Tipping Points

The card pulled today from the Quantum Tarot is the Six of Pentacles:

Unlike leptons (see Dec. 10), quarks cannot exist independently but only in groups called hadrons.  Stopforth and Butler associate this card with the hadron - a composite particle made of quarks and held together by the strong force.  There are two groups of hadrons, baryons (made of three quarks) and mesons (made of one quark and one antiquark).  Because mesons contain both matter and antimatter, they are unstable and don't last long.  The baryons and mesons show the balance in nature, having the qualities of change and stability, just as we experience both abundance and lack.  Like quarks, humans were made to exist in groups and form an interdependence on each other.  When one person is experiencing a crisis in health or finances, another person who is not can help them to keep things in balance.  Giving and receiving are both on the same continuum, and I must be open to both in order to maintain a sense of equilibrium.

     From the Universe Cards this morning comes the "Supernova - culmination:"

A supernova is a star that explodes, but to get to this point we have to rewind.  Normally stars maintain an equilibrium, with the gravity that tries to compress it being balanced by the nuclear reactions in their cores trying to expand them.  The fusion that occurs by turning the star's hydrogen into helium eventually creates a problem - the helium sinks to the core of the star because it is more dense than hydrogen.  Without enough hydrogen in the core, the star begins to collapse, creating a pressure and temperature that creates carbon.  At first the star expands, and begins creating many internal layers until the core becomes iron.  When iron becomes its center, the star collapses in a tremendous explosion called the supernova.  Nature has a way of rebalancing itself, whether in the stars of the universe or the routine of my day.  The unexpected is often just the pendulum swinging back the other way.