Pamela Colman Smith – Just the Tarot

The World – The Dance of Life

The World marks the completion of the Tarot’s great journey—but every ending contains a new beginning. Explore the card’s mysterious wands, its connection to The Fool and The Magician, and the symbolism of dance, rebirth, integration, and divine play.

As the final card of the Major Arcana, The World is both the end of a cycle and the beginning of a new one.

Yes, we’ve come to the end of the long journey through the archetypes. The lessons have been learned, the trials endured, and the pieces brought together. But Tarot doesn’t really have an ending. The moment one journey is completed, another begins.

The World isn’t a period.

It’s a doorway.

THE WREATH — COMPLETION AND REBIRTH

The most obvious symbol of completion is the enormous wreath surrounding the central figure.

But look at its peculiar shape. Rather than being perfectly circular, the wreath forms a long oval. It can easily suggest an opening, a portal—and perhaps even the shape of the birth canal.

Seen that way, the figure isn’t simply standing triumphantly inside a wreath celebrating what she has accomplished. She’s passing through it. She’s arriving at the destination and simultaneously being born into another world.

That’s one of the great paradoxes of The World: completion and beginning are the same event. Every genuine transformation eventually requires us to leave behind the person who began the journey.

THE FOOL, THE WORLD, AND THE DANCE OF LIFE

At the very beginning of the Tarot journey we encountered The Fool.

He’s filled with such exuberance that he practically dances toward the edge of a cliff. He doesn’t know where he’s going. He hasn’t experienced the Magician, the Lovers, Death, the Devil, the Tower, the Moon or any of the other archetypal encounters awaiting him.

He simply steps forward.

Now look at the figure in The World.

She’s dancing, too. But this is a very different dance. The Fool dances because he doesn’t yet know what lies ahead. The World dances because she does.

She has traveled through the entire cycle and somehow recovered the joyous freedom with which she began it.

This idea has a fascinating parallel in Hindu philosophy.

Shiva as Nataraja—the Lord of the Dance—is portrayed dancing within a great circle of flame. His dance represents the ceaseless movement of existence: creation, preservation, destruction and renewal.

The visual resemblance to The World is striking: a dancing figure surrounded by a circular boundary representing something vastly larger than the individual.

Hindu traditions also give us the wonderful concept of līlā, usually translated as “divine play.” Līlā suggests that creation doesn’t necessarily arise because the divine lacks something or needs to accomplish some desperately important objective. Creation can be understood as spontaneous expression—something closer to art, music, play or dance.

An artist paints. A musician plays. A dancer dances. Creation creates.

This doesn’t mean that suffering is unreal or that life should never be taken seriously. It suggests something subtler: beneath all our struggling, planning and attempts to control events, there may be another way of participating in existence.

We can dance with it.

The woman in The World is being born into something new, but she isn’t grimacing with effort. She’s having a hell of a lot of fun doing it.

THE MAGICIAN, THE WORLD, AND INTEGRATION

There’s another fascinating connection between The World and one of the earliest cards in the Major Arcana.

The woman holds two peculiar short, double-ended wands loosely in her hands. We’ve seen that wand before. The Magician holds one.

But notice the difference in how the two figures use them.

The Magician raises his wand deliberately toward heaven while pointing his other hand toward Earth. His entire posture communicates intention:

I will make something happen.

He channels divine power into manifestation. He gathers the four elemental tools before him and consciously directs his will.

The World no longer needs to do that. She holds two wands, perfectly balanced on either side of her body. She isn’t pointing them anywhere. She isn’t commanding anything. She almost seems to be playing with them.

They’ve become part of the dance.

The Magician uses magic. The World embodies it.

At the beginning of the journey, we have to learn that we possess creative power. We have to discover intention, will, concentration and the ability to shape our lives. But perhaps there comes a point when even that must be surrendered.

The Magician says: I am creating my world.

The World says: I am the creation.

The World Tarot Poster – Available on etsy

THE MAGIC CIRCLE

Now notice the four mysterious figures occupying the corners of the card: the human or angel, eagle, bull and lion.

They have a long symbolic history extending far beyond Tarot, but within the Tarot’s esoteric correspondences they can be associated with the four fixed signs of the zodiac:

Aquarius — Air

Scorpio — Water

Taurus — Earth

Leo — Fire

Once again, all four elements are present. We encountered them on the Magician’s table at the beginning of the journey. Now they surround The World.

