Aeon

This is why the Sun isn't the completion. After all that hardship, we don't just get happy endings. The sun coming up the next morning doesn't make everything okay and fine again. Aeon is the card of integrating everything that's gone before; the realization, as the Sun is going down, that we still have memories of the Tower, of Justice, of Death; that we are not the Fool anymore, and that we have the weight of everything we've done and learned on our shoulders.

The Sun enlivens us and reminds us to stand up again, and that there is joy. It is not negated by Aeon. It gains something by not being the placid happy ending, but the active presence of joy in the world--in a world that includes pain and loss and confusions and self-destruction.

Aeon is becoming. Water falls from the sky, fire from the earth; the clouds have echoes of bone and stone, and the weary eye of what may be God or the Magician looks out over the landscape. In the far distance, great white mountains rise up, brighter than anything we've seen before; the undiscovered country? the next step for the Fool? In the center of it all is a nine-months child, ready to be born.

Unlike the Chariot, we aren't yoking two different forces; unlike Alchemy, we're not throwing them together for a big boom; unlike the Lovers, we aren't compromising between them. In Aeon, things that seem different are in the process of becoming--or being recognized as--whole.