The web of the mind catches and keeps all kinds of things. It stores memories—the good and the bad. There are flowers on there… or are they spiders? There is the butterfly of tender emotions. There is a leaf–an endeavor that got started but didn’t grow. But around it all there is our own weaving of the world and of our circumstances in a way that congeals reality into patterns of our own making. So many silk lines do we weave around things we wish to hide, around lies that we have told. We anchor our hopes on moors made of air; we develop our worst nightmares and hang them upon walls built to avoid certain truths that need be faced, certain actions that must be taken, certain beliefs that are based on nothing more than a neurotic attempt to circumvent deceit of ourselves and of others.

All this menaces the stability of the Queen of Pentacles. She sits on a throne that was weaved as well—with wicker rather than silk, but that starts to unravel just the same as our eyes open up to the terribly intricate threads of thought and emotion, fear and joy-grasping, spun around our arms and legs and extending outward onto infinity. Paralyzed and imprisoned thus, the emotional weight of years of ignorant yet real falsity and deceit starts to crumble and fall upon ourselves, weighing heavily upon a soul that, like the fox on the 10 of Wands, finds itself blocked and surrounded by the truths that for so long it has sought to avoid. Further illusion results. When dealing with lie and omission is refused, the options that lay ahead become even more muddied. More threads need to be weaved to bypass the facing of our own lack of integrity. More walls need to be built to hide and bury. We end up blind to the path ahead, stuck, pondering which one of the several illusory futures is less shifty, since our path thus far has left us with no solid ground to stand on.

Let us not settle for the least undesirable of possible futures due to our errors, lies, deceit, or lack of self-accountability. A clearer path emerges with the unweaving of the web of personal terrors. Will we acknowledge and speak the truth before the whole thing comes crashing down?