This gives the card an almost ritual quality. In Western ceremonial magic, the four directions and their elemental correspondences can be invoked around a ritual space. Symbolically, then, we can imagine the dancing woman standing within a great magic circle surrounded by the forces of creation.

But something has fundamentally changed.

The Magician stood before the elements and manipulated their symbols. The World dances among them.

Mind, emotion, body and spirit are no longer competing forces that need to be brought under control. They have become parts of a larger whole. That is integration.

And perhaps that’s what The World ultimately means by completion. Not perfection. Not reaching a place where nothing difficult will ever happen again.

Wholeness.

WHEN THE WORLD APPEARS IN YOUR READING

When The World appears in a reading, something has come full circle.

A long process may be reaching completion. You may finally understand something that once confused you, finish something you’ve worked toward for a long time, or realize that you’ve simply outgrown a particular chapter of your life.

But don’t mistake completion for stagnation. The World almost always contains the seed of what comes next.

You may be standing at exactly that strange threshold where you can look backward and say, “I’ve finished,” while simultaneously looking forward and realizing, “Now I begin again.”

The card can also indicate integration. Pieces of yourself that once seemed contradictory may finally be learning to coexist. The intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual parts of your life may be finding their proper relationship with one another.

And sometimes The World offers an even simpler message:

Stop trying so hard to control the dance.

You’ve learned more than you realize. You have the tools. You’ve survived the journey.

Now loosen your grip on the wands.

Listen for the music.

And dance.

THE SUN — JOY WITHOUT EFFORT

The Sun represents far more than happiness and success. Through the mysterious symbolism of the child, white horse, enormous red banner, stone wall, and radiant sun, the card reveals a deeper state of being—innocence without naïveté, power without force, balance without control, and joy that arises naturally when we finally stop struggling against ourselves.

The Sun is one of the most immediately joyful cards in the Tarot.

Everything about it seems to announce happiness. A brilliant sun fills the sky. Sunflowers rise above a stone wall. A white horse moves peacefully through the scene, carrying a laughing child who waves an enormous red banner.

Traditionally, The Sun is associated with happiness, vitality, success, clarity, and optimism. All of those meanings are perfectly valid. But they don’t really explain the picture.

Why is the central figure a naked child? Why is the child riding without reins? Why does Pamela Colman Smith give this tiny figure a banner far larger than any child could reasonably carry? And why is a stone wall standing in the middle of this otherwise exuberant landscape?

Perhaps Smith is showing us something much more profound than happiness.

Perhaps The Sun depicts what happens when we finally stop struggling against ourselves.

THE CHILD WHO COMES AT THE END OF THE JOURNEY

It is tempting to look at the child in The Sun and think immediately of the modern concept of the inner child. There is certainly some resonance there, but the placement of The Sun within the Major Arcana suggests something deeper.

This child appears very late in the Tarot journey. We have already passed through The Devil, confronted The Tower, stood naked beneath The Star, and traveled through the strange nocturnal landscape of The Moon.

This is therefore not the innocence of someone who has never encountered darkness. It is innocence recovered after encountering it.

That distinction is important.

The Fool is innocent because the journey has barely begun. The figure in The Sun has traveled through nearly the entire Major Arcana.

This is not naïveté. It is simplicity on the other side of complexity.

The child can therefore be understood as something closer to the ancient archetype of the Divine Child: something newly born within us that appears small and vulnerable while possessing extraordinary power.

The personality has not returned to childhood. It has rediscovered something child-like.

Naturalness.

Spontaneity.

Trust.

Wonder.

Joy.

NAKED IN THE SUNLIGHT

The child’s nudity reinforces the idea.

There is nothing to hide.

Throughout the Tarot, people wear costumes that tell us who they are. Kings have crowns. Priests have robes. Warriors wear armor. The Emperor sits dressed in the symbols of authority.

The child in The Sun has none of them. No rank. No profession. No armor. No social identity.

Nothing stands between the child and the world.

This is especially striking after The Moon.

Under moonlight, appearances become uncertain. A rope can look like a snake. The familiar becomes strange. Material rises from the unconscious in dreams, fears, fantasies, intuitions, and projections.

The Sun changes the light.

