their reality. The sense that something is about to change without yet knowing how.
Fifteen forty two. Tick tock.
The signal that rises “from far below” is the call of the deeper self. It does not arrive from the sky of authority but from the interior ground of being. The leaving of the moving world behind is not withdrawal from reality but withdrawal from a reality defined by external motion, expectation, and inherited identity.
The frozen glass is the suspended life. The storm is the necessary dissolution. The fire carried in the soul is the indestructible continuity of the self that passes through transformation without losing its form.
In the chorus the movement changes. Drifting upon the silent stream is the discovery that the current was always there. Awakening inside a living dream is the recognition that what we called the world is also a field of perception. The wasted years dissolve because time itself is reconfigured. Past and future lose their weight when the center is found in the present.
Then the moment arrives.
The second hand begins to flee.
In the historical sixteenth century this was the moment when the Earth began to move. In the personal and collective present it is the moment when identity begins to move. The fixed self dissolves. The inherited cosmology of the individual life is replaced by direct vision.
It is fifteen forty three.
This is not a date. It is a state of consciousness.
To say that we become the gods of old is not to claim dominion over the world but to remember the creative nature of awareness itself. In the ancient cosmologies the gods were not distant supernatural beings. They were personifications of forces that shaped reality. To rediscover that the shaping force is within perception, within imagination, within the heart, is to return to a form of centrality that the Copernican revolution could not abolish.
The Earth becomes the center again because the place in which we stand becomes the axis of meaning. Every point is the center when consciousness is present.
In this sense the movement from 1542 to 1543 is not finished. It is a recurring passage. A rhythm in history. A rhythm in individual lives.
There is always a suspended year in which the old structure still appears to hold. There is always a following year in which vision shifts and the universe begins to move.
The ticking of the refrain continues, but it is no longer the sound of time running out. It is the sound of emergence.
And the realization returns, not as history but as experience.
“Perhaps time exists only when we turn toward it and measure it. When we lose track of time, we find infinity.”
It was Sunday, February 15, 2026.
By the calendar of the visible world, it was an ordinary winter afternoon in Ontario — a grey sky, salt-streaked roads, the long patience of February. But by the archetypal climate in which I track the movement of unseen things, it was the fifteenth day: the day of Le Diable, unfolding inside a month governed by the silent authority of La Papesse.
I was driving.
Highway 6.
That peculiar state took hold — the one I am now very accustomed to — where the body drives with perfect competence while the mind drifts into a lucid elsewhere. The engine hummed beneath me, a continuous mechanical Om. Asphalt streamed backward. The world reduced itself to rhythm, to forward motion.
And then it arrived.
Not as a thought constructed through effort. Not as an argument.
It entered the car as a presence.
A realization about aging. About entropy. About the secret suspension hidden inside lived time.
I looked at the dashboard.
15:42
The digits burned green in the dim interior like coordinates.
The Anatomy of the Hour
Fifteen.
Le Diable.
Forty-two.
Four plus two is six: L’Amoureux.
Fifteen also reduces to six.
The hour itself revealed the image:
The Devil resting upon the Lovers.
But not the Devil of fear.
Pan.
The living god of instinct, music, desire, terror, and ecstatic dissolution — standing upon union, the binding force founded on love.
As the kilometers passed, the number opened further.
Six becomes four and two.
Four — L’Empereur the architecture of incarnation
Two — La Papesse the closed book, the silent gestation of knowledge
The moment was a nesting architecture:
Pan standing on Union whose skeleton was the Emperor holding the hidden book of the Papesse.
The Mirror of the Road
At the same time the outer world began to speak the same language.
I was on Highway 6 — the Lovers.
I was approaching Highway 403.
4 + 0 + 3 = 7 Le Chariot.
I was physically traveling from the Six to the Seven.
Union → Motion.
And the sum of the passage:
6 + 7 = 13
Arcanum sans nom.
Transformation. Reconfiguration. The rebuild after the fall.
The clock was time. The road was space.
Both were telling the same story.
The ramp between highways became the threshold between arcana.
Suspension in the hour. Transformation in the turn.
The Galactic Alignment
Later, when I cast the chart for that exact second — 15:42 — the heavens revealed their own architecture.
The Vertex stood at precisely the same degree, minute, and second as the Galactic Center:
27° 12′ 56″
The number unfolded into its own procession of presences:
27 — L’Hermite — Chronos the lantern of deep time
12 — Le Pendu — Orpheus my birth number the suspended one who sees by inversion the singer between worlds
56 → 11 — La Force — Artemis the calm hand that holds the lion without violence
And all of this in House Five:
the solar chamber the child creation for its own sake the place where time disappears because presence becomes complete.
The Mathematics of Suspension
The arithmetic of the hour completed the revelation.
1 + 5 + 4 + 2 = 12 15 + 42 = 57 → 12
Two paths. One result.
The entire configuration resolves into Le Pendu.
The suspended state.
The Orphic condition.
And with it came the theory in its simplest form:
Entropy feeds on resistance.
When we count time, when we fight it, when we measure ourselves against it, the ripples multiply and disorder grows.
But when we lose track of time — when we enter absorption, creation, love, play — the current slows.
The surface clears.
The aging of the soul and body halts.
The Passage Through the Ordinary
I carried the thought with me as the road changed beneath the car.
I spoke it to Karina while we were on the 403, the theory still fresh in my mind, the traffic moving around us in its steady mechanical procession. Saying it aloud for the first time altered its density. It had been a configuration; it became a sequence of human words.
Later, in the quiet of the house, I spoke it again to Clara in the dim light of her bedroom. The architecture of the heavens reduced itself to a shape that could be carried into sleep.
A thing must survive the ordinary world if it is to live.
Only afterward did I sit down to write. The article came first, the careful reconstruction of correspondences, the setting in place of each element of the moment. Then the song, which had been present from the beginning, waiting for the language of the day to complete its work.
When I finally looked at the clock, the work was finished.
3:43 a.m. I had lost track of time.
Exactly twelve hours after the hour in which the thought had arrived.
For twelve hours it had remained suspended — moving through speech, through motion, through the domestic evening, through the act of writing — and at the end of that duration it crossed its own threshold.
15:42 — the state of Twelve.
3:43 — the emergence of the Wheel of Fortune, the crossing into Thirteen.
The passage had taken place not only in symbol, but in lived time.
The Idea
My idea is that we all enter states in which we lose track of time. Sleep is the most obvious, but it is not the only one. There are other moments, when we are absorbed, when we drift, when we are so completely inside what we are doing that the hours fall away without leaving a mark.
I wonder if infinity lives inside those intervals.
Perhaps time exists only when we turn toward it and measure it. When we say that we have lost track of time, perhaps nothing has been lost. Perhaps in those stretches we have stepped outside the field in which time binds us. The body continues its quiet work, but whatever it is in us that tightens around the passing loosens its grip in those uncounted spaces.
I have been thinking a great deal about entropy, and this too seems to belong to the same pattern, in a ripples in the pond kind of way. When we lose track of time the surface grows still and the spreading slows. When we are under pressure, when we are upset, bored, or working against ourselves, the ripples multiply and break into smaller disturbances. Disorder seems to feed on resistance, and agitation produces more agitation.
This is not a statement of physics but an inner observation, a sense that some part of us frays more quickly when we are forced to inhabit time consciously and when every minute acquires weight.
What I am trying to say is simple.
If we could remain longer in those states where time falls away, where it is neither counted nor felt, then it might not shape us in the same way. We would still move forward, but more lightly, less marked by its passage.
The song commentary
Where the story lays out correspondences, the song performs the passage in lived time. It is constructed as a device that carries the listener from the measured world into the suspended state and then returns them, altered, to the flow of duration. It is constructed as a spell.
The Refrain — Naming the Gate
Fifteen forty-two / δεκαπέντε σαράντα δύο
The first act of the song is not narrative but invocation.
The number is spoken in two languages. In English it belongs to the clock, to the green digits on the dashboard, to the modern surface of time. In Greek it falls backward into the older current where number is not quantity but presence.
Between them:
Tick tock.
The sound of measurement becomes rhythm. The rhythm becomes trance. The listener is not yet outside time, but the mechanism that binds them to it has begun to change function. The clock is no longer counting; it is inducing.
The gate has been named.
Verse I — The Descent of the Signal
From far below, the signal starts…
The movement is downward, not upward.
This is the body, the road, the engine, the undercurrent beneath thought. The signal does not arrive from abstraction but from depth. It rises through the heart, takes shape in the mind, and in doing so releases the listener from the “moving world.”
This is the first loosening.
The Chariot continues, but the one inside it has stepped sideways out of its velocity.
Verse II — The Alchemical Chamber
A moment frozen in the glass…
The car becomes a vessel.
Outside: weather, traffic, the entropy of the visible world. Inside: suspension.
The “storm” is duration as pressure. The “fire carried in the soul” is the solar force of the Fifth House — the creative core that maintains form when external structure dissolves.
This is the state in which time continues but no longer accumulates.
The Refrains — The Pulse of the Threshold
Each return to
δεκαπέντε σαράντα δύο / Tick tock
is a tightening of the circle.
The listener is being trained. The number becomes familiar. The rhythm becomes bodily. The gate is no longer an idea — it is a place one can enter.
Repetition here is not emphasis. It is induction.
The Chorus — The Field of Twelve
I drift upon the silent stream…
This is the arrival at the number to which the hour reduces.
Twelve. Le Pendu. The suspension in which nothing advances and nothing is lost.
The “silent stream” is duration without measurement. The “living dream” is consciousness without resistance. The slowing of the current is the slowing of entropy as it is experienced from within.
“Wasted years” dissolve because they were never years — only the sensation of friction against the flow.
This is the state in which the theory becomes real.
The Soft Refrain — The Fading of the Mechanism
Tick tock, softer.
Time is still present, but its authority has been broken.
The listener has learned how to hear it differently.
The Realization — The Return Through Thirteen
The second hand begins to flee…
The spell cannot remain closed.
The world returns. Gravity resumes. The clock continues.
But the number has changed.
Fifteen forty-three. δεκαπέντε σαράντα τρία.
Thirteen.
Arcanum sans nom.
This is not death in the crude sense. It is reconfiguration — the form that emerges after suspension. The return to motion carrying the knowledge that motion is not binding.
The singer does not escape time.
The singer re-enters it having discovered the point at which it opens.
The Structure as Initiation
Heard in sequence, the song performs a complete operation:
The gate is named.
The signal descends.
The vessel is sealed.
The state of suspension is entered.
Time is heard differently.
The world returns in another form.
It is the passage from Twelve to Thirteen.
From hanging to transformation.
From duration as weight to duration as movement.
Why It Had to Be a Song
The story can describe the architecture of the moment.
Only the song can reproduce its condition.
Because the state it speaks of — the loss of measured time — cannot be argued into existence. It must be induced, rhythmically, in the body of the listener.
The song is the working model of the theory.
It is the gate that can be opened again.
Every time the number is spoken.
The Song: Fifteen Forty-Two
[Refrain] Fifteen forty-two δεκαπέντε σαράντα δύο Tick tock Tick tock
[Verse 1] From far below, the signal starts A frequency within my heart A shape now gathers in the mind I leave the moving world behind
[Refrain] δεκαπέντε σαράντα δύο Tick tock Tick tock
[Verse 2] A moment frozen in the glass While waiting for the storm to pass A fire carried in my soul To give me form and keep me whole
[Refrain] Tick tock tick tock
[Refrain] δεκαπέντε σαράντα δύο
[Chorus – bloom] I drift upon the silent stream Awake inside a living dream The current slows, the vision clears Dissolving all the wasted years
[Refrain – softer] Tick tock tick tock
[Verse – realization] The second hand begins to flee A shift in my reality I blink my eyes and I can see It’s fifteen forty-three (fifteen forty-three…) δεκαπέντε σαράντα τρία… (δεκαπέντε σαράντα τρία…)
Coda
I write this the way one records the conditions of a dream before it fades:
Le Diable in the month of La Papesse. The hour resolving into Twelve. The road resolving into Thirteen. Pan in the body of Ares above the book of Selene. Chronos lifting the lantern. Orpheus suspended. Artemis holding the current. House Five, the chamber of creation.
The thought did not arrive alone.
It arrived as an event in which time, suspension, motion, song, and transformation were all present at once.
And it continues — every time the number is spoken — to open the gate again.
A Myth of the Book of Life, the Floating Island, and the Birth that Found the Center
There is a way to tell time that has nothing to do with clocks.
Some people count hours and days. Others count cycles: storms, seasons, arguments, reconciliations, moments when everything spins, and moments when something finally holds.
This story is about one of those moments. A moment when the spinning found its center.
The World That Would Not Hold
Long ago, before cities, before temples, before anyone believed the earth was stable and round, there was a goddess named Leto.
Her name carries an old echo. Some say it is related to lēthē – forgetting, concealment, what is hidden beneath the surface. Leto is the veiled one. The quiet endurance. The mother who carries what is not yet visible.
She carried children inside her. Not ordinary children. Two forces that would change how the world moved: one would become the clarity of daylight, and the other would become the mastery of instinct, the guardian of wild boundaries.
But Leto had a problem that was not only personal. It was cosmic.
No place would receive her.
Not because she was evil. Not because she had done wrong. But because powerful jealousy and fear had spread a rule through the world: no solid land was permitted to give her safety.
So Leto wandered.
She was in pain. She was exhausted. She was desperate, because birth is not only creation. Birth is a demand: the world must make room.
And the world refused.
This is what it feels like when life is turning but cannot land, when anger is rising but cannot soften, when the body wants release but nothing offers ground.
It is not a clean “journey.” It is frantic and raw.
It is spinning and dizzying.
