In Suspense: The Hanging One

Every few years, I do some of the exercises from the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, a title that’s always confused me because the exercises always feel soooo left-brainy to me. Most recently, I tried to copy a Picasso drawing right-side up, and the results were embarrassing. But drawing it upside down, as the exercise commanded, OMG, I was able to create a near replica!

The reason it works to draw an upside down image, the theory goes, is that it transforms a recognizable man—and all the assumptions we have about how to represent him—into a collection of lines and curves that are entirely new to us. We have no choice but to study and reflect the image in its bare form, unburdened by the stories we have about what a seated man with glasses looks like. And it freaking works!  

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The Hanging One from the Gentle Tarot

In today’s Sweet Start freewriting session, the prompts were inspired by The Hanging One in The Gentle Tarot. When The Hanging One comes up in a reading, we are being invited to view something from a wholly different perspective.

Perhaps that invitation has already arrived in the form of a sudden life shift—a birth, death, breakup, job loss, inheritance, diagnosis, recovery, or surprise of any kind, welcome or not. And in those cases, it’s hard not to see life differently. 

If that’s the case for you, The Hanging One wants you to take some time to pause and soak in the new view. What, exactly, does the world look like now? What do you know now that you didn’t know before? What beauties do you see that were once invisible to your naked eye?

What sorrows have taken up residence, and how do they shift your lens? What assumptions have been stripped from your vision? What perceptions of yourself no longer fit? What new possibilities are presenting themselves as the ground becomes the sky?

Or maybe your life feels the opposite of upside down right now. Maybe it’s just the regular old right-side up grind. Predictable, repetitive, and even a bit stagnant. Perhaps you’re working on a creative piece and just can’t figure out the next step. Maybe your life is the creative piece you’re working on and you know you want to make a change but your feet are stuck in invisible mud.

In that case, The Hanging One wants you to shake things up! Look at your project or your life from a different perch! You could literally hang upside—on bars at the playground or at the circus arts school or by standing on your head in the living room-and see if all that blood rushing to your brain brings any epiphanies.

Yet there are so many others ways to shift the view, right? Changing routines is a good one. Taking a different route on daily trips, choosing a new form of transportation, talking to strangers, going to that random cafe you’ve been curious about for years, and taking a class or reading a book or watching a movie about a place and time you know little about are good ones, too.

The Hanged Man from the Smith-Rider-Waite

Ten years ago I became The Hanging One when my partner of six years ended our relationship in one short conversation. For a few hours I felt sick to my stomach as I imagined my next steps. I got as far as seeing myself in my own apartment or a house with strangers and continuing my life in Portland as it had been for the past six years when a clear and resounding voice spoke up.

No. I wasn’t going to keep doing the life I had been doing since my 30th birthday. I had been feeling stuck for a long time, bound by my commitments to my bakery job, my writing studio, my work for Prescott College, my relationship, my writing, my martial arts practice, and my friendships. I was exhausted and stretched thin and knew something had to give, but had no idea what or how.

But when my now-ex-partner showed me exactly what was ready to give, ready or not, I discovered a porthole to a brand new view. I saw my bookshelves emptied. My vintage teacher’s desk in my poet friend’s bedroom. I saw myself light and free, living in the cabin in the woods that had been calling me my whole life.

I gave notice at my baking job that night. A month later I was on a plane to Chicago to rest and recoup in my family nest. And six months later I was living in a platform tent in the ancient forests of the Oregon Cascades. And though it all seems to have happened quite quickly in my retelling of this story, the chunk of time I spent suspended in The Unknown is the true heart of The Hanging One.

Ram Dass wrote, “The dark night of the soul is when you have lost the flavor of life but have not yet gained the fullness of divinity. So it is that we must weather that dark time, the period of transformation when what is familiar has been taken away and the new richness is not yet ours.”

While being metaphorically flipped upside down can feel as gleeful as the Gentle Tarot’s Hanging One appears to be, it can also be excruciating to be in midst of transformation with our feet far from the ground while the comfort of the familiar is no longer there.

The Hanged One from the Brady Tarot

For me, the post-breakup time of rest and hard-core daydreaming about life in the woods was delicious and also full of grief and hurt and a general sense of floating with no clear direction.

So I gave myself micro directions every day: walk or ski along the lake, talk to Sister and M*0*M, write, grade papers, stretch, repeat. I created a scaffolding of familiar, beloved activities to hold me steady as I climbed toward a higher, broader vision of my life than I’d allowed myself to take years. Every time I reached a lookout along the way, I caught a glimpse of the pulsing center of my life and the increasingly clear route into it.

This clarity is The Hanging One’s ultimate gift to us. When we find ourselves upside down—whether it’s because life has done the flipping for us or we’ve been stuck and it’s time to see the world from a different angle—there is always a period between the known and not-yet-known, the stagnant and the rich, the person we were before and the person we are in the midst of becoming. And it can be downright uncomfortable in that in-between land.

But if we can just hang in that space while all the stuff we’ve been carrying falls out of our pockets, enjoy the feeling of swinging through the air alongside the discomforts, greet fears and doubts with tenderness as they arise, and allow our upside-down stance to transform the world into a series of stark lines and curves unburdened by our preconceived notions about them, we will thrive. Because The Hanging One is able to draw into being the new life she sees in its barest form now that she’s looking at it upside down.