Nothing needs to remain hidden because everything can now be seen clearly. And the figure who emerges into that illumination has nothing left to conceal.

WHO IS RIDING WHOM?

Then there is the horse.

At first glance, we naturally say that the child is riding it.

But look again.

There are no reins. The child isn’t gripping the horse with her legs. In fact, her legs kick exuberantly outward. She isn’t clutching the mane or concentrating on maintaining control. She appears almost unconcerned with the mechanics of riding.

Perhaps the child isn’t controlling the horse at all. Perhaps the horse is carrying the child.

That gives us an entirely different image of power.

The horse can represent the animal nature—the body, instinct, appetite, physical energy, and all those parts of ourselves that conscious thought so often tries to control.

The Sun offers another possibility.

The child doesn’t dominate instinct. She trusts it. Horse and rider are in balance without visible control.

There is no struggle between the conscious and instinctive self because they are no longer trying to go in different directions.

POWER WITHOUT FORCE

This brings The Sun surprisingly close to the Taoist concept of wu wei—often translated as effortless action or action without forcing.

The child accomplishes everything without apparent effort.

And nowhere is that more obvious than in the enormous red banner. Look at its size. It is absurdly large.

The artist understood human proportions perfectly well. A child that size should struggle even to keep such a large flag upright, particularly while sitting unsecured on a moving horse.

Instead, the child casually holds it aloft with one hand while it billows dramatically across the sky. This tiny figure possesses outsized power.

But there is no evidence of effort. No straining muscles. No grim determination. No attempt to demonstrate strength.

The child doesn’t act powerful. She simply is.

Perhaps this is one of the central mysteries of The Sun: The Sun is not the power of forcing things to happen. It is the power that becomes available when we stop fighting ourselves.

THE RED BANNER

The banner itself deserves attention.

Its brilliant red is almost discordant against the yellows, whites, blues, and grays dominating the rest of the card. It demands to be noticed.

Red is the color of blood, heat, passion, vitality, and physical existence. It is the color of life.

And the child doesn’t hide that vitality. She raises it above her head and lets it unfurl across the sky.

The gesture is almost declarative. I am here.

After the uncertainty and ambiguity of The Moon, there is no hesitation about existence in The Sun. Life announces itself.

THE WALL

And then we come to that peculiar stone wall.

Why place a wall in this scene at all?

Walls divide. They establish boundaries between what is inside and what is outside, what is permitted and what is excluded, what is protected and what is kept away.

Behind the wall are the sunflowers. In front of it are the child and horse.

Something has crossed a boundary. She has simply emerged beyond it.

We might think of that wall as all the things that have separated us from our natural selves: conditioning, fear, social expectations, defensive structures, old beliefs, and identities we once needed but eventually outgrew.

The Sun doesn’t necessarily destroy them. It illuminates them and moves beyond them.

THE FLOWERS THAT SEEK THE LIGHT

Behind the wall are four enormous sunflowers. Their symbolism could hardly be more appropriate.

Sunflowers turn toward the light. They suggest the natural movement of life toward illumination—not because someone commands it, but because that is simply what the organism does.

And perhaps that is another clue to the entire card. Nothing in The Sun seems to be trying very hard.

The sun shines because that is its nature.

The flowers turn toward it because that is their nature.

The horse carries the child because horse and rider are moving together.

The banner flies because the wind catches it.

And the child rejoices because joy has become natural.

Everything is doing what it does without struggling to become something else.

JOY WITHOUT A REASON

This also helps explain the extraordinary joy of The Sun.

We often think of happiness as something caused by circumstances.

We will be happy when we get the job. When we find the relationship. When the money arrives. When the problem disappears.

But nothing identifiable has happened to make this child happy. There is no treasure chest. No victorious army. No palace. No admiring crowd.

She is simply alive beneath the Sun. Her joy seems to arise from being completely at home in herself.

That may be why the card feels so different from ordinary images of success.

The child isn’t celebrating an achievement.

She is celebrating existence.

WHEN THE SUN APPEARS IN YOUR READING

The Sun can certainly indicate the traditional qualities associated with it: happiness, success, vitality, confidence, clarity, and favorable circumstances.

But on a deeper level, it may ask a more interesting question:

What would happen if you stopped fighting yourself?

Perhaps you don’t need another layer of control. Perhaps you don’t need more armor. Perhaps you don’t need to force the horse to go where it already knows how to go.

