Tower Moments
I’m a big Maren Morris fan – a “lunatic,” as her fan base has been dubbed. Maren released a new song recently called, “The Tree,” and I can’t stop listening to it. It’s powerful, it’s soulful, it’s infectious like an anthem… and it’s about a Tower Moment.
I’m done filling a cup with a hole in the bottom.
I’m taking an ax to the tree.
The rot at the root is the root of the problem
But you want to blame it on me.
If you know anything about tarot, you’ll recognize the ridiculousness of writing an anthem for the Tower because the Tower is the worst. Folks that don’t know tarot are scared of the Death card; folks that do know tarot dread the Tower. It signifies a bitter, fiery, catastrophic end that is neither welcomed nor expected, and as a reader it’s pretty challenging to sugarcoat it into something palatable – and I can sugarcoat almost anything! The Tower comes up for everyone eventually, and it’s terrible every time. Yet, this song…
In an interview for the LA Times, Maren talks about growing up loving country music. She talks about making herself different, molding herself to fit what country music asked her to be. She did what she thought she needed to do to earn love from the industry, from its fans. And on the 10-year anniversary of her move to Nashville, she gives us this song about how you should never meet your heroes.
Spent 10,000 hours trying to fight it with flowers
When the tree was already on fire.
In the music video – which is gorgeous and nostalgic and as affecting as the song – she walks through a deserted Small Town (built out of miniatures), once “great” and now poisoned by the toxic family tree at the town’s center. Maren moseys alone, even stopping to water flowers at the base of the tree, only to find herself ensnared by vines creeping around her ankles. She gets up the resolve to strike a match just as the tree bursts into flames without any help from her. The video ends with Maren strolling over a bridge and out of town, the tree ablaze in the background.
Oh-hoo do you hear that?
That’s the sound a new wind blowing.
Oh-hoo do you feel that?
A heart letting go of a weight it’s been holding.
How triumphant, right?? She’s finally free! The tree has fallen! Ding-dong the witch is dead!
And yet, my empathy bone aches for her. How painful for her to have to tumble to the ground a Mecca she made a lifelong pilgrimage to find. What a tragedy to realize that which she loved so unconditionally never intended to love her back. We’re told you get out what you put in / you reap what you sew / you treat others the way you want to be treated (with the underlying assumption that they will, in fact, treat you that way back). Yet here’s this song about a girl and a Tree that didn’t hold up its end of any of these bargains. The injustice of it makes me so sad for her.
Lamenting injustice makes a voice in my head argue, “Yea well, life’s not fair!” which is dismissive and also true. Justice implies fairness. Balance. Perfect harmony. And this is a transient, wild, ever-shifting, imperfect existence. We can know moments of perfection: a sun falling neatly between two buildings just before it sets, or two clock hands overlapping for a literal second before decoupling again. Perfection as a state of being though? That’s not where we live. The impermanence of it, the fleeting nature of perfect harmony requires us to get good at grieving, to get good at burning down trees and towers. Death is a part of life, and that’s fine – but what a travesty when we’re asked to wield the reaper’s scythe ourselves. It’s giving Old Yeller, and I’m not ok with that.
The rot at the root is the root of the problem.
Our ecosystem is a fragile one. Sometimes the tree – or the tower or the Golden Retriever – that we loved and maybe even built our foundation on starts to rot and poison everything around it. It’s not the tree’s fault, and it’s not our fault for not protecting or nurturing the tree better. The tree is a part of nature, and its survival is its own responsibility. By the same token, our survival is our responsibility. And if that tree threatens it, then we have to let it burn down. Felling trees and tumbling towers is part of life and growth.
What I eventually get to beyond the sadness of leveling something that we once loved is the realization that the perfection of that thing was only an illusion to begin with. And so all we’re actually losing when this tower falls is a belief system, a story we were being told or were telling ourselves. And isn’t re-writing stories simply a part of the process of creation? If every writer published her first draft, none of us would read. Creating and recreating and shaping and editing and fine-tuning and evolving is our birthright. That means outgrowing old clothes. It means moving away from home. It means ending relationships, abandoning interests, quitting jobs, giving up hobbies.
I’m done filling a cup with a hole in the bottom.
Towers and trees are never insidious by nature – they’re built or planted to serve a purpose during a very specific time. The operative word there is “serve.” Once they’re no longer serving us, they have to come down. I know Maren Morris will find her way to greater ease and prosperity and personal success after letting this tree burn down – that’s what the tarot promises is on the other side of a tower moment. A fallen tower makes room to give new growth a chance.