The Floating Island
Eventually Leto reached something that was not quite sea and not quite land: a drifting island named Delos.
Delos means “the visible,” “the revealed.” A strange name for a place that floated unnamed and unclaimed. It was as if revelation itself had not yet found ground.
Delos was not anchored. It floated.
That matters, because floating things are not fully claimed by laws of land. A floating island belongs to the threshold between worlds. It is not stable, but it is available.
Delos did not welcome Leto with warmth. Delos simply did not reject her.
And sometimes that is enough.
Leto stepped onto Delos – and even there she could not rest. The island moved beneath her. The world still had no center.
Now listen carefully, because this is where the myth becomes a map.
This story was not only set in an ancient world.
I discovered it in a particular year, at a precise time.
A year that carried three powers at once.
It was a century ruled by Discernment – the force that knows what must descend and what must rise again. The Greeks would have called her Persephone: she who has walked below and returned, and therefore can tell what belongs to shadow and what belongs to light.
It was a year governed by Fate – when the Wheel turns and the Moirai spin threads that bind beginnings to endings.
It was also a year marked by Law – not punishment, but balance. Themis, who measures what leans too far and restores proportion.
And the story came into speech on a day of the Wheel itself – a day when Fate was not abstract, but turning.
Discernment watching. Law measuring. Fate turning.
But more quietly than all three, this story was born in the month of the Papesse – the Keeper of the Book – whom we may understand as Selene, the Moon.
Selene’s name comes from selas – brightness, shining light. Not the harsh blaze of noon, but reflected illumination. She does not generate fire. She reveals what is already there.
She is older than judgment. Older than law. Older even than the spinning of threads.
She does not intervene. She illuminates.
She watches the tides rise and fall. She sees what the sun reveals too quickly and what darkness tries to conceal.
If Leto wandered under the turning of Fate, she wandered under the gaze of Selene – the primordial mother of reflected light before articulation, the silver witness before speech.
If the Wheel spun, it spun beneath Selene’s silver.
And on that day – the day of the Wheel – as midnight approached and the world stood on the cusp between turning and mastery, the Moon did not blink.
Because she knew.
She knew that Fate must turn. She knew that Law must hold. She knew that Discernment must separate what ends from what begins.
But she also knew that there is a moment when the spinning finds its center.
In the year of this telling, Fate was turning strongly. Law was weighing everything. Discernment was not punishing – but deciding.
So Leto’s labor did not happen in an empty universe.
It happened under three pressures at once:
Fate turning the Wheel. Law holding the scale. Discernment separating ending from beginning.
All under the watchful eye of Selene.
And Leto felt all three as pain.
The Keeper of the Book
And above this turning world – quiet, still, and watching – there sat another figure.
She is not a goddess in the usual sense, and not a queen, and not a judge. She is something older and stranger:
the Papesse – the Keeper of the Book.
If you have never heard of her, imagine this:
A woman seated in stillness, holding an open book in her lap. She does not shout commands. She does not chase people. She does not strike.
She knows.
Her power is not force. Her power is not speed. Her power is hidden knowledge, and something even more important:
She knows that the world can be read more than one way.
Most people think a book must be read forward: page one, then page two, then page three – always marching toward the end.
But the Papesse holds a different kind of book.
Her book is written so that when you read it backward, the meaning becomes deeper.
Not because forward is wrong – but because forward is not the only path.
The Book Written Backward
In the Papesse’s open book, the pages are not numbered in the usual way.
One page is marked by Law. The next page is marked by Time.
Law measures. Time passes.
But in the Papesse’s book, these pages are arranged so that the reader can move backward -from Law to Time, from time to deeper forces, all the way toward origin.
To understand this, imagine entropy – the way things naturally scatter, disorder increases, people lose their calm, and arguments split into a hundred sharp pieces.
Forward motion often increases entropy.
But what if the Papesse’s book does the opposite?
What if turning her pages backward is a way of reversing scattering?
A way of gathering what has been torn apart?
A way of returning to what was whole before it fractured?
This is the Papesse’s secret:
the origin is not ahead of you. The origin is behind you.
Not behind you in the past as nostalgia behind you as a deeper layer of reality, beneath the noise.
And the path to it is not by pushing forward harder, but by turning the page.
The Cry Before Midnight
Leto’s labor reached its breaking point near midnight – on the cusp between two states of the world:
the state where everything spins without center
and the state where something finally holds
That cusp is the razor-edge between Fate turning blindly and mastery entering the world.
Leto screamed.
Not politely. Not poetically. The scream of a living being who cannot be denied.
And in that screaming, another sound appeared – at first barely audible:
A whisper.
Not one whisper. Many.
Because when things fall apart, language falls apart too. People shout in different tongues. Meaning scatters.
So the whisper came in several voices – five streams searching for one channel:
Turn the page. Tourne la page. Γύρνα τη σελίδα. Verte paginam. Întoarce pagina.
At first they were buried beneath the fight.
Like a child crying while anger fills a room. Like a thought that tries to rise when the body is overwhelmed.
But the whisper persisted.
It grew louder and louder, not because it became violent, but because it became aligned.
The fighting was chaos. The whisper was instinct attempting to become center.
The Turn That Changes the World
The Papesse heard the whisper.
And she did not calm Leto with words.
She did not erase pain.
She simply did what she always does:
She placed her fingers on the edge of the open page and she turned it backward.
Not forward into more scattering. Backward toward origin.
In that one motion, something changed.
The sea did not stop being sea. Fate did not stop turning. Law did not cease measuring. Discernment did not disappear.
But the world gained a hub.
The floating island remembered that it could be still.
Delos anchored.
The waters gathered around it the way a spinning wheel gathers around its center when the axle finally locks.
The Birth of Artemis
And then Artemis was born.
Her name is mysterious. Some link it to meanings like “unharmed,” “safe,” or “whole.” Others hear in it something intact and untamed. Whatever its origin, it carries the sense of that which cannot be easily violated.
Not as softness. Not as decoration. Not as a dream.
She was born as the first act of mastery.
In the old world, force was wild anger with no direction. In the new world, force became something else:
instinct held with grace. power that does not destroy. strength that becomes steadiness.
Artemis did not silence the lion of rage by killing it. She held it.
She did not end the turning. She centered it.
This is why her birth matters.
It is not only the arrival of a goddess.
It is the moment the world learns:
There is a difference between spinning and choosing.
And the first step to stability is not to deny force, it is to redirect it.
It is to turn the page.
Artemis Helps Apollo Be Born
Only after Artemis was born could Leto finish the labor.
Only after instinct had arrived could clarity arrive.
The second child was Apollo – whose name has been linked to light, to shining, to driving away darkness. He is articulation. Song. The sun that names what the moon has already revealed.
Before you can reason, you must regulate. Before you can speak clearly, you must find ground. Before Apollo’s light can rise, Artemis must anchor the land.
Artemis is that ground.
Apollo is what comes after.
The Fool at the Beginning and the End
The Papesse closes her book, and you might think the story ends.
But her book never truly ends.
At the beginning of her book is the Fool – wild, laughing, wandering, uncontained. At the end of her book is the Fool again – still wandering, but now returned to wholeness.
The same figure.
Different meaning.
The journey is not a straight line. It is not “progress” as accumulation.
It is return.
You begin as unshaped life. You scatter. You fight. You lose the ground.
And then, if you are lucky, you hear the whisper.
And you turn the page backward not to undo your life, but to recover the origin that was never destroyed.
The Phrase That Crosses Generations
And here the myth touches my human world.
Because there is a phrase that belongs to this story.
A father once said it to his daughters when they were overwhelmed, angry, wild with feeling:
“Turn the page.”
And later, when the father was overwhelmed, the daughters returned it to him:
“Dad… turn the page.”
That is how the Papesse’s knowledge moves through the world.
Not in lectures. Not in commandments.
In a simple sentence that becomes a ritual.
In a whisper that grows until it becomes clear.
In an instinct that becomes mastery.
In a page turned backward toward origin.
And that is why, on a night balanced between turning and mastery, the world found Delos, and Artemis was born.
Because somewhere inside chaos, a whisper learns to become the center:
Turn the page.
And then came the song: “Turn the Page”
Turn the Page
Cold in my bones. Fire in my chest. Pieces scattered. No place to rest.
The song does not retell the myth directly. Instead, it inhabits its inner movements.
The opening spoken lines — “Cold in my bones. Fire in my chest. Pieces scattered. No place to rest.” — establish the condition before anchoring. The body is divided between freezing and burning. There is no stable ground. This mirrors Leto’s wandering and the floating island before it holds. The experience is not abstract fate, but lived fragmentation.
In Verse 1, the imagery widens:
“The center breaks, the edges fly.”
This is the moment when structure collapses. The “center” is no longer secure; the “edges” are no longer contained. The world becomes centrifugal. The dissolving ground and freezing heat describe the contradiction of overwhelming external conditions assaulting internal warmth.
Verse 2 intensifies the instability. Gravity fails. The heart tears “through the veil.” The veil here is not mystical decoration; it is the thin membrane between coherence and collapse. To tear through it is to lose orientation. There is motion without landing. Shattered dust, shifting sand. This is the Wheel turning without a hub.
The Chorus introduces the first act of agency:
“Turn the page to seize the spin.”
The choice is not to stop the motion, but to seize it, to redirect it. The path is described as “neither left nor right,” which rejects dualistic reaction. Instead, it goes “in the dark, away from light.” This is a descent before ascent. It echoes the mythic truth that Artemis, instinct mastered, arrives before Apollo’s light.
The Greek line, Γύρνα τη σελίδα, reinforces the command. It is both translation and intensification. The repetition across languages suggests that the instinct to reorient is not confined to one culture or one voice.
Verse 3 introduces the turning point:
“Inside the storm, a shape appears.”
The shape is not yet defined. It is possibility emerging within chaos. A moment of clarity and hope. It bears fear; it becomes a point inside drift. This is Delos before anchoring, something not yet solid, but no longer nothing.
The chant that follows returns the listener to the rhythm of fragmentation. The spinning has not vanished; it is being reorganized.
The spoken interlude — “What is that? Where am I?” — is a moment of cognitive reset. It acknowledges disorientation honestly. It does not pretend clarity has already arrived.
Verse 4 answers quietly:
“A whisper cuts the noise in two.”
The whisper is instinct. It is not louder than the storm, but it is sharper. It reveals “a tiny path,” not a highway. Stability begins small. The drifting land inside the sea becomes a place “to set my spirit free” — not by escaping the storm, but by finding footing within it.
The Bridge makes the internal transformation explicit:
“I plant my feet. The world reforms.”
The reforming of the world is not a miracle imposed from outside; it is the consequence of planting one’s feet. The center is recovered. The hub is found beneath the storm.
The single line, “Turn the page,” after silence, functions as the birth moment. It is no longer frantic. It is declarative.
In the final verse, force is no longer destructive:
“The lion rests. The fire obeys.”
Rage is not erased; it is mastered. The moon stands watch, instinct remains vigilant. Only then does the sun rise. Clarity follows grounding. Light follows stability.
“I found my grace. I turned the page.”
Grace here is not softness. It is balance regained. It is the condition in which force and clarity can coexist without tearing the center apart.
The song, taken as a whole, traces a movement from fragmentation to anchoring, from scattered edges to centered presence. It dramatizes the mythic pattern in personal terms: instability, whisper, choice, grounding, and renewal.
Each time the page is turned, the world does not change completely. It re-centers.
And that is enough.
A Note on Return to Origin
I once read an article about the most common Romanian swear word and how, stripped of aggression, it can be understood as something else entirely—a crude but direct command to return to origin.
Du-te-n pizda mă-tii.
Not as insult. As mythic instruction.
Go back to where you came from. Return to the source. Reset to origin.
If anyone ever finds that article again, send it to me.
Because sometimes wisdom hides in places polite language avoids.
Turn the Page
Somewhere inside chaos, a whisper learns to become the center:
Turn the page. Γύρνα τη σελίδα.
And on a night balanced between turning and mastery, the floating island anchored, the world found its hub—
I have been thinking quite a bit about you. I wonder where you are and what you are up to. I like to think that if you could, you would come back and fill me in from time to time. Maybe you are, in some strange way. I want to tell you a story. The story of a song I wrote the other day, the story of the birth of “Levels of Pain.” If I am honest, it feels less like something I created and more like something we uncovered together, as if it had been waiting beneath the surface of our lives.
It began with pain, real visceral pain. It began with a ski trip beneath a pale winter sky, with breath turning to frost in the cold air, and with a question.
A question that unraveled memory. A question that carried me back to the hospital, this time with you as the patient. A question that summoned the late night conversations we shared in the quiet corridors of Juravinski Hospital. A question that thinned the veil of time.
It was a question I was asked again and again in the sterile glow of hospital rooms after my motorcycle accident on May 29, 2023. A question that followed me through shattered bone and failed surgeries, through long nights when pain stretched the hours into something without edge or mercy.
And it was the same question that returned in the final months of your life, spoken softly beside your bed, rising through the hum of machines and the fragile rhythm of borrowed breath.
“On a scale from one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”
At first it felt practical. A number. A box to be checked. A way to measure something that refuses all measure.
But over time it became something else. It became a rhythm. A ladder rising through shadow. A language we both had to learn.
A language we came to speak fluently. A language written in breath and bone. A language many of us carry, whether we wish to or not.
There are so many things I want to tell you. And I am late in telling them.
I meant to say them while there was still time. But you went quickly. Priorities shifted overnight. The days narrowed. And somehow, I ran out of time.
I tried to say what I could by simply being there. By sitting beside you in those final stretches of the road. By showing up as often and as long as I could.
