Strength Year, 2024 in Review
integrating strength + courage
Let’s recap the ways in which 2024 were difficult collectively:
We weathered and witnessed and resisted a full 12 months of genocide.
We lived through one presidential candidate yielding their candidacy to another, and the brutal defeat of Kamala Harris to one of the most outwardly fascist and white supremacist leaders the U.S. has ever experienced.
We have become fully conscious of how little regard institutions and governments have for the people they supposedly protect and support.
+ So much more.
+ All the personal ways this year has pushed us to our limits.
Art: Walton Ford, Gleipnir, 2012.
2024 has been a year of hard truths and hard situations, both situations that are relatively out of our hands, and those that we had major influence over. Our resilience has been tested to no end. Our ability to stay grounded in our humanity has been on trial. In order to be fully present this year, we have had to step into courage at some point. To embody courage is to be acting from the heart. The tarot archetype of 2024, Strength, is ruled by Leo, which is an astrological archetype deeply connected with the wisdom of the heart. While our hearts break a thousand ways for our precious world on fire all around us, how can we stay rooted in love and belonging?
This year we have truly reckoned with our place in the collective context and the ways we each participate in manifesting the morphic field. While the world rages and power dynamics bloom to reveal their ugliest manifestations, we have been forced to show up in revolutionary ways to resist the destruction and brutality. The revolutionary work, in part, is to find and tend to wells of care, love, and softness to combat the spiritual depletion surrounding us.
Enter Strength. The Strength card, no. 8 in the Major Arcana journey, is a message of heart centered persistence. Strength arrives in a reading when we need to be told to push forward, to weather the storm, to dive deeper into the work. There is usually something heavy to grapple with when Strength enters the landscape of our divination and psychic work. Traditionally, strength is pointing towards something untamed and primal within us (or around us) that we must cope with in order to journey forward on our path of individuation and collective evolution.
Strength reminds us to center our humanity. In early tarot depictions of the Strength card, we see a figure slaying a lion. Since our relationship with the wild and our own psyches has transformed, the archetype too has shapeshifted to depict a figure with their hands inside of the lion’s jaws. The transformation of this archetype illustrates how important it is to know and understand our wilder parts, our untamed desires, our unconscious motivations. When we are tapped into the shadow, when we are in relationship with the shadow in ways that are participatory and non-confrontational, then we are able to receive its intelligence with greater ease. Our unconscious is no longer something to be vanquished, but it is something to hold tenderly, in hopes that it will yield to integration.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
— James Baldwin
This Strength year has been an exercise in facing what we fear with tenderness and love, rather than violence, denial, or defensiveness. The figure on the Strength archetype is bold and soft, putting themselves in a deeply vulnerable position. When we open ourselves up to vulnerability, we are also stepping into our courage and increasing our resilience to difficulty.
The world is in dire straits, but what seems clear to me, is that the violent, patriarchal, capitalistic, white supremacist powers that have been steering the ship are leading us into total destruction. If we can transform our inner and external relationships with power, and with the things that scare us, then we might have a fighting chance at changing our collective course.
Here are some prompts for you to consider as you reflect back on your Strength year, what it has revealed to you, and what it has prepared you for. Feel free to use these questions as journal prompts and divination prompts. Feel free to share your insights below!
What situation caused you the most fear and stress this year and how did you show-up in response?
How did you embody courage this year? What were your obstacles in embracing the wisdom of the heart?
In what ways did you test the limits of your vulnerability this year?
What do you think this Strength year’s lessons prepared you for?
Stay tuned for more offerings on integrating Strength year wisdom and tuning into the collective archetype of 2025: The Hermit.
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