"Starlight Through the Smoke" by Meg Jones Wall
An excerpt from The Star, now available for purchase
Today we are publishing an excerpt from The Star anthology: an essay by Meg Jones Wall titled “Starlight Through the Smoke.”
Meg is a tarot reader, author, teacher, and previous Rebis contributor! Meg’s also the creator behind 3am.tarot and the author of “Finding the Fool: A Tarot Journey to Radical Transformation,” with two more books forthcoming. Their work has been featured at Autostraddle, WIRED, Catapult, Astrology Answers, and more. Meg runs a tarot newsletter called devils & fools, and is also the host of two podcasts: CARD TALK, a mini tarot podcast offering quick tips for tarot readers at all levels; and CALL YOUR COVEN with and fellow Rebis contributor , featuring practical advice using astrology, numerology, and tarot. As a queer, chronically ill tarot reader, Meg's writing focuses on keeping tarot intuitive and accessible, using gender-neutral language and welcoming readers of all identities into the tarot community.
In the essay, Meg describes The Star as a glimmer glimpsed through the billowing soot of the old world, guiding us onward to build a different, better one. As part of our collaboration, Meg shares more about their relationship to the card:
“For me, the Star feels like a deep, powerful exhale. It always brings a sense of relief when it comes up for me in readings: like I've gotten permission to relax, to trust in something bigger than myself, to be present and perhaps worry a little less about the future. In our current world, sometimes this energy can feel hard to connect with in an abstract way — but in tarot readings, The Star consistently offers me comfort, reassurance, glimmers of magic in the darkness. As my relationship with hope itself expands and grows, as I learn more about what it means for me to be hopeful even in the midst of horrors and fear and grief, The Star has really served as a gentle and generous companion. I don't see this card as a demand for unearned, blind optimism — I instead read this card as an opportunity to trust that something better, something sweeter, something real, is on its way, even if I can't see it just yet.”
The Star anthology features more than 30 writers and artists. It’s a beautiful full-color 8x10 book with 114 pages of fiction, essays, poetry, interviews, creative non-fiction, and original artwork. We are an anticapitalist publication and redistribute all profits to social justice orgs. Read more about our mission.
Starlight Through the Smoke
by Meg Jones Wall
The Death card is not the only significant moment of decay, transformation, and rebirth in the tarot.
The narrative arc of The Tower and The Star—the chaos and the calm, the destruction and the rebuilding—also represents a kind of death. But where the Death archetype might speak to an inevitable end, a long-anticipated and necessary release, The Tower’s rapid change can catch us off-guard, activating the kind of stressful response that takes significant time to recover from. The Tower’s crumbling is not just about losing our footing or not having control over where we land—rather, it’s a fundamental recognition that something we thought was solid, stable, and reliable is fading before our eyes; that a truth we once held dear is no longer one we can trust.
In the story of the tarot, The Tower’s fall is followed by the peace and calm of The Star: a chance to rest, to heal and recover, to start seeking hope again. But the trouble with our present world, one of information overload and ongoing crises in every corner, is that a new Tower falls every day. We live in a time of genocide, when we are seeing the devastating long-term impacts of white supremacy, colonization, and Indigenous dehumanization play out in real time. Our natural world is beautiful and sacred, but our greed-fueled institutions and exploitative structures are wildly destructive. The people and systems we once hoped would save us continue to reveal their flaws and fissures, crumbling into dust the more pressure we place on them: towers themselves, built on faulty foundations.
How do we process all of this death, all of this chaos, when we are constantly drowning in grief and fear? How can we catch our breath long enough to recover, to search for a glimmer of hope, when the sky is eternally heavy with ash and sorrow? How could we possibly seek the starlight, shining faintly overhead, with all of this smoke in our eyes?
Perhaps we need to bring a bit of The Star’s light down to earth, where we can feel it more intensely.
It’s The Star that slowly tugs our gaze to the future,
that tends our wounds and dries our tears.
It’s The Star that reminds us of how powerful hope can be.
And it’s The Star that allows us to imagine something new,
something revolutionary, something that’s still in the process of being born.
As an archetype, The Star is one of the most beloved and soothing cards in the deck, representing faith, dreams, recovery, healing, optimism, belief in ourselves, strength, and restoration. After the terrifying freefall of The Tower, after seeing the truth whether we like it or not, The Star offers a balm to our ragged, overstimulated spirits. Even when it’s just a tiny speck of light millions of miles away, even when we aren’t sure what shape the future may take, The Star’s gentle light guides us toward a new hope.
Sometimes this North Star energy is just what we want: something to reach for, something to follow. But other times, we need The Star’s light to be closer, more tangible, providing warmth and comfort when the smoke still hangs thickly in the air. Rather than turning our gaze towards the distant heavens and using that dim light to guide our steps on earth, we must pluck some of The Star’s light from the sky with trembling fingers and find a way to carry it with us: tucked into a lantern, keeping us company, illuminating our purpose.
Transformation, especially the kind that we see in Death and The Tower, requires mourning. It’s impossible not to be changed when witnessing the ongoing genocides in Palestine and so many other countries, not to be impacted by our governments’ devastating failures. And as our eyes are opened, as the fault lines beneath our feet jar us from our sense of safety, as we challenge what we once knew and wonder what’s to come, grief can bubble up in overwhelming ways. Every morning when I log into social media, when my eyes well with tears as I take in whatever fresh horrors have occurred overnight, it feels like another shattering, another collapse, another piece of the puzzle crumbling into dust.
The Tower’s chaos may demand that we stay present and alert, even as we struggle to reconcile the past we experienced with the realities we see now. But it’s The Star that slowly tugs our gaze to the future, that tends our wounds and dries our tears. It’s The Star that reminds us of how powerful hope can be. And it’s The Star that allows us to imagine something new, something revolutionary, something that’s still in the process of being born.
Read the full essay by ordering your copy of The Star.