I remember how you told me that you had not been a good father. That you had not imparted any great lessons. That there was nothing you could point to and say, “My children know this because I taught it to them.” No grand teachings. No clear inheritance of wisdom.
You were wrong.
At least for me, you were there in the ways that matter most. You were always my Plan B, whether you knew it or not. And that is no small thing. Plan B is salvation when Plan A collapses. It is the quiet assurance that if the ground gives way, someone will still be standing. It is the lifeline that allows a person to take risks, to grow, to step into the unknown without being consumed by it.
It is the safety net so many never have. You were pure strength for me. I saw you as invincible.
Plan B
I think you taught me that lesson when I was very young, in a way that was anything but abstract. I am sure you remember our boat trip on the River Lăpuș in Romania, when our inflatable boat wrapped around a tree and hurled us into the wild current.
I do not remember everything. Memory from that age is scattered and fragmented. But I remember calling for you. I remember you being there. I remember your hands pulling me out of the water. I remember the blood on your legs from the stones you threw yourself onto to reach me.
Most of all, I remember feeling safe.
In that moment, without speeches or instruction, you showed me what it means to be there. Not conditionally. Not conveniently. But completely.
You taught me that lesson again years later, when I left home to live with Mom without telling you. I do not remember that period as a happy one or a sad one for that matter. But I remember that morning in Bucharest, when I walked toward school and saw you there. You had tracked me down. You had found me.
I think that may be one of the happiest and most formative memories I carry. I had missed you more than I knew how to say.
I remember seeing you there, smiling, your arms wide open. I remember running toward you without hesitation, throwing myself into your embrace. I remember the feeling of being lifted, of being gathered in.
I remember pure joy.
I tried to tell you some of these things during those long hospital nights. I remember thinking they deserve to be written, to be set down in the form of a letter. I meant to do it then. Instead, I am writing it now.
And even as I write, the question returns and echoes in my mind. “How would you rate your pain?”
It is not physical pain I am listening to now. It is something quieter. Thinking of you. A pain of the soul. A pain of time, maybe, and the strange distance it keeps placing between us. Not only the distance of death, but the distance of forgetting. Each day I am sure there are small things that slip away. Your face. Your smile. The little habits that used to annoy me. The exact sound of your voice when you were amused, or annoyed, or critical of something. I fear that one day you will be only an outline, a passing thought, or perhaps not even that. I do not know. My memory has never been reliable over the long haul.
But pain has a way of becoming memory. It roots us. It steadies us. It builds its own kind of fortress within us. What is carved in pain is rarely forgotten. So I will use this pain to carve memories of you, to hold them and treasure them and keep them with me. I will use pain as an anchor, a way of binding your life to mine. And I have plenty of it, in every single step.
And I return to the question. “On a scale from one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”
When I lay in that hospital bed after my motorcycle accident, when the surgeries failed, when the hardware broke and the pain refused to loosen its grip, I answered that question honestly. Sometimes through clenched teeth. Sometimes in exhaustion. Sometimes not knowing what number could possibly contain what I was feeling.
And then, not long ago, I stood beside your bed and heard them ask you the same thing.
Christmas morning
I remember your face behind the oxygen mask. I remember how tired you looked, and how you still tried to be strong when you answered. I remember the exhaustion in you, the kind that sits deeper than the body. I remember when you asked me to take a photo of you that Christmas morning, on your last day. It was the last photo I took of you while you were still yourself. As distressing as it is to look at, I will treasure it. Thank you for asking me to take it. I do not think I would have otherwise.
I do not know why you asked. You seemed almost amused by the situation you were in, as if you could still stand a little outside it and watch it with humor. Maybe you thought we would look at it later and laugh. Maybe you knew I would need it. A proof of your courage. A reminder of how brave you were, that last day, stepping into the unknown.
I remember the distress when they hooked you up to the larger oxygen machine. I wonder now what I would have done if I had known it was your last day. I wonder if I would have spoken differently, touched your hand longer. Part of me, I am ashamed to admit, was annoyed about missing Christmas dinner.
I remember every time you struggled to pee that day. I remember how hard it was for you, how each attempt became another small battle, and how often nothing happened at all. I think I had a hunch it would be soon. I think some part of me even welcomed it, not because I wanted you gone, but because I could not bear watching you fight for every breath. I hated that you could not find a moment of peace.
I wanted them to sedate you and intubate you so you would not have to fight anymore. You did not want that. I think you made up your mind after being on that machine that you did not want any more interventions like that. You wanted to go out on your terms.
I am glad Karina brought the girls to see you. I do not know what they will remember, or what it will mean to them later on, but I hope that visit meant something to you, and that some part of you felt held by it.
I am grateful for those last moments when the drugs gave you some relief and I like to think I even saw you smile one more time. I will remember the last words you spoke, “Hai sa mai dormim un pic!” “Let’s get some more sleep.” I will always remember the awkward heart you tried to shape with your hands, the one that looked more like an infinity symbol than a heart. I will remember your warm hands. Always warm.
Only now I begin to understand how tightly our stories had braided together, and how our shared pain gave rise to this letter, and to the song.
The ski trip
It seems I needed this ski trip. One more reminder, perhaps at a critical time, before forgetting could fully settle in. A time to inscribe something into the book of my life. A reminder. Not the kind that breaks bone or steals breath, but something smaller and sharper. A fresh edge of physical pain to bring me back into that familiar landscape. And again, it arrived through the bond between parent and child.
This time, I was the father.
On a beautiful and frigid morning, February 1, 2026, I took my daughter, Clara, skiing. She is nine years old. Probably the same age I was when we went on our boat trip.
The sky was impossibly blue, the snow bright as glass. The air was sharp with cold, yet the sun hung warm and steady above us. Her excitement was palpable. It reminded me of a few moments from my own childhood when joy felt that pure and uncomplicated.
I remember one in particular. After my appendix operation, you took me with you on a work trip. We ate at a restaurant, and it felt like an adventure. I remember how special that small thing felt. How seen I felt.
Clara was laughing, buzzing with energy, eager to spend the day with her dad on the slopes. So off we went. She was excited, and I was worried.
Getting my foot into the ski boot was its own quiet battle. The bones never healed properly. The hardware that remains inside me shifts and presses where it should not. I knew the risk. I knew the cost. But I wanted to stand beside her on that hill. I wanted to give her that small joy. I wanted to be there with her, to teach her, to guide her.
The walk to the hill felt like light fighting a war against the Klingon Empire. I was sweating in minus ten degrees, heat rising from a body under siege. Pain has a strange way of making you feel both overheated and hollow at the same time.
Time began to dilate in that familiar way. The short walk stretched into something endless. Pain is a powerful alchemist. It thickens the air. It slows the clock. Add enough of it, and a moment can feel like eternity.
We made it to the hill. The ten minute wait for the chairlift felt like hours. I imagined the ride up might bring some relief, a brief reprieve from the pressure. It did not. If anything, it sharpened the ache. The boot pressed against bone that never healed, against metal that still lives where it should not. Whether my foot rested on the snow or hung suspended in the air made little difference. The pain remained steady, indifferent to gravity.
We made three small runs.
With each descent, the pain climbed. It tightened around my ankle, then around my breath. By the third run, I could barely speak. I recognized the territory. I had lived there before.
And then something unexpected happened.
She looked at me carefully and said, with a calm I did not expect from someone so young, that we could go home, that we should go home. She had tears in her eyes. She said she did not like seeing me in pain. That it made her sad. She said we did not have to stay. She told me that she loves spending time with me. She knows how to ski already, and she loves that she learned from me. She told me we could find something else to do together. Maybe a project in the garage.
There was no drama in her voice. No disappointment. Only care.
It was not like the river. There was no current pulling us under. No blood on stones. But in a quieter and more profound way, she was the stronger one that day.
So we packed up and went home. She came with me to the mechanic for an oil change on the van. While we waited, we sat in the car and played Sudoku on my phone. I showed her little tips and tricks, and she listened carefully, determined to get it right.
She remembers that afternoon fondly. She says we did Sudoku together at the mechanic and that it was fun. She was so patient, so focused, even in a place that would bore most nine year olds within minutes.
It was not the adventure she expected, but it became one she treasures anyway.
There was something beautiful about that ordinary moment. No heroics. No rescue. Just presence.
In some quiet way, our roles shifted that day. I saw myself again as a child, looking toward you. And I saw her looking toward me, her father, measuring something she could not yet name.
I find myself hoping that I can inspire in her what you inspired in me. That sense of security. That quiet certainty that there is always a Plan B. Not just as a father marked by pain, limited in the things I can do. Not only as the careful man with the broken foot.
But as someone steady. Someone she can lean on without hesitation.
It is strange to look at myself through her eyes, and through yours. The lines begin to overlap, as if time folds in on itself. Father and son. Father and daughter. Patterns repeating across generations, only revealing their shape when we step back far enough to see them.
The landscape of pain
Going back to this idea of pain, I had known pain before. Small encounters and larger ones. Do you remember the plantar wart on the bottom of my right foot that I carried for seven years. That was a long test of endurance.
I remember a particularly brutal episode on a New Year’s Eve in Cuba. The infection set in. Red streaks climbed up my leg toward the knee. The doctors would not touch it. They gave me antibiotics, but the pain became something primal. It narrowed the world to a single point of pressure.
Relu managed to get razor blades, and I cut open the sole of my foot. I was desperate for relief. When the pressure finally released and the infection drained, the relief was immediate, almost shocking.
CORRECTION (2026-02-06): Look above for a moment. Notice the name Relu. A small side note, just to prove how unreliable my memory can be. Karina read this post this morning and informed me that it was not Relu who got me the razor blades. It was her. But, just like President Trump, President Karina also never gets any credit either. 🙂
Even with all of that in the rear view mirror, what came after the accident was something else entirely. It was not an episode. It was not a sharp crisis with a beginning and an end. It was a landscape. And I was not prepared for it.
Do you remember how we used to joke that after you were gone, I would still see you riding your motorcycle ahead of me. I actually do sometimes. I miss the bike. I miss our rides.
Karina once told me that I am free to get back on the bike if I want, but if I fall again, she is not staying for part two. There was a saying she used. Something about fool me once, fool me twice. I cannot remember the exact words, but I understood the meaning.
It may be that my riding days are over. It may be that the motorcycle has served its purpose. It may be that it will never hold the same appeal without you.
I remember how you reacted when I told you I was getting my motorcycle license. You were excited like a child on Christmas morning. I remember the first motorcycle I bought and the first time I let you ride it. You were so eager to get on. The speed took you by surprise and for a second I thought you might crash into a parked car. You came back grinning anyway, lit up by it. You were so excited to get your own license. It was not that you had never had the opportunity before. It was that the idea of doing it together sparked something in you.
Your first instinct was to jump on the bandwagon. As I remember it, you got your license shortly after me. And that is how we became riding buddies.
I never really rode with anyone else apart from the occasional ride with Karina. And you did not either.
Perhaps it was never only about the road. Or the machines. Perhaps it was always about freedom. About riding together. About choosing movement and horizon.
I think that was always the part I looked forward to most. The time we spent. The camping. The stops between stretches of asphalt.
I have been thinking about our last motorcycle camping adventure. It was supposed to be a long ride through Ontario and Quebec. Instead, it became a short trip to a provincial park, where we stayed for all the days we had planned.
On our way there I noticed my rear tire was in terrible shape. The tread was gone in places. I could see the wire mesh showing through. It was not safe to ride, and I could not find a replacement. On the way home, I wrapped duct tape around the tire to keep it from wearing down further. I like to think it helped.
It was a great trip. Not because of the miles we rode. Not because of the road itself. That part was quieted by the tension of the failing tire. But because we stayed.
We fished. We talked. We cooked. We sat around the fire. We did forest things. Camping things. The simple rituals that stretch time and soften it.
Now that you are gone, I wonder if it is time to let go of the motorcycle. I do not know when or where I would ride again. Perhaps in another life.
Maybe I will take up horseback riding instead. Something even wilder. Something freer. A partnership in motion, where the road is not faced alone.
The accident
These thoughts bring me back to the day of the accident, and to that last trip we took together.
As always, you were riding ahead of me on that warm day in May. I was close behind when disaster struck. It was beautiful out. A perfect day. We had just crossed into New York State and put our helmets on. Up to that point we had been riding without them. I had music in my headphones, and I remember exactly what was playing. An ABBA song, “Mamma Mia.” I have not listened to it since. Writing this now, I stopped and played it again for the first time since that day, and it felt like opening a sealed room. The lyrics in particular were striking for me. Give it a listen when you have a chance. Here is the link.
I remember the moment I hit the ground, the motorcycle bucking and flying out from under me. I remember looking at my right foot and thinking, with strange calm, that it looked wrong. It was pointing the other way. My first instinct was practical, almost absurdly so. Turn it back. I remember pausing, trying to decide which direction to rotate it. I had to trace the creases of the skin to find the right orientation, like a person trying to solve a small puzzle while the world is on fire. Then I did it.
The next order of business was to get off the road. That proved harder. I took inventory of my limbs. They were all there, but they were not cooperating. I seemed to have my left hand, so I started to move the only way I could, squirming in a kind of worm fashion. I remember thinking it was comical. I remember thinking, very clearly, that I would not enjoy being a worm.
I was not afraid at that time. I was not even in pain at first. My thoughts were of you. I was worried you would blame yourself. I asked you not to. I told you I was at peace with what happened. I meant it then. I mean it now.
The accident did not take something from me without giving something back. It taught me patience. It taught me endurance. It taught me humility. It slowed me down in ways I did not know I needed. It changed how I see my daughters and Karina. It changed how I measure strength. It changed a great many things.
I would not undo it.