The Sun can appear when something authentic is ready to emerge from behind the walls that have contained it.

It encourages trust in your own nature. It asks you to allow yourself to be seen.

And it reminds you that genuine power does not always announce itself through effort, dominance, or control.

Sometimes power looks like a tiny naked child carrying an impossibly enormous banner while a horse gently carries her into the sunlight.

She is small without being weak. She is vulnerable without being afraid. She is powerful without exerting force. She is balanced without needing control.

And she is joyful without needing a reason.

That is the illumination of The Sun.

The Death Card in Tarot: Death Is Only the Beginning

The three stages of the Death Tarot Card.

The Death card is one of the most misunderstood cards in Tarot. Far from simply representing physical death—or the rather vague modern idea of “transformation”—Pamela Colman Smith’s imagery appears to present death as the first stage of a much larger journey: death, passage through the unknown, and eventual return to the light.

Few Tarot cards have undergone as dramatic a transformation as Death.

In many early Tarot decks, such as the Marseilles deck, Death is exactly what we would expect him to be: a skeletal figure wielding a scythe, mowing down human beings almost as though they were wheat. Kings, commoners, young and old all fall before him.

The symbolism isn’t particularly subtle.

Death comes for everyone.

But when Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith created the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, they radically reimagined the card.

The scythe disappeared. Death climbed onto a white horse. And, perhaps most importantly, Smith created an entire landscape behind him.

That landscape may tell us what happens after Death passes.

From the Grim Reaper to the Rider

The mounted skeleton almost certainly draws upon one of the most famous images in the Book of Revelation: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

When the fourth seal is opened, Death appears riding a pale horse.

Waite and Smith borrow that terrifying image, but significantly change its character. Their Death carries no scythe and no sword. Instead, he carries a black banner bearing a white rose.

He isn’t simply killing people.

He is moving through the landscape.

And the landscape appears to be divided into three remarkably distinct regions.

Death Card Poster – 13 X 19 – Available on etsy

The First Realm: Death in the Clear Light of Day

The foreground is brightly and naturally illuminated.

Everything is clearly visible. We see the white horse, the skeletal rider, the fallen king, the bishop, the woman and the child. There is nothing particularly mysterious about this portion of the card.

Perhaps that is appropriate.

Whatever we may believe about an afterlife, reincarnation or resurrection, death itself is observable. Living things die. We may fear it, deny it or try not to think about it, but there is nothing metaphysically mysterious about the physical event itself.

Smith even gives us several different human responses to it.

The king has fallen before Death. His crown lies uselessly on the ground. Political power and worldly status provide no protection.

The woman turns away.

The child looks directly at Death, apparently without fear.

And the bishop remains standing, hands clasped before the approaching rider.

The bishop is particularly interesting. Unlike the king, he possesses no worldly means of resisting Death. But he does possess a spiritual framework through which death can be understood.

He doesn’t defeat Death.

He is able to face him.

The figures also recall the medieval Dance of Death tradition, in which Death comes for every rank of society. King, priest, woman and child ultimately share the same fate.

But then our eyes move beyond them.

And the card changes.

The Second Realm: The Liminal World

The middle distance is dramatically different from the foreground.

The clear light disappears. The landscape becomes gray and indistinct.

And separating the two regions is water.

On that water Smith has placed one of the smallest—and potentially most important—details in the entire card:

a boat.

The image immediately recalls the ancient story of Charon, the ferryman who transports the dead across the river separating the world of the living from the realm of the dead.

Whether Smith consciously intended Charon is impossible to establish simply from the picture. But the symbolic association is extraordinarily appropriate.

The river marks a boundary.

The boat crosses it.

And on the other side lies a strange, shadowy landscape.

In other words, Death itself may not be the mystery depicted by the card.

The mystery begins after Death.

Is the Moon Hidden Inside the Death Card?

At the far edge of this gray landscape stand two towers.

Anyone familiar with the Rider-Waite-Smith deck has seen them before.

They strongly resemble the two towers in The Moon.

In The Moon, a path leads between two towers and disappears into a strange nocturnal landscape. It is the territory of uncertainty, dreams, fears, illusions, instincts and the unconscious—the world in which the ordinary clarity of daylight has disappeared.

