78-Day Meditation Challenge: Day 47

The Ember That Remains

Card of the Day: The High Priestess (Reversed)

Sometimes insight comes from noticing where a card sits within the Tarot sequence. The High Priestess is the third card of the Major Arcana, following the Magician, who follows the Fool. The Fool represents youthful optimism—a blissful ignorance of risk or the possibility of failure. Fearlessness. The Magician embodies agency, the power to act and shape reality. The High Priestess represents spiritual alignment, intuition, and clarity.

There is a message in these first three cards—an invitation to balance three attributes, three superpowers if you will: optimism, agency, and spiritual alignment.

When reversed, the High Priestess invites reflection on spiritual depletion. The fatigue that settles when our optimism has waned, when our sense of agency has dimmed, when life has pulled us so far from our center we can scarcely recall where it is.

What happens when fear replaces fearlessness? When powerlessness eclipses agency? When we begin to believe we are only what has been taken from us?

And yet—even in that place—some ember remains.

Viktor Frankl, writing from a place of unimaginable suffering, offered a perspective that feels humbling to recall in the relative safety of ordinary life. He wrote that in Auschwitz, his first act of reclaimed agency was choosing where to look: left or right. In a context where everything had been stripped away, he began with the smallest freedom—and discovered that no one could take the sovereignty of his mind. And that gave way to a greater power: choosing to act with kindness despite the cruelty of his captors, sharing what little he had with those who had even less. Which gave way to a still greater power: the ability to see beauty amidst horror—that birds still flew overhead, that trees could be seen beyond the walls of the camp.

While our challenges are not the same, his example reminds us that even in far lesser trials, the freedom of our minds can become a place of refuge.

So, too, this card reminds us: even in exhaustion, we can choose perspective. We can choose to notice the single bird overhead. The glimpse of sky beyond the walls.

Optimism. Agency. Spiritual alignment. None are absolute. All can be rekindled.

How can I apply this today?

• I will notice where I have surrendered my power and gently reclaim it.

• I will honor even the smallest choices as expressions of freedom.

• I will look for beauty in moments of heaviness.

• I will trust that no circumstance can fully sever me from my spirit.

I welcome all parts of myself—known and unknown, shining and shadowed.

I honor my past for what it has taught me.

I trust my intuition to lead me.

I release what no longer serves me.

I walk forward with steadiness, guided by the light within me.

Be well, be present, be at peace.