So when you told me, near the end, that my accident was your greatest source of guilt and regret, my heart broke in a way I did not expect. Not because of the accident, but because you carried that weight alone, even after I tried to take it from you. I suppose I should have known that guilt often works that way. We make our own punishments, and then we carry them.
Micu, I need you to hear this again.
You did not take anything from me. You did not ruin anything. You did not fail me.
You rode four hours home, then four hours back, then four hours again. You did not sleep. You just showed up. That is who you were. Steady. Responsible. Quietly strong.
If there was pain in our story, it was not your fault. It was part of the road. Part of life. Part of being human.
When I wrote “Levels of Pain,” I realized something. The scale from one to ten is not just about suffering. It is about endurance. It is about love that refuses to step away. It is about parents and children standing beside each other in hospital rooms and on highways and ski hills.
It is about breath.
You rode ahead of me once. I stood beside you at the end.
We walked each other through our hardest numbers.
And I carry that with gratitude, not regret.
There is something about the human condition. I do not think we ever experience life without some level of pain, physical or otherwise. When I wrote the song, I first set the scale from three to ten because I suspect most of us live our days at three. Not absent of pain, just living with a low hum of it, so familiar we stop naming it.
Pain can be damage, but it can also be memory. It marks the places that mattered. It presses experience into the body so it will not drift away. And without pain, happiness would be harder to recognize, because contrast is part of how we see. Pain comes in many forms, sharp and dull, brief and lasting, physical and invisible. It does not only hurt. It measures us, even as we try to measure it.
Timing, Tarot, and the second melody line
I want to reflect a little on the timing of this letter through the lens of mythology and the Tarot de Marseille. I do not offer this as proof of anything. I offer it the way I have offered everything else here, as pattern, as resonance, as a way of giving the days a second melody line.
I wrote the song on February 2, 2026. Two is the day of II, La Papesse. I associate her with Selene, the Moon, and with the hidden book, the book of life that is written quietly in the dark. The Papesse does not perform. She keeps the record. She holds what is secret, what is true, what is remembered beneath the noise. It feels as if that day I wrote a page in our book of life, a page to remember, set down under a Titaness of the moon.
On the 3rd, a day of III, L’Impératrice, the Empress, whom I associate with Demeter, I began writing this letter. That also feels right. Demeter is the life of the world. She is the green force that insists. She is the seasons. She is descent and return. She is the mother who searches. If the Papesse is the book, Demeter is the living ink. She is what makes memory fertile instead of sterile. She is what turns grief into something that can feed us.
On the 4th, a day of IIII, L’Empereur, whom I link to Ares and Mars, the structure of the world, I took a break from the letter. The Emperor is the frame. The boundary. The bones under the body. If Demeter is the feminine aspect of life, Mars is the masculine principle of form. The part of us that builds, measures, stabilizes. It makes sense to me that on the Emperor’s day I stepped away from the raw, inward work of writing, and turned toward making something that could be held.
That was the day I worked on a different project that had been lingering in my mind. I designed a program to create a life signature. I started from a simple idea. We are born at a specific spot on the planet. Over a lifetime we travel from place to place, and our path leaves a trail. But that trail is not drawn on a still map. The Earth rotates on its axis. It circles the Sun. The Sun and our solar system travels through the galaxy. A human life is not only a line across countries. It is a curve through moving space, a thread laid into a spinning world.
So I created a mathematical program that, given coordinates and dates and times, traces a person’s path to create a life signature. This is what came up. A spiral within a spiral. Here is the photo.
This is what I did on the 4th day. The Emperor’s work. Turning motion into form. Turning a life into a mark.
And now, on the 5th day, a day of V, Le Pape, whom I associate with Hermes, I am writing you this letter and this interpretation. That also feels fitting. Hermes is the messenger and the translator. The one who can move between worlds without getting lost. The one who knows the roads. The one who carries words across thresholds. If there is an archetype that can gather all of this and bind it into something communicable, it is Hermes. He is the bridge between the living and the dead, between the raw experience and the story we make from it.
It seems right that Hermes would wrap this small project. He is the one who seals it, not with finality, but with passage.
I will make the program public as well. My intent is to use a laser to engrave your life signature onto a piece of metal. Something durable. Something that can be touched. A physical emblem of the trail you left through this moving world. Not a tombstone, but a talisman. Not an ending, but a mark that says, you were here, and your path still shapes mine.
Lyrics
In the end, I want to leave the lyrics here in the body of this letter, the way you might press a leaf into a book.
LEVELS OF PAIN
Intro
Tell me, on a scale from one to ten, how would you rate your pain?
Verse 1
We’re born with lungs that have to learn, From fluid into breath we turn, Before we know what living means, We gasp in pain between the seams.
Chorus
One to three begins the game, Four to seven feeds the flame, After seven, night begins, Time expands to hear my screams.
Ladder
One. Is where the pain begins.
Two. The baseline settles in.
Three. Is normal for us all.
Four. Is where I can’t ignore.
Five. I feel I lost my spark.
Six. Has led me to the dark.
Seven. I can’t even speak.
Eight. I lost my way to think.
Nine. There is so little sleep.
Nine point five. I lost my fear.
Ten. I can feel the end is near.
Verse 2
Me and you, we are old friends, In a loop that never ends, Some will say you’re teaching me, I would ask you, let me be.
Chorus
One to three begins the game, Four to seven feeds the flame, After seven, night begins, Time expands to hear my screams.
Verse 3
Am I dreaming while awake? Is this body real or fake? If we suffer just to live, What is left for us to give?
Outro
Release me.
What it means to me
It begins where the hospital begins, with that dry clinical question that pretends pain is a number you can hold still long enough to measure. One to ten. As if suffering were a neat line. As if it rose politely. As if a person could translate the whole storm of the body into a single digit without losing the truth of it.
But I also understand why they ask it. When you are standing at the edge of someone else’s suffering, you need a bridge. You need a shared language. You need a scale, because without a scale you are helpless. The question is not cruel. It is the best tool medicine has for something that cannot be seen.
And yet, for me, that question became a doorway. Because pain is not only physical. Pain is emotional. Pain is memory. Pain is the way the soul keeps score. Pain is also the way time announces itself. Time passes, and the body and heart register it.
Verse 1 goes all the way back to the beginning, because pain begins at the beginning. Birth itself is the first threshold. We come out of fluid into air, out of the womb into the world, and the first proof that we are alive is a gasp. Before we have language, we have lungs. Before we have meaning, we have sensation. The song says, even before we know what living means, we are already learning pain. Not as punishment, but as initiation. We arrive through strain. We arrive through rupture. We arrive through the seam.
Then the chorus lays down its mythic structure. One to three begins the game. That is the low hum of ordinary human life. The background ache, the small griefs, the compromises, the wear and tear, the quiet disappointments, the bruises we do not name. It is the pain we get so used to that we forget it is there.
Four to seven feeds the flame. This is where pain stops being background and starts taking the foreground. This is where it begins to narrow the world. Four is the moment you cannot ignore it. Five is the moment you feel something in you dim. Six is the moment the horizon darkens. Seven is the moment your voice leaves you. It is not only that it hurts. It is that it changes who you are allowed to be.
After seven, night begins. That line is true in a way that almost scares me. Past a certain point, pain is not just sensation. It becomes a country you live in. It bends time. Minutes stretch. The body becomes the only universe. The mind becomes a room with no windows. Time expands to hear my screams is not exaggeration. Anyone who has suffered knows it. Pain dilates time the way the Moon pulls tides. It makes a day feel endless. It makes a night feel like a life.
Then comes the Ladder, which is the part of the song that feels most like a spell. Counting is what you do when you cannot do anything else. Counting is how you stay present. Counting is how you endure. Each number is a rung. Each rung is a condition of the self.
One is where the pain begins. Not dramatic, just the first signal. Two is the baseline. The pain becomes part of the background. Three is normal, the line that terrifies me the most, because it suggests we can live at three and call it life. Four is the moment denial ends. Five is the loss of spark, the loss of ease, the loss of the self you thought you were. Six is the dark, where you begin to bargain with reality. Seven is the loss of speech, when your suffering becomes too concentrated to translate. Eight is the loss of thought, when even the mind cannot hold the shape of it. Nine is the loss of sleep, and without sleep, the walls thin. Nine point five is the moment fear leaves. That one matters to me. It is not that things are better. It is that fear no longer has room. Something else takes over, something cold and clear. A kind of surrender. I have lost my fear a number of times now. I have been at nine point five. Ten is the end being near. Not always death, but an ending. A threshold. A cliff edge. A point where something has to change.
That is what I heard in you at the end. Not only pain, but the movement through pain. The way the self is pared down. The way dignity becomes smaller and more luminous. The way the will chooses what it will and will not endure.
Verse 2 is where the song speaks directly to pain as if it were a person. Me and you, we are old friends. That line is honest, and it makes me angry too, because it is true. Pain returns. Pain loops. Some will say it teaches. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it only takes. So the line I would ask you, let me be is the prayer at the center of the song. Not a noble prayer. A human one. The plea for a quiet life. The plea for mercy.
Verse 3 turns surreal, because severe pain is surreal. Am I dreaming while awake. Is this body real or fake. When the nervous system is on fire, reality becomes questionable. You can feel disembodied. You can feel trapped. You can feel like you are watching your own suffering from a strange distance, like a person in a dream trying to wake up.
And then the hardest question in the song lands. If we suffer just to live, what is left for us to give?
That is not a philosophical question. It is a bedside question. It is the question a person asks when the cost of staying alive begins to exceed the resources they have left to pay with. It is the question you were approaching, whether you said it out loud or not. It is the question I was forced to touch when I watched you fight for breath.
The outro is simple. Release me.
It can mean relief from pain. It can mean release from guilt. It can mean release from the body. It can mean release from the loop.
And for me, it also means something else. It means release into memory, so that what hurt does not vanish, but becomes part of the story we carry, part of the book we write, part of the love that remains when the body is gone.
That is why I put these lyrics here. Not to dramatize suffering, but to witness it. To give it shape. To turn it, as best I can, into something that holds.
Something tells me that I will write to you again. But for now, this will suffice.
A myth for a man I loved, and the ritual that taught me how to keep walking.
We live in a mathematical reality.
Time moves us, and dates shape us. We are surrounded by numerical patterns. They describe the world we live in and the flow of what we do. It is like a matrix, not as a prison, but as a living lattice, a kind of hidden architecture that holds experience in place long enough for meaning to form.
There are days that behave less like time and more like doorways.
Not because the world announces them, nor because the calendar insists. But because, if you step into them with your whole attention, the air changes. The ordinary becomes transparent. The edges of things start to shimmer, like heat rising above stone.
Lately, I have been treating dates the way some people treat coastlines: not as mere markers, but as places where currents meet. If I stand there long enough, patterns wash up. A number mirrors itself. A name reveals an older root. A myth slips over a real place like light over water. The fit feels exact, as if it had been waiting for someone to notice it.
My father passed through the veil on 2025-12-26, the day after Christmas.
I wrote him a song on 2026-01-10 and released it on 2026-01-11, offering no explanation, because some offerings do not require one. They simply need to be placed on the altar of the world and left there, burning quietly.
I called it Dreams of Unseen.
It was the first song I had ever written, though I have played with poetry before. For me, this song was a candle, a flame I lit in the shock of loss because I needed something to exist besides the silence. I have given it significant thought since, and I thought I would attempt to explain it to myself here.
The First Fire: Dreams of Unseen
If the second song I wrote was a map, this first song was a simple farewell. It was the sound of me standing at the border, watching him go.
1) The Return to the Wild
Farewell, my friend, in dreams you go,\
To realms unseen where wild things grow.
To forests that will know your name,
And to the roots from which you came.
He was a man of the earth and the water. He did not belong in a sterile room; he belonged where things are wild and growing. This verse is an acknowledgement that death is not just an end, but a return. The forests know his name not because he is famous, but because he is made of the same stuff they are. He is returning to his roots.
2) The Permission
Walk in light, and don’t be afraid,
We will meet beyond the shade.
This refrain is a prayer for safe passage. It is the hardest thing for the one left behind to say: Go. It is okay. Don’t look back in fear. It is the promise that the separation is temporary, that the “shade” is just a veil we will both eventually cross.
3) The Steering Hand
To freedoms that you held so dear,
And all the roads you loved to steer.
Just know our love for you is strong.
Feel free to come and sing a song.
He loved his freedom. He loved to be the one at the wheel, whether it was a car, a boat, or his own destiny. I couldn’t write a song for him without honoring that independence. And the invitation, feel free to come and sing a song, is the open door. It is saying: You are gone, but you are still welcome here.
4) The Simple Truth
Farewell, my friend, in dreams you go,
Farewell, my friend, we miss you so.
Sometimes, poetry has to step aside for the raw fact of the matter. We miss him. That is the anchor of the song.
The Second Fire: Into the Blue
Exactly a month later, on 2026-01-26, I found myself in a different kind of moment. Not the first blaze, but the second fire. The one that comes after the funeral silence has cooled. The one that commands: Now you must live with this. Now you must carry it forward.
That day I wrote another song. I called it Into the Blue. It was not my second song. Between the first and this one, twelve more came through me, as if a door had opened and I could not close it again. It is almost as if I cannot stop writing. As my oldest daughter would say, “Daddy, since Micu died, you have become a songwriter.” There is nothing like pain to stir the creative waters.
The day I wrote Into the Blue, I was with my wife on the island of Saint Martin. I had brought some my dad’s ashes with me, not knowing exactly what I would do with them. I did not plan any grand ceremonies. I had no plan at all. I only thought I would release his ashes on the island exactly a month after his passing, on January 26, 2026. So, I simply wandered to a few places on the island and let a small ritual take shape. Saint Martin is a unique island—a divided land, a borderland, a place that belongs to two nations and yet remains one body of earth.