Smith appears to evoke remarkably similar visual territory in Death.

That gives us a fascinating possibility.

The middle portion of the Death card may function almost like a miniature version of The Moon: the liminal realm between one state of existence and another.

We have left the known world.

We haven’t reached the next one.

We are between states.

That is the essence of liminality:

I am no longer what I was, but I have not yet become what I will be.

The Third Realm: And Then the Sun Rises

Beyond the gray landscape and between the two towers, something entirely different appears.

The rising sun.

This is not a minor decorative feature. Waite himself called attention to it and associated it with immortality.

And visually, its placement is extraordinary.

If the towers recall The Moon, the brilliant sun appearing between them naturally anticipates The Sun.

The progression therefore becomes:

Death → the shadowy realm → the rising Sun.

Or, expressed through the Major Arcana:

Death → Moon → Sun.

And what follows The Sun in the Major Arcana?

Judgment.

That is where the dead rise from their graves.

Suddenly, an extraordinary symbolic sequence becomes visible:

Death XIII → Moon XVIII → Sun XIX → Judgment XX

Death.

Passage through the unknown.

Return of the light.

Resurrection.

We cannot know whether Pamela Colman Smith consciously sat down and constructed that sequence. But we don’t need to know. The visual relationships are present in the cards themselves.

Death and Judgment

This also helps us understand why the Death card cannot be considered in isolation from Judgment.

The connection already exists within Christianity.

The Book of Revelation gives us Death riding his horse—and later gives us the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment.

The early Tarot’s scythe also contains an interesting implication. Death isn’t merely slaughtering people.

He is harvesting them.

And harvesting belongs to a cycle.

The crop grows. It is cut down. The field lies barren. Eventually new life appears.

Christian theology calls the eventual return of the dead resurrection, not reincarnation. They are very different doctrines.

Symbolically, however, both contain the same fundamental pattern:

Life → Death → Intermediate State → New Life

The Tarot journey appears to contain precisely that pattern.

The White Rose: Life Carried by Death

And this brings us back to Death’s strange banner.

Against the black background appears a white, five-petaled rose.

Waite explicitly tells us what it signifies. He calls it the “Mystic Rose” and says that it represents life.

Think about the paradox.

Death is carrying the symbol of Life.

The regenerative principle isn’t waiting somewhere beyond Death.

Death himself carries it.

There is also a beautiful visual echo elsewhere in the deck. The Fool carries a white rose as he begins his journey.

The Fool sets out carrying the rose.

Death carries the rose.

Bodies and identities disappear, but symbolically something essential continues.

The white rose may therefore give us the central message of the entire card:

The form dies. Life does not.

Death Is Only the First Third of the Picture

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Smith’s Death card becomes apparent only after we stop staring at the skeleton.

Death occupies the foreground.

But the card continues far beyond him.

There is a river.

There is a crossing.

There is a mysterious intermediate landscape.

There is a gateway marked by two towers.

And beyond that gateway, the sun is rising.

Smith and Waite took an older image whose basic message was Death destroys everyone and expanded it into something much more complex.

Death became not simply an ending but the entrance to a process.

That is why describing XIII merely as the card of “transformation” doesn’t quite do it justice.

Transformation sounds almost painless.

Death is more radical.

Something has reached the end of its existing form. That form cannot accompany us farther. We must relinquish it before whatever comes next can emerge.

The card doesn’t promise that we will understand the passage while we’re traveling through it.

In fact, Smith seems to suggest exactly the opposite.

Between Death and the rising Sun lies the gray territory of uncertainty.

But the Sun is already rising.

What Death Means in a Tarot Reading

In a reading, Death usually indicates a genuine ending and an irreversible transition. Something has completed its natural life and cannot continue in its present form. This might be a relationship, job, belief, identity, habit, period of life or way of seeing ourselves.

The card’s advice is not simply “change.”

It is release.

Death says that we may temporarily enter a liminal period in which the old life is gone but the new one isn’t yet visible. That uncertainty is part of the process, not evidence that something has gone wrong.

The most important symbol may therefore be the smallest one on the horizon:

Beyond the ending, the Sun is already beginning to rise.

The Strength Card and Fearlessness

Exploring quiet fidelity to our values as the greatest form of strength.

Are you living fearlessly in the midst of chaos?