Only later did I understand what had truly happened. Only later did I recognize the kind of day it had been.
Only later did I see the myth forming around the act like a cloak being drawn across shoulders.
The private arithmetic of the Tarot
To understand this story, I should explain a little of the numerology and mythology I use. I have immersed myself in this world for the better part of a year, and the rabbit hole is deep.
I use the Tarot de Marseille. I use it the way some people use prayer beads, not to predict, but to measure. To weigh numbers and meaning. To give human experience a second melody line.
The tarot is often treated like a loud oracle for divination, but I treat it as a quiet instrument for storytelling. A set of archetypes that can hold what language cannot. A way of saying, this feeling has a shape. The major arcana are numbered 1 through 21. Each card carries a story, and each card carries a myth. I use the numbers, the Tarot de Marseille major arcana cards and mythology, especially Greek mythology, to interpret those stories. In this system, any number can be reduced until it finds its place among the 1 through 21 trumps.
I will not go much deeper than that here and I will try not to over explain the numerology.
Seen through this lens the day my father died corresponds to VIII – La Justice, the card of Justice. The date was the 26th, which, as I explained above, reduces to 8 by simple addition, 2 plus 6.
People hear “justice” and imagine verdicts, punishments, moral accounting. But older than the courtroom is the idea of right order, the structure that allows a universe to hold together. In the Greek imagination, Justice is carried by Themis, a Titaness older than the Olympian gods, whose very name suggests placing, setting things where they belong.
Not condemnation, but measure.
Not emotion, but proportion.
Not a gavel, but a scale.
When I let that archetype stand beside the date of my father’s death, the atmosphere changed. It did not become “fair.” It became aligned, like something heavy finding its level.
I also read the relationships between dates by adding them together, as if they were musical chords. My father was born on the 29th, which in tarot reduces to 11, XI – La Force, whom I associate with Artemis, a goddess of the moon, the wild, and the hunt. The resemblance is uncanny to what my father stood for and the things that were important to him. He died on the 26th, which, as I mentioned above, reduces to 8, VIII – La Justice, Themis. When I combine the two numbers, 29 plus 26 becomes 55, and 55 reduces to 10, X – La Roue de Fortune, the turning Wheel of fate. I link this card to the Moirai. This simple addition tells a story. It feels as if the Fates were calling him home, not as punishment, not as reward, but as allotment, as a portion, as a turn of the Wheel that arrives when its time arrives.
In the last weeks of his life, when I visited him in the hospital and in other places, he had a saying he liked to repeat, half amused and half solemn, as if he had borrowed it from a deeper room in the library of the world. “We each have a card, like a calling card. We are born with some minutes loaded onto it. When the minutes are gone, we have to go.”
Around that day, the larger time also spoke in my private Tarot de Marseille language:
The month was 12. It carried XII – Le Pendu, the Hanged Man, whom I associate with Orpheus. Inversion: the world turned upside down so it can be seen from the other side. Orpheus does not descend with weapons; he descends with song.
The year reduces to 9, VIIII –L’Hermite, the Hermit, whom I link to Chronos, time itself. The Hermit carries a lantern. He does not rush. He witnesses.
Under that slow witnessing, as we were in a year marked by 25, two plus five equals seven, I felt the undertone of VII – Le Chariot, Apollo, the sun god: direction, clarity, forward motion even when the road is dark.
Justice. The Hanged Man. The Hermit. The Chariot.
Measure. Inversion. Time. Direction.
A grammar for grief.
The mirrored day: 8 – 1 – 8
Then came 2026-01-26, a month after his passing. This was one of those dates that looks back at you.
It begins and ends with 26, like a bracket. Two identical pillars holding the day between them.
In the Tarot de Marseille arithmetic, 26 reduces to 8, and 8 is Justice again. The middle of the date is 01, and 1 is the Magician: the figure at the table, tools laid out, making something real with intention.
So the day reads:
8-1- 8 Justice, Magician, Justice
Measure. Act. Measure.
Themis mirrored through the Magician.
The whole year 2026 reduces to 10, the Wheel of Fortune, which I associate with the Moirai, the Fates, the weavers of portions. The turning of shares. The great wheel that moves whether we consent or not.
So I stood in a Wheel year, on a day framed by Justice, and performed an act of will:
A song written. Ash scattered. A portion returned to the sea.
Cycle, measure, will, measure.
Not proof. Resonance.
Islands: the old language of thresholds
If you want to understand why Saint Martin mattered, you must remember what islands are in myth.
Islands are never just geography. They are liminal spaces, places where rules thin, where gods step closer, where a person can become someone else because the mainland’s gravity loosens.
In the old stories, islands are where transformations happen:
Delos, the floating island that becomes anchored so Leto can finally give birth, because no mainland would receive her. A wandering, rejected mother finds refuge on a piece of earth that itself was once homeless. The island becomes a cradle. A sanctuary. A place that makes room for what the world would not hold. This is the island where Artemis, whom I associate with XI, La Force, and whom my father’s birth number carries as well, is born alongside Apollo. Moon and sun together, twin lights arriving on the same shore.
Aiaia, where Circe bends men into animal shapes. Not as punishment, but as revelation: showing the form their hungers already carry.
Ogygia, Calypso’s island, where time can stall in sweetness until a person remembers they were meant to continue.
Islands are thresholds because they are surrounded. Circled. Held.
Water draws a boundary the way ritual does.
To go to an island is to step into a ring.
And in that ring, the soul listens differently.
Saint Martin: the cloak, the border, the mercy of Mars
Saint Martin is a divided island, shared since 1648 between France and the Netherlands. Two sovereignties, one landmass. A split that does not shatter.
That alone is mythic geometry. The single thing with two names. The unity that survives a line.
And then the island carries an older stamp, pressed into it long before my own story ever arrived. On 1493-11-11, during Columbus’ second voyage, the island was sighted and named for Saint Martin of Tours on his feast day. What remains steady is the date itself, the signature of 11/11.
In the tarot language, 11 is La Force, Artemis again. So the island’s naming arrives under a doubled Force, a doubled Artemis. Not as proof, but as atmosphere. As an undertone. The island is stamped with strength twice over before you even step onto its sand.
And the echo deepens when I place my father beside it. As I mentioned above he was born on the 29th. Even there, the number contains an 11, because 2 plus 9 becomes 11. Artemis again, carried quietly inside his birth date like a hidden emblem.
November 11 also carries a living weight in the modern world. It is the day of remembrance, the day when the Great War’s armistice is marked at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. In Canada it is Remembrance Day, a pause held inside the calendar like a collective breath. That matters to me here, not because I am trying to force the island into a single meaning, but because the date itself already knows how to do what I was doing on that shore. It knows how to make time into a threshold. It knows how to ask for silence. It knows how to turn memory into a ritual that returns each year.
There is also the legend that gives the island its saint. Martin was a Roman soldier who met a freezing beggar at a gate. He cut his own cloak in half to share it. A blade used not to harm, but to divide warmth. Protection multiplied by surrender.
Even his name carries an older echo. Martinus, “of Mars.” Not only Mars the god of war, but Mars as guardian of fields and boundaries, strength tied to territory. The soldier becomes bishop. The boundary keeper becomes mercy.
So Saint Martin holds a paradox at its center.
Mars softened into compassion.
A border that still makes a home.
A division that becomes sharing.
When I scattered ash across that island, I was not only saying goodbye. I was placing my father into a landscape that already speaks the language of portioning. Two nations sharing one body of earth. A cloak shared in half so warmth can reach further. An island marked by 11/11, carrying Force in the Tarot de Marseille system, carrying remembrance in the public world, and touching the hidden 11 inside my father’s own birth date.
Moira is portion. The Wheel is the turning of portions. The island is portioning made geography, and somehow it survives.
Resonance.
Four stops: the Emperor’s geometry, the world’s elements
As I mentioned before I had no plan at all when the day began. It unfolded like a tide. And yet it formed a pattern.
I made four stops to scatter ash.
Four is a number that always shows up when the world wants to describe itself: four directions, four winds, four corners, four elements. In tarot, four is the Emperor: structure, placement, the laying down of foundations. The boundary keeper. Again, the Mars echo.
I did not realize it at the time but the sequence of my four stops echoed the island’s own division:
French side.
Dutch side.
French side again.
Finally Dutch side.
Across the border and back, like a pendulum. Like breathing.
Each stop felt like it matched him, less in logic than in the strange fidelity of memory
1. Forest / Jungle peak: because he loved nature and the wild.
2. Harbor / Fish market: because he loved fishing, boats, kayaks and the untamed waterways.
3. Beach: open and sunlit, the place where land and sea shake hands.
4. Rocky ocean shore: where the last portion went into the sea toward the descending light.
Forest. Harbor. Beach. Sea.
Earth. Work. Sand. Water.
A complete circle of elements, without me meaning to draw it.
As if the world itself wanted the farewell to be whole.
18:00 — the hinge between lights
I did not time the ritual. I didn’t look at the clock. I didn’t wait for an hour. I simply stepped forward when it felt right and cast the last of the ashes into the sea.
Only later, watching the video, did I notice the timestamp:
18:00.
Six in the evening. A hinge between day and night.
In the tarot language, 18 corresponds to the Moon, and I associate that Moon with Hecate, guardian of crossroads and liminal paths. Hecate doesn’t arrive because you schedule her. She appears because you have entered a crossing.
At 18:00, I had already thrown the ashes.
Setting Sun. Present Moon. I took a photo at the time:
A handoff between lights.
The sky that evening did what skies sometimes do when they decide to speak in colors instead of words: orange and yellow near the sinking fire, violet and darkening blue opening over the bay. The Moon was there, partly lit, waxing, not full, not absent. Becoming.
That is the whole story, isn’t it?
Grief is a waxing Moon. You don’t return to “full daylight.” You learn to live in becoming.
And on the walk back to the car after the sunset, fireflies and bats accompanied us.
Fireflies: small lanterns.
Bats: living calligraphy of night.
If the Hermit carries a lantern, the forest answered with lanterns of its own. If the Moon guides the dark, the bats wrote the dark’s script in motion.
We were not alone on that trip.
It was my wife, myself, and him.
The figures walking with me
Looking at my own identity through these archetypes.
I see myself as Le Pendu, the Hanged Man, representing Orpheus energy: inversion, descent, altered sight, the one who goes down to retrieve what cannot otherwise be held.
And I read my wife as the Star, representing quiet guidance, promise without noise, the steady light that doesn’t demand anything from you except that you keep going.
The one who descends and the one who keeps the light.
Orpheus and a star.
A song and a lantern.
A journey that continues.
Into the Blue: a walkthrough, verse by verse
When I wrote Into the Blue on 2026-01-26, it didn’t feel like writing a eulogy. It felt like channeling a memoir in miniature. It is not my voice speaking in the verses; it is his. It is the map of his soul’s travelogue, from the moment he arrived to the moment he left.
Here is what the song says when I listen to it as his story, from birth to death.
1) Arrival and Departure
Out of darkness I was born
The light just made me blind
To the shadows I return
With a heavy, quiet mind.
This is the great cycle of existence. He speaks of his own birth, emerging from the mystery (“darkness”) into the overwhelming brightness of the world. And now, at the end of the timeline, the cycle completes itself.
He returns to the shadows. This is not fear; it is the natural closing of the circle. The “heavy, quiet mind” is the accumulation of a life fully lived, the wisdom and the silence that descend when the noise of the world finally ceases.
2) The Life Lived
On the road of life I went
With the engines running wild
At the crossroads I got lost
Just a broken, blinded child.
Here is the Chariot of his years. “Engines running wild” captures the kinetic energy of his life: the motorcycle, the fishing, the boats, the nature, the movement. The sheer force of living.
But every hero’s journey hits its crossroads. Even a father, who seems invincible to a son, knows the feeling of being “lost.” The “broken, blinded child” is the vulnerability that sits at the core of every human being, even the strongest ones, when they face the magnitude of the world alone.
3) The End of the Road
Chasing roads to “I don’t know”
Where the choices go to die
Searching for the secret place
Where the souls and stars align
“Chasing roads to ‘I don’t know'” is the story of the human experience. We spend our lives navigating a series of choices without a clear map. We turn left or right, we make good decisions and bad ones, often without knowing exactly where we are heading or why.
“Where the choices go to die” marks the end of that frantic search. It is the realization that a life cannot be measured just by the turns we took, but by what we were looking for all along.
He—like all of us—was searching for that “secret place.” The alignment. It is the universal hunger for meaning and fulfillment, the desire to find the moment where the confusion of the road settles, and the soul finally feels at home in the universe.
4) The Inheritance of Truth
Blood remembers what is true
Trust what lies inside
Speak the language of the heart
Free your soul and mind
Here, the perspective shifts. He is no longer just describing his own departure; he is sending a signal back across the divide. This is his message from behind the veil to those of us still walking the earth.
“Blood remembers” is his reminder that we do not need to look outside ourselves for the answers. The truth isn’t something we learn; it is something we inherit, something that flows in our veins. He is telling us to trust that deep, quiet instinct that lies beneath the noise of the world. To speak the “language of the heart” is his final instruction on how to live: authentically, intuitively, and without the cages we build for ourselves. It is a father’s ultimate wish for the ones he leaves behind: be free.
5) The Weighing of the Soul
She weighs the heat within the spark
The harvest of the soul
The shape you’ve carved into the dark
To make the spirit whole.
Here, he stands before Themis. She is the ultimate measure, yet her scales are not calibrated for the things the world usually values. She is not weighing his wealth, his status, or his public victories.
She weighs “the heat within the spark.” He is telling us that what matters in the end is the work you do inside—the quiet, grueling work that nobody else can see or measure. It is the lifelong quest to piece together a fragmented spirit, to find wholeness in a broken world. The “harvest” he speaks of is his contribution to the collective spirit of humanity; it is the weight of the knowledge he gained and the lessons he learned, carved out of the darkness not merely to be left behind, but to be integrated into the greater understanding of the whole.
6) Crossing Over
The road dissolves, the debt is paid
She measures how I’ve grown
Into the dark and unafraid
My journey marches on.
The finale. The road of the living dissolves. The “debt” of existence—the minutes on the card he used to talk about—is paid in full.
He steps “into the dark and unafraid.” Not because there is no mystery, but because he is ready. And the most vital line: “My journey marches on.”
Death is not a stop. It is a continuation. His movement continues, just on a different shore, into the blue.
Why I’m releasing this now
I’mI’m placing Into the Blue here today, 2026-01-29, not for an audience, but for memory.
My website is a quiet corner of the internet. There is little traffic here, and these songs are not destined for the charts. Popularity was never the point.
I am leaving this here as a memoir to myself, a way to remember my dad, and an attempt to understand why the music came to me in the first place.
The first song was my candle: walk in light, don’t be afraid, we will meet beyond the shade.
The second song is my threshold: into the blue, into the deepening color where day becomes night and love becomes lineage.
I write this to pay tribute to him. And I write this for the future. Perhaps, one day, my girls will be interested enough to wander back to this date in the archives. Perhaps they will read what I wrote and listen to the music their grandfather inspired, and understand the journey we took together.
So I leave this as an offering.
To my father, whose name the forests will know. To the sea, which receives without needing to understand. To the island that taught me what a border can be: not only a division, but a shared holding.
If you are reading this, or if you are my daughters listening years from now: listen like you would watch a sky change. Not trying to decode it. Just letting it happen.
Paris, the city of love. What an intriguing name and an even more intriguing designation. I can’t quite say whether it was Paris itself, which we visited two years ago during the Olympics, my daughter, born on 2016-06-24, or my own birth chart that first drew my attention to the Lovers card in the Tarot de Marseille, VI – LAMOVREVX.
Suffice it to say, my true journey into this card began on September 27, 2025, and culminated on October 2, 2025. It feels fitting that after the card lived with me so intensely for six days – the very number of the card itself – it is now on the seventh that I am finally ready to tell its story. During the time I contemplated the card and its surrounding myth, new ideas solidified and the fog lifted in different ways. I wrote as ideas came to mind. I considered rewriting the entire piece to integrate these later revelations, but I ultimately decided to leave the writing as it is, for better or worse. I believe the journey of discovery is just as exciting as the discovery itself, and that bringing you along through all the twists and turns is perhaps the truest way to tell this story: a story about truth, fear, and love.
This card has been the quiet focal point of my life, shaping my path even when I was not aware of it. So let me begin at the beginning.
First, I have to draw your attention to another card in the Tarot de Marseille deck. Number 9, VIIII L’HERMITE. My mother once told me, or perhaps I read it in her book (https://carteamagului.ro/tarot/initiere-in-mistere/), words that lingered in my mind. They may not be exact, but the message was clear: “When L’HERMITE comes into your life, listen to what he has to say.”
I had been expecting him, even searching for him, only to realize that he was right under my nose all along. This revealed another lesson I have come to understand in the past little while: the most important things in life are often hidden in plain sight. They wait quietly until we are ready, and all it takes is the courage to shine a light.
This leads me into the mysterious world of the number nine itself: L’Hermite, Cronos, the keeper of time, the old man with the lantern showing us the way.
I have always felt the number nine to be special, but I had never looked too closely. For the past couple of years, I have been on a learning path, determined to leave no stone unturned. I find teachers in the most peculiar of places, but I have to recognize that my most important guides are my two daughters, currently seven and nine. They have been showing me a new way of life since the day they were born; I have just been too blind to see it and too dumb to listen to them. So it comes as no surprise that even in interpreting this card, my little teachers are once again showing me the way. Children are a repository of knowledge; we only have to open ourselves and listen to them. They see the world with a wonder and excitement most of us have forgotten, like the simple idea of having a favourite number.
When my daughters ask me what mine is, my answer has always been nine. They know this about me. Perhaps it was their asking that first made me pause and truly notice the number, long before my journey with the Tarot de Marseille. Only in the last few days have I begun to understand just how special it really is. Nine has been present in my life in ways I did not even recognize. I will not go into detail here, as that deserves its own spotlight, but in a nutshell, it has become a catalyst for change – a shining light, a lantern, or perhaps even a laser pointer.
So here we are in 2025 (2+0+2+5), a year marked by nine, in the ninth month, on the 27th day. A portal of sorts – 9-9-9 – calling me toward the lantern of L’Hermite, almost as if the number itself summoned me on its own day. I did not even realize the significance of that particular day, or of the events that unfolded then, until today, September 29, 2025. I did not know it at the time, but it felt like another beginning, as though more pieces of the puzzle were quietly falling into place.
One clue that pointed me toward LAMOVREVX was my elder daughter, who happens to be nine this year, a year of nine. She was born on 2016-06-24. Her birth year, 2016 (2+0+1+6), also reduces to nine, echoing the lantern of L’Hermite as it shines into hidden places. In her case, that light illuminates the numbers six and twenty-four, both energies of the Lovers that form the next part of her birthday. She is the Lover born in the month of the Lover shining the L’Hermite light on the next step in my journey of discovery.
And it is not only my daughter who carries this influence. My own birth chart is threaded with the same pattern. My Ascendant and Descendant axis, Sagittarius and Gemini, lies at 24°48′. My MC and IC line, Libra and Aries, rests at 24°24′, with Pluto poised at 24° on the Midheaven. Even White Moon Selena is placed at 24° Taurus. But perhaps the most striking placement of all is my True Node in Cancer, an astrological sign I associate with the LAMOVREVX card. This point, which represents my soul’s very destiny, is found at 14°29’11”- placing it right in the heart of the card.
So with all this in mind, here I stand, flashlight in hand, face to face with 6/24, LAMOVREVX, the Lover, a pattern woven through my life and carrying its own luminous symmetry. What secrets might it reveal, and what does it have to do with Paris?
Love, I suppose, is the first answer. The lover, as the card says. Singular, masculine. Choice in the hands of masculine energy, but is it really choice at all? When I think of the city of Paris, romance is the image that rises first. Yet my analogy runs deeper. It reaches into Greek mythology, another thread I owe to my mother.
But before I dive into that story, let me tell you about my wonderful nine-year-old daughter, the lover and the hater, the black and the white, the yin and the yang.
Clara has been a difficult energy to navigate as parents. She can be the sweetest presence or the most challenging. She is governed by two simple rules: I like it and I do not like it. There is no in-between for her. This energy is so overpowering that it shapes everything in her life. When she likes something, she loves it with all her being and life is heaven. When she does not, she rejects it with all her being and life becomes hell.
This colors every detail of her world, from the shade of her ice cream spoon to the food arrangement on her plate, from the design on her underwear to a stone she picks up on the sidewalk. She must love it all.
We all experience this to some extent, but most of us learn to soften it. We tell ourselves: you cannot love everything, some things in life must simply be done, you take the good with the bad, and so on. For years we have tried to teach Clara these lessons, pressing our worldviews and wisdom onto her, yet all the while she has been the one teaching us.
An interesting thing about wisdom and discernment: I do not think it is a coincidence that in the order of the Tarot de Marseille the Lover, card number VI comes right after card number V, LE PAPE, the teacher of wisdom and discernment. Even the number hierarchy seems to tell us that matters of the heart overpower matters of wisdom and discernment, or perhaps that the greater wisdom lives in the heart.
Another thing my mother once said comes to mind. She told me that the Lovers card shows the fall from heaven, the moment we become mortal, even finding a hint of death itself built into the name La Movrevx. It’s a powerful and somber idea. And while the linguistic echo between Movrevx and Mort (death) is compelling, I am no longer sure I can fully agree. To me, this card may just as well point the way into heaven. After all, when is true love ever the wrong choice? That is another lesson these last couple of weeks have taught me well.
Let us first look at the name itself: LAMOVREVX. At the beginning we find LAMO, echoing the Latin amo, “I love.” This is love in its simplest and purest form, a declaration of the heart. Clara’s first rule of being. Her only calling. Her most treasured state. The thing she chases from the moment she opens her eyes in the morning until the moment we tuck her into bed at night. And yet it is the very thing we have been fighting against for years. Even as I write this, it sounds absurd, fighting against love, all the while thinking we are helping her. But I digress.
In the middle stands the letter V, the number five – the Pope of the Tarot de Marseille. He is the mediator, the messenger, and the teacher; the hinge or perhaps the very mirror between higher and lower forces.
On the other side of the mirror we encounter REVX, an old spelling that carries the sense of “fullness” or “completeness.” Perhaps this is the wisdom the world offers: the lessons we pass to our children, the driving force of society. Learn to be rich, to be self-sufficient, to amass wealth, to amass knowledge so that you can monetize it. Yet hidden within that fullness is its own shadow, for the last letters, VX, mirror XV, the Devil card. I have not yet studied it in detail and so I reserve the right to change my mind, but as I understand it now it represents bondage, temptation, and compulsion.
Thus the very structure of the word suggests a choice. On one side is love, unencumbered and true. On the other is fullness, which promises abundance but conceals the chains of the Devil. The Pope at the center calls for discernment, yet the deeper wisdom of the tarot may be that love alone is the true and liberating path, the way into heaven itself.
This is a truth I have been waking up to in what we teach our daughters. I realized that we teach them to be rich when we should be teaching them to be happy. In doing so, we end up teaching one another to be miserable. Perhaps this is because we ourselves have forgotten how to be happy, caught in a mad race to enrich our material world. I am only beginning this journey, unsure of where it will lead, but already I sense that the heart knows more than we let it.
And so I turn back to the card itself, VI – LAMOVREVX. Looking at the image, four figures occupy the scene: a young man stands between two women, as if torn between paths, while above him hovers Eros with bow drawn, ready to strike. This is not a simple image of romance; it is the drama of choice, of surrender, of stepping into destiny. The arrow reminds us that love is not always reasoned, and that discernment alone cannot shield us from its pull. The card suggests that the heart’s decision carries consequences that shape the course of a life. To me, this is where the mystery deepens – choice and fate entwined, wisdom and desire in dialogue, all illuminated by that ancient lantern of L’Hermite.
The Lover stands with bare legs, his red shoes of action planted on a patch of yellow. This patch of yellow at his feet represents wisdom and discernment, showing that he already carries all he needs to choose. Yet the question remains: which will prevail, the mind or the heart?
To explore this, I turn to the story that mirrors this card most closely: the Greek tale of Paris of Troy, a story I once read to Clara. We spoke of it again tonight, and to my surprise she remembered the details more vividly than I did, as if the tale had rooted itself more firmly in her heart than in mine.
Paris was the man who stood between goddesses, forced to choose. Or perhaps it was Eros’s arrow that chose for him, tilting the scales toward love and setting in motion a war. So too Paris the city, forever bound to love, temptation, unrest, and destiny. In both man and city, the same pattern repeats. The circle closes where it began.
But Paris’s story begins long before his fateful judgment. At his birth, an oracle warned his mother, Queen Hecuba of Troy, that her son would bring about the destruction of the city. In fear, she and King Priam abandoned the infant on Mount Ida. Yet fate, unyielding, had shepherds raise him in secret. Paris grew into a prince of both pasture and palace, his life already shaped by prophecy. From the very start, love and destiny were bound together – what is foreordained cannot be escaped, only delayed until the appointed hour.
That hour arrived at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, a celebration of divine union. All the gods were invited – except Eris, goddess of discord. Enraged at her exclusion, she flung into the banquet a golden apple inscribed “To the fairest.” Instantly, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite each laid claim to it. Unable to choose between them, Zeus refused judgment and instead appointed Paris, the mortal prince whose life was already under the shadow of fate.
So Paris, like the Lover of the Tarot, found himself at the center of competing forces. Each goddess promised him a gift: Hera, the throne of sovereignty and kingship; Athena, wisdom and glory in battle; Aphrodite, the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta. Before him lay three paths: power, wisdom, or desire. Above them all loomed the golden apple, not a warm sun but a burning star of discord, forcing the choice into being.
Eros hovered doing Aphrodite’s bidding, bow drawn, arrow aimed at Paris’s heart. For in such moments, reason cannot decide. It is not logic that bends the scales, but love itself, piercing the soul. Paris chose Aphrodite, and with that choice set in motion the Trojan War. Desire, or perhaps fate, carried him, as his very name foretells: Paris, “to carry off.” For he would soon carry Helen—whose name means “torch”—from Sparta to Troy, bringing upon his city’s destruction and closing the prophetic circle that began with Queen Hecuba’s dream; a dream that could have been interpreted through love and prosperity, rather than through the vision of fear.
This brings us to the next piece of the puzzle, the duality embedded in the man himself. Paris is also known as Alexandros, “defender of men.” In this duality, he mirrors his own father, carrying the same purity that was once corrupted by fear. His two names represent his two possible paths: Paris, “to carry off,” the agent of a fate sealed by fear; and Alexandros, “defender of men,” the potential champion of a destiny guided by love. The myth shows us that love is the only true defense. The prophecy declared Troy would fall, and so, in their fear, his parents cast away Alexandros. But in trying to flee fate, they only ensured it. The son who returned to them was now Paris, ready to carry off a destiny of fear and bring about the destruction of Troy.