In the past, I’ve written about how the Strength card beautifully illustrates the Hindu principle of Ahimsa—the practice of harmlessness. (See The Strength Card, Ahimsa, and Your Magical Anti Shit-Head Cloak.)

In its simplest form, Ahimsa teaches that when our own hearts are truly peaceful, we cease moving through the world as agents of violence. The remarkable claim of the tradition is that this inner harmlessness also becomes a kind of protection. Peace itself becomes a shield.

Today, though, I’d like to explore another aspect of the Strength card.

Fearlessness.

Look carefully at Pamela Colman Smith’s illustration. The woman doesn’t overpower the lion. She doesn’t wrestle it into submission. She approaches it with gentleness, compassion…and with a complete absence of panic.

The great lion becomes, almost unbelievably, a house cat waiting to have its ears scratched. She’s fearless and so the lion is fearless.

Strength Tarot Poster by Dan Adair – available on Etsy

What Is Fear?

Fear is not a character flaw.

It’s part of being human.

Deep within the brain are networks whose job is to constantly scan our surroundings for danger. When they detect a threat, our limbic system responds instantly. Our heart rate rises. Adrenaline and cortisol flood our bloodstream. Muscles tighten. Attention narrows.

Fight.

Flight.

Survive.

It’s a marvelous system. Our ancestors lived because of it.

Thank you, nervous system – good job!

The problem isn’t fear itself.

The problem is when we never leave that state.

Modern life has a remarkable ability to keep the alarm bells ringing. Financial worries. Health concerns. Relationships. Politics. Endless news feeds. Before long we’re swimming in stress hormones that were designed for emergencies, not for everyday living.

Eventually the body grows exhausted.

And so does the spirit.

The Western Idea of Fearlessness

Our culture loves fearless heroes.

Movies are filled with square-jawed action stars who stare down impossible odds without breaking a sweat. They defeat violence by becoming even better at violence.

It’s entertaining.

But it’s also a fantasy.

That kind of fearlessness isn’t based on peace.

It’s based on becoming more dangerous than whatever threatens us.

The mystic quietly disappears and the sociopath takes center stage.

The message becomes: “You don’t have to be afraid if everyone else is afraid of you.”

That’s a strange definition of courage.

Nothing has actually become peaceful.

We’ve simply dumped more adrenaline into the system and called it victory.

A Peaceful Heart

Whenever we declare war on fear, something curious happens.

We activate the limbic system that we’re trying to quiet. When we use phrases like, “battling our fear,” we immediately wake up our fear center. Battle? Did someone say battle?

Why do we battle something?

Because we’re afraid of it.

So we create a strange paradox.

We try to conquer fear…with fear.

The Strength card offers another path.

It doesn’t ask us to destroy fear.

It asks us to stop feeding it.

That doesn’t mean we ignore danger. It doesn’t mean we stop listening when our instincts warn us that something is genuinely wrong. We don’t need to take up nude skydiving just to prove we’re fearless.

We notice fear.

We thank it for trying to protect us.

And then we continue walking with a peaceful heart.

The lion is still a lion.

But we are no longer terrified by its roar.

Quiet Fidelity

When I think about genuine fearlessness, I don’t think about action heroes.

I think about the husband who spends years caring for his wife through cancer, quietly getting the wheelchair ready every morning.

I think about the single mother working two jobs so her children have food on the table and shoes on their feet.

I think about the husband or wife who continues showing kindness and faithfulness long after romance has faded into ordinary life.

Henry David Thoreau famously wrote that “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Perhaps.

But I think he overlooked something.

Most people live lives of quiet fidelity.

They get up every morning.

They show up.

Even when hope seems unreasonable, they continue hoping.

Even when depression whispers that nothing matters, they keep looking for beauty.

Even when illness or grief comes to visit, they continue choosing life.

That, to me, is what the Strength card is really about.

For most of us, fearlessness doesn’t mean living without fear. Perhaps the rare saint—or the rare sociopath—can make that claim.

The rest of us simply learn not to let fear become the author of our lives.

We acknowledge it.

We thank it.

We refuse to let it drive.

And little by little, we discover that the lion was never conquered.

Only our relationship to it changed.

As Joseph Campbell so beautifully observed:

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

Perhaps the greatest treasure isn’t on the other side of fear.

Perhaps it is the peaceful heart we discover while walking through it.