Perhaps fear itself was the seed that gave rise to the prophecy. It was the same fear that once made the Titans cast away their own kin, and in doing so, sealed their own downfall. It is fear, not love, that we should avoid at all costs. These same patterns are found in our own lives, again and again. We start off pure, only to lose ourselves and corrupt our own true names.
So again, I think The Lover card may be telling us that fear is the enemy of love. Fate is inescapable, but love is the thread that redeems our passage through it – liberation through love, even salvation through love. Love must be pure, unencumbered, and free of expectation.
Clara knows this instinctively, and nobody taught her. She feels it in her being. Yet the world is cruel and tries to tell her, at every turn, that love is not possible, that compromises must be made, that we must learn to endure what we do not love rather than change it.
So in conclusion, here we see the full mirror of the Lover card. The mortal stands in a triangle of choice: two women before him and Eros above, each drawing him toward a promise. The golden apple glows like the sun of destiny, while the arrow of love ensures the decision will not be reasoned, but fated. The choice is his, yet it is not his alone. Through him, fate moves, and through love, history itself is rewritten. Even the name of the card hints at this, ending in the letter X – LA ROVE DE FORTVNE – the cross of decision, the stitch of fate, the mark of the Moirai, the weavers of destiny. In the end, it is always the Moirai who have the final word. And perhaps that is why Clara, in her all-or-nothing way, reminds me so much of the Lover card itself – a little girl standing at the center of choice, guided not by fear, but by love – love that endures even in spite of fear.
Fearless love is our ticket into heaven. So love fearlessly!
Chronicles of Fear
Like many creative endeavors, the true revelations often begin only after the writing is seemingly finished. So it was with this article. It was on the morning of October 1, 2025, that the deeper layers of the story truly clicked into place. How fitting that this clarity arrived on a day marked by the number one – LE BATELEUR, the Magician’s number of creation – and in the tenth month, evoking the Moirai themselves through the Tarot’s tenth major arcana card, X – LA ROUE DE FORTUNE, the Wheel of Fortune. The wheel turns, a cycle ends, and a new understanding begins.
The story of Paris, I now realize, does not begin with a choice between three goddesses, but with a dream and the fear it inspired. Before Paris was born, his mother, Queen Hecuba of Troy, dreamt that she did not give birth to a child, but to a blazing torch that set the entire city of Troy aflame. Disturbed by this premonition, King Priam sought the counsel of seers, who confirmed that the child would be the city’s ruin.
Here, at the very inception of the tale, fear becomes the guiding hand of fate. Let us look closer at the parents. Priam was not always known by that name; in his youth, he was called Podarces, “the swift-footed one.” This name evokes the heroic ideal of strength, speed, and agility in battle. His name was changed to Priam, meaning “the ransomed one,” after his life was spared in a bargain. This changed Priam from a heroic archetype into a weak, compromised shadow of his former self. From then on, his very identity was forged by compromises made under duress, setting him on a path marked by misfortune and fraught negotiations.
When his wife Hecuba, whose name can be traced to the Greek for “far-off strike,” brought him this dream of misfortune—a vision that was itself a far-off strike from the truth—Priam’s first instinct was fear. It was fear that led him to the seers, and it was fear that dictated the decision to abandon his son. This leads me to a new conclusion: Troy itself was already compromised, just like Priam. The seeds of its destruction were not sown by Paris’s choice of love, but by his parents’ choice of fear. A kingdom built on fear has no place in our collective evolution and, perhaps, had to fall.
This dynamic is also etched into the very design of the Lovers card itself. The title, LAMOVREVX, is framed by vertical lines: five lines (|||||) stand before the word, and six lines (||||||) follow it. This is a visual metaphor for the choice at hand. The five lines evoke the preceding card, V – LE PAPE, representing the wisdom we carry into the moment. The six lines represent the new reality of the Lover (VI) that is born from the choice. The scales are already tilted towards the six, suggesting the heart’s decision is the intended path forward.
But another more chilling detail confirms that the true downfall is fear. Above the figures, Eros hovers within a radiant sun. If you look closely, the negative space created by the divine light framing the archer forms the unmistakable image of a skull. When Priam and Hecuba looked upon their prophecy, their terror acted as a filter; they saw only the skull of their city’s demise. The card presents the same choice: will the Lover see the divine impulse of Eros, or be paralyzed by the specter of the skull? Fear will always find the face of death, even in the heart of the most brilliant light.
This reframes the entire concept of fate. There is a saying, “You will not escape what you fear,” because all prophecies are projections born from a place of fear. Priam and Hecuba, in trying to save Troy, set in motion the very events that would ensure its fall. The core lesson is not that love is destructive, but that fear is.
This brings the lesson back to my daughter, Clara, who embodies this card. She has had one amazing day after another, in love with life and succeeding at everything she sets her mind to. Though she can be naturally selfish, when she is truly in love with herself, she becomes the most caring, helpful, and kind human. She is showing us that the key to being good to others is to first love ourselves so completely that the kindness naturally overflows.
It pains me to think that we constantly fight against this. I am guilty as charged. We tell our children they are selfish, that they only think of themselves and should think of others. We teach them to do things they don’t like just to please people. We tell ourselves that this is preparing them for life, that the world is cruel and they must be made ready. We see it as our duty, but we fail to see how damaging these words are. They make our children start to hate themselves. They begin to believe they are terrible, unworthy, that their own needs cause harm and hardship to others. Of course, this is the last thing they want. Slowly, bit by bit, a program of self-negation gets installed. The damage is done, and to reverse it is nearly impossible. I only hope it is not too late for my girls.
Some might say this argument is against educating our kids. How do you get them to brush their teeth, to do their homework, to tidy up their rooms and form good habits? The honest answer is that I am not sure yet, but I am going to try to do it all and more. I do know one thing, however: when they are truly happy and in love with themselves, they live to please and are on a quest to do things to make us proud.
And so, this is the final, deepest secret. We see the Lover standing between two figures and assume his choice is external. But what if the first choice is internal? To beat fate, we must free ourselves from fear – and I mean all of it. We must write every fear down on paper. We must visit and revisit that list and, like a surgeon removing a tumour, carve each one out of our soul. Fearless love is the only alternative, but it must begin with the self. The Lover, singular, must first choose to love himself or herself. Only then is he or she truly free to love another. This is the only true liberation from a destiny forged in terror.
True and fearless love.
My fear builds a wall of night, And steals away my inner light. It whispers lies of what’s to come, And leaves my heart completely numb. With fearless love, my rising sun, I will declare: The WAR is won!
I am the poison and the cure, The wound you struggle to endure. My gaze turns living flesh to stone, Yet from my death, new life is born. From horror, beauty takes its flight, And wisdom learns to rule the night.
Real Life Struggles
Pythagoras once said, “Know yourself, and you will know the universe and all the gods.” I have often wondered what knowledge or insight led him to make such a profound claim. After the past couple of weeks, his words have become a focal point of my life. I think he was onto something and I have caught a glimpse of it.
Let me provide some context. Between September 10th and September 20th, 2025, I experienced a profound spiritual awakening. It unfolded not on a retreat, but in the midst of my ordinary life. Against a backdrop of ten idyllic days of sunshine and warmth, I continued to go to work, care for my children, and navigate our usual weekend activities. Life went on as normal; the only wildcard was me. This experience was an awakening to what is truly important in life. I will describe it in greater detail elsewhere; for now, I will be brief, as this story’s focus is on something else entirely. It is also worth noting that all my revelations during this period occurred in the light of day. I recall no dreams and slept very little. Throughout this journey, I was guided by music, conversations, people, and what I can only describe as divine communication. Suddenly, everything spoke to me: people having idle chats in the elevator, the music on the radio, numbers, and more.
It is now September 23rd, three full days since the awakening subsided and silence returned. On September 20th, it all stopped, abruptly. The quiet has left me feeling lonely, sad, and longing for understanding.
In these past three days, the clouds have returned, and so have my dreams. It feels as though the front lines of this inner battle have moved, shifting from my waking consciousness to the subconscious depths of sleep. The weather itself seems to mirror this change, turning stormy, especially at night. Although I cannot remember the specifics of my dreams, I wake up feeling as if I have been dreaming the entire night. I also wake with a powerful sense of understanding, but when I try to grasp what I know, the feeling vanishes.
Despite the sadness and confusion, one thing remains fixed in my mind: an unrelenting need to understand what happened and, more importantly, where to go from here. My experience left me with a final clue to guide that next step, the story of Medusa. The awakening felt like navigating an escape room, and the very last piece of the puzzle or perhaps the beginning of a new puzzle was a song about Medusa that ended with the verse, “I am Medusa… I am not the villain in your lore; I am what comes NEXT.” That final word resonated with my own urgent question, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that her story held the key.
So here I am, revisiting the myth and trying to make sense of it. And I think I finally understand.
First, let’s summarize the story as it is commonly known. While there are several versions, the summary below aligns with the most widely accepted narratives.
The Myth of Medusa – a short but comprehensive summary
From the depths of the sea came three sisters, born of ancient gods: Stheno (“Strength”), Euryale (“Far-Roaming”), and Medusa (“the Guardian”). They were called the Gorgons (“the Grim Ones”).
While they were all immensely powerful, they were not alike. Stheno and Euryale were immortal, unyielding, and terrifying forces of nature. Medusa alone was mortal, which made her uniquely vulnerable and capable of being corrupted. Her story, however, begins not with a monster, but with a Guardian.
Unlike her sisters, who were primal forces beyond good and evil, Medusa was born pure and innocent. She devoted herself to Athena, the goddess of wisdom and purity, and served as a priestess in her temple. She was a beacon of light in that sacred space, a dedicated protector.
One day, Poseidon, lord of the sea and fury, desired her beauty and assaulted her within that sacred space. Outraged at the desecration of her temple, Athena punished Medusa instead of Poseidon. Her hair was transformed into hissing serpents, her skin hardened into scales, and her gaze was cursed to turn any living thing that met her eyes to stone.
Cast out, Medusa could no longer serve Athena or fulfill her mission as a guardian. In a final, tragic act of that very guardianship, she exiled herself from the world of mortals. She was driven to the edge of the world to rejoin her sisters, as they alone were immune to her deadly gaze. There, the three Gorgons dwelled together, but Medusa remained the only one who was mortal. For years, her exile was a static tragedy, where warriors journeyed to her shores only to meet their end as stone statues.
This concludes Medusa’s coming-of-age story. For the myth to continue, a hero must enter the stage.
His tale begins on the island of Seriphos, where Perseus (“the Destroyer”) and his mother Danae (“Parched, Dry”) had been given refuge in the court of King Polydectes (“Receiver of Many”). The king lusted after Danae and, seeing her son as an obstacle, devised a treacherous plan to eliminate him. He demanded the head of Medusa as a tribute, a seemingly heroic quest designed to send the young hero to his certain death.
The gods aided Perseus in his quest. Athena offered him counsel, and Hermes (“the Guide at the Crossroads”) showed him the way. They first sent him to the Graeae (“the Old Women”), the ancient sisters of the Gorgons.
The Graeae—Deino (Dread), Enyo (Horror), and Pemphredo (Alarm)—shared a single eye and a single tooth. This suggests that these fears are crippled; they can nibble at life but never consume it. By sharing one eye, they possess only a limited perspective and can never see the whole picture.
Perseus stole their eye, forcing them to reveal the path to the Stygian Nymphs.
The Nymphs gave him three sacred gifts:
The Kibisis (a pouch) to safely hold the head.
The Helm of Hades (the Unseen One) to make him invisible.
The location of the Gorgons’ lair.
Hermes gave him the Harpe (a curved sword) and the Talaria (winged sandals), while Athena provided her shining shield with a critical piece of instruction: he must use it as a mirror and never look at Medusa directly.
Armed with these tools and this knowledge, he set out on his quest.
At the edge of the world, Perseus found the Gorgons asleep. Looking only at Medusa’s reflection in the shield, he severed her head with the Harpe.
From her blood sprang her two children:
Pegasus (Spring, Fountain), the winged horse.
Chrysaor (Golden Sword), a warrior or giant.
Stheno and Euryale awoke in a fury, but Perseus, wearing the Helm of Hades, vanished and fled.
With Medusa’s head secured in the Kibisis, Perseus began his return, discovering that the Gorgon’s stare had lost none of its power, even in death. He was no longer just a hero; he was the wielder of a terrible and profound force, and he would learn to use it in many ways.
Flying over Africa, he encountered the Titan Atlas, who was condemned to bear the weight of the heavens. When the inhospitable Titan refused him rest, Perseus unveiled the head and turned the suffering giant into the stone Atlas Mountains, granting him a permanent, unthinking rest from his eternal burden.
Next, he found Princess Andromeda (“Ruler of Men”) chained to a rock as a sacrifice to Cetus (“a fearsome sea monster”), a monster of the sea. He used the head to turn the beast to stone, saving her from the chaos of the deep and winning her hand in marriage. At their wedding, however, they were attacked by her uncle Phineus (“dark/mottled”), a figure from a past she had left behind. Outnumbered, Perseus used the head again to petrify the aggressors, turning the unjust claims of the past into powerless statues.
In a quiet moment by the sea, he carefully set the head upon a bed of seaweed, which absorbed its power and hardened into the world’s first coral, showing that this force, when handled with care, could create beauty.
His final act was to return to Seriphos. There, he confronted the treacherous King Polydectes and his court, petrifying them all and freeing his mother, Danae, from the tyrant’s grasp.
Finally, he gave the head to Athena, who placed it upon her Aegis (a shield of goatskin). In this final act, Medusa was transformed from a cursed monster into an eternal protector, the true meaning of her name: the Guardian.
Back to reality
Now that I have summarized the story, I want to explore its deeper meaning. For this, I have drawn upon conversations with my mother and my two daughters. I have found that learning from both the experienced and the inexperienced provides a more balanced perspective on reality.
I turned the story over and over in my mind, unable to reconcile the cruelty of the gods towards Medusa. Although the gods are often portrayed as capricious, Medusa’s story felt uniquely unjust: a pure and innocent girl punished for the crime of her perpetrator. To find the answer, I read many interpretations, but none resonated.
Today, in a conversation with my mother, she suggested that nothing in the Greek legends is quite what it seems and that they can be interpreted in many ways. They are lessons, she said, and some battles are fought entirely within our minds. This insight clicked. It brought back memories of my own life and observations of my daughters, who are nine and seven.
Consider a young child, around seven years old. What mechanism governs their conflicts, especially with parents? It often begins with a catalyst, something that upsets them. This leads them to act out, becoming angry or defiant. The behavior escalates until the original trigger is forgotten. At that point, their anger is no longer directed at the initial cause but has turned inward, aimed at themselves for causing their parent grief. Though they may not be conscious of it, the message they tell themselves is: “I am a terrible human.” They read this accusation clearly, as if in a mirror, on the parent’s face.
At this stage, they want to stop but cannot. They know they have been hurtful, which traps them in a deepening cycle of shame. They begin to feel they deserve punishment and that there is no way out without it. If the parent provides a consequence the child deems sufficient, their world can return to a state of balance. If the parent resists, however, the conflict intensifies and turns inward, resulting in self-punishment or even self-harm. This internal conflict is often a far more traumatic experience than any punishment a parent could provide. The child lacks the tools to stop on their own. They need our help.
My Interpretation
Now, let’s view Medusa’s story through a psychological lens, starting with her coming-of-age.
Imagine the entire drama unfolds within the landscape of a single human mind, for in this inner world, we each have a Medusa of our own. Picture this mind as a vast ocean. In the center is the main island where your daily, conscious life occurs. Nearby are smaller islands for secondary thoughts and feelings. And far away, at the distant edges of awareness, lie the remote islands where we banish what we cannot handle or understand, the realm where our subconscious dwells.
At the start, the mind is a temple, pure and innocent. Within this temple live the Gorgons, forces of the psyche. Stheno, Strength, is our raw power. Euryale, Far-Reaching, is the tendency for our emotions to spread far beyond their origin. They are primal, not good or evil and beyond our control. Medusa, the Guardian, is different. She is mortal, vulnerable, and therefore capable of being corrupted. She watches over the temple, protecting its order and balance. She is our shield to the world, our first line of defense.
One day, a violent force of fury and rage (Poseidon) invades the temple and assaults our Guardian, Medusa. Or perhaps it is a series of smaller misfortunes, a succession of Poseidons, that slowly test her. This is an enemy she is unprepared for; she is wounded, and the battle is lost. When we are violated or hurt, a primal part of us puts the guardian who failed us on trial. Our own limited wisdom (Athena) acts as the prosecutor, blaming her for the misfortune: “You were meant to protect us, and you failed.” Just as in the example with the child, this external wound stirs an internal fury directed at the self. In this act of self-directed revenge, we punish our own guardian. Our thoughts can turn venomous like hissing serpents, and our gaze begins to turn the good things in our life to stone. Through this process, the guardian also gathers an immense, unfocused power, becoming a raw force like her immortal sisters.
Our once gentle guardian becomes an uncontrollable monster, a deadly weapon that now threatens our very existence. She grows so toxic that our conscious mind can no longer bear her presence, knowing it would lead to total self-destruction. And so, our wisdom (Athena) makes a final, desperate judgment: she banishes the guardian to the far edges of the mind. But she does not vanish there. Instead, she recedes into the subconscious, feeding on all that is hidden. At times, we may try to regain control, but any conscious effort we send her way is instantly turned to stone by her icy stare.
The result is a psyche left angry, vulnerable, and deeply damaged. We often fail to see just how deep these wounds truly are.
We struggle to protect ourselves from this fate, and so we fail to give our own children the tools to prevent it in themselves. Or perhaps this is not a failure at all. Perhaps we are not meant to prevent it. Perhaps the creation of Medusa is an inevitable, even necessary, part of our journey.
Now that we talked about the creation of the monster let’s explore what comes next. The legend does not end in this darkness. It also provides a complete guide on how to confront and overcome this inner demon. This is the moment the hero is born.
This moment often comes later in life, when we realize we must face our demons. By this time, another monster has taken shape in the mind and rules the island: King Polydectes, the Receiver of Many. He represents the insatiable part of us, the inner tyrant who hoards our time, energy, and attention. He always demands more.
Polydectes works through trickery, subtle demands, false promises, and endless distractions. This is the tyranny of the Receiver of Many: the weight of expectations, the hunger of the ego, the chains of fear.
It is in this moment of crisis, the hero stirs. He emerges from the same inner sea as Poseidon, yet where Poseidon brought rage, our hero is driven by love. His love is for Danae (“dry and parched”), our dry and parched soul, the purest part of us that remains. This hero is Perseus, (“the Destroyer”), the part of us that has been growing quietly through many trials, willing to risk everything to save what is most precious. He is finally spurred into action when the inner tyrant, Polydectes, tries to claim Danae for his own.
He is not reckless. He is guided by a more mature wisdom (Athena), one that now remembers the tragic fate of Medusa, and by the quiet messages of our intuition (Hermes). Together, they arm him with clarity, cunning, and courage.
His first mission is to seek out the Graeae: Dread, Horror, and Alarm. These are the ancient fears that haunt the edges of the mind, and he must come face to face with them. He must see them not as great monsters, but as they truly are: weak, limited, and feeble. He observes how they struggle to even perceive the world or to feed themselves, pathetic figures born old, sharing a single eye and a single tooth. He sees with sudden clarity how such limited senses can lead one down dark corridors and realizes how easily these crippled emotions can be overcome. By stealing their single eye, he masters their limited vision and forces them to reveal the path forward.
This path leads not to a physical place, but to the very edge of the conscious mind: the border of the subconscious. In Greek mythology, this border is the River Styx, the border between the realm of the living and the underworld. There, at this great threshold, he meets the Stygian Nymphs (Stygean because they live next to the Styx, like Athenians live in Athens). They are not the ferrymen of the dead, but something more primal: the guardians of hidden knowledge, the keepers of the sacred tools needed for the journey into the unknown.
From the Stygian Nymphs, guardians of the psyche’s deepest truths, Perseus receives the three sacred tools required for a safe journey and return. They do not offer advice, but the very archetypal powers needed to navigate the subconscious and bring back real power:
The Kibisis (The Pouch): The Power of Containment. This is the essential tool for handling the power brought back from the subconscious. The Nymphs know that Medusa’s power cannot be destroyed, only contained. The Kibisis is a safe psychic space, the ability to hold the terrifying energy of this weapon without it running wild and destroying the rest of the mind.
The Helm of Hades: The Dissolution of Ego. To approach a primal trauma, the conscious self, or ego, must step aside. The Helm of Invisibility allows the hero to become a neutral witness, to observe the source of his pain without his identity getting in the way. If “he” were to confront Medusa, he would be turned to stone. As an unseen presence, he can act without being paralyzed by the horror.
The Location of the Lair: The Naming of the Wound. The Nymphs give him the one piece of hidden knowledge he cannot find on his own: where the monster lives. This symbolizes the moment of clarity when we are finally able to locate and name the specific source of our deepest pain. I am still pondering this aspect of my journey.
Next, the divine messengers of the conscious mind, Hermes and Athena, provide the tools for action and engagement:
Hermes, the Guide, offers two gifts for the journey. As the god who can travel freely between the upper and lower worlds, he bestows his Talaria (Winged Sandals). These represent psychological agility and transcendence, the ability to navigate the treacherous inner landscape, to rise above being stuck, and to make a swift escape. He also provides the Harpe (The Curved Sword). This is not a weapon for direct combat, but a tool of discernment. Its curved blade is designed for a precise, indirect cut, symbolizing the ability to carefully sever the toxic, corrupted part of the psyche without destroying the whole.
Finally, Athena provides the ultimate secret weapon: her polished shield. She gives it to him not as a shield for defense, but as a mirror for reflection. This is the master tool of consciousness. Athena knows that to look directly at the raw face of one’s trauma is to be paralyzed by it. The shield allows the hero to see the monster indirectly, through reflection, granting him the one thing necessary to overcome it: the ability to face a terrible truth without being destroyed by the sight of it.
Armed with these tools and knowledge, Perseus ventures into the far reaches of the subconscious, where the monstrous guardian waits in darkness. Using the shield of reflection, he avoids her deadly gaze, seeing not a monster to be slain, but a wound to be healed. With the Harpe, he makes a single, precise strike, not an act of murder, but of psychological surgery. He severs the corrupted, monstrous identity from the pure, primal energy it had imprisoned.
The moment the head is severed, that trapped energy is liberated. From the wound itself, the children of her trauma are born, not as monsters, but as magnificent powers. First springs Pegasus, the winged horse, representing the soaring flight of a spirit and creativity finally freed from paralysis. He is followed by his brother Chrysaor, the warrior with the Golden Sword, embodying the birth of a sovereign will and the authentic power to act in the world.
Having released this long-captive potential, Perseus carefully places the monstrous head into the Kibisis, containing its destructive power so it can now be wielded with wisdom.
The liberation of Medusa’s power and the birth of her children is a seismic event in the psyche. Such a profound shift inevitably triggers a powerful, primal backlash from the mind’s most ancient forces: Medusa’s immortal sisters, Stheno (raw Strength) and Euryale (Far-Roaming consequence).
They awaken in a fury. These are not monsters to be fought in the same way as Medusa. They are immortal, meaning they are fundamental, unchangeable aspects of our psyche. Stheno is the overwhelming, brute-force strength of an emotional surge, the raw power of grief, rage, or shock that follows a breakthrough. Euryale is the tendency for that emotion to spread, to echo, and to have far-reaching consequences across the entire mind.
The hero’s wisdom here lies in knowing he cannot fight them. To engage with this primal backlash directly would be to be torn apart. Instead, he uses the Helm of Hades. He becomes invisible. Psychologically, this is the crucial act of detaching the ego. He doesn’t identify with the overwhelming emotional surge. He becomes a neutral witness, allowing the raw strength and its far-reaching echoes to wash past him without engaging. He wins not by fighting, but by wisely retreating and allowing the initial, uncontrollable storm to pass.
Having survived the immediate backlash, Perseus begins his journey back from the edge of the world to the main island of his conscious life. This is a critical and difficult process of integration. He is flying with his new winged sandals, representing a newfound psychological agility and a higher perspective, but he is also carrying the terrible head of Medusa.
This journey symbolizes bringing the profound lessons and dangerous power of the subconscious back into the light of day. He is no longer just a hero on a quest; he is now the responsible wielder of a paradoxical force. The Guardian, once a banished source of terror, is now a tool he must learn to control. The trauma is no longer running wild in the shadows, but its contained power is now part of his conscious toolkit, a burden and a gift.
His return to the conscious realm sets the stage for a new series of trials. The first half of the myth was about the internal journey to confront and reclaim a lost power. The second half is about the external journey of learning to apply that power wisely to solve the problems of his everyday conscious world.
His first challenge is the Titan Atlas, whose name means “to bear,” the very embodiment of a chronic, internal burden. By turning the suffering Titan into the unfeeling Atlas Mountains, Perseus performs an act of radical acceptance. He uses the Guardian’s power not to destroy a foe, but to end the suffering of a struggle, petrifying it into a fixed part of his inner landscape.
Next, he confronts an overwhelming external threat in the form of Cetus, a sea monster of pure chaos. In saving Princess Andromeda, whose name means “Ruler of Men,” he is saving his own ability to rule his life. This is the moment the hero learns that his deepest wound can become his greatest strength, a shield against the destructive forces of the world.
He continues to use this power to protect his hard-won peace from Phineus, a figure representing the entitled, toxic past. Petrifying him is the act of setting a final, non-negotiable boundary, turning the ghosts of old contracts into powerless statues.
He also understands that the Guardian’s power is not purely destructive. In a quiet, reflective moment, Perseus carefully places the head on a bed of seaweed, which hardens into beautiful coral. This reveals a profound alchemy: when a trauma is handled with care and reverence, its terrifying energy can be transformed into an act of creation.
His final act brings the journey full circle. He returns to confront the inner tyrant, King Polydectes, the “Receiver of Many,” whose greed threatens his mother Danae, the “Parched” soul. By petrifying the king, Perseus uses the strength gained from his deepest trauma to permanently silence the very part of himself that created the trauma in the first place. This ultimate act of self-liberation frees his soul and restores true balance to his inner kingdom.
At last, Perseus gives the head back to Athena, his wisdom. The monster that once threatened to destroy him now becomes the shield that protects him. The corrupted guardian is restored to her true purpose, and the temple of the mind is finally defended not by fear, but by wisdom itself.
And so, the story circles back to where it began. In my own awakening, I heard the voice of Medusa, not as a villain but as a teacher. She is not the end of the story, but the beginning of transformation. To face her is to face the part of myself that has been wounded, corrupted, and banished. To master her is to reclaim the Guardian who protects what is most precious within.
This, I believe, is what the myth has been trying to tell us all along. The gods may appear cruel, but perhaps their cruelty is only the mask of a deeper wisdom. What seems like punishment can become instruction. What feels like destruction can give birth to strength and flight.
“I am Medusa; I am not the villain in your lore. I am what comes next.” These words still echo within me. What comes next is not fear but courage, not paralysis but movement, not exile but restoration. To meet Medusa is to meet myself, and to find, beyond the monster, the Guardian who was always there.
