Reality Check

From the Artist's Inner Vision Tarot, Judgment; from the Art of Collage Cards, a work by Eugenia Loli:

          These folks all look like they're in the throes of a terrifying situation, using their hands to shield or beg for mercy. One angel extends a rod, but I'm not sure if it is offering relief or just poking people with it.  It is a day of reckoning, a time when mindlessness of one's actions have now been exposed. Yet rather than some deity or external judge tying me to the whipping post, I am the one who has been forcefully awakened by the consequences of my previous actions (or inaction). I might try to blame everything on someone or something else, but I am ultimately responsible for planting and watering those seeds that turned into briers. I've given the collage by Loli the title "Erosion." This woman seems to be in deep thought while the waterfall erodes her cube of stability. Hopefully what is being eroded are the rigid ideas that created the chaos in the Judgment card. Her cube isn't on the ground but floating above it, suggesting that what she thought was concrete isn't even grounded in reality.

In the naivete of their youth, they believed Fate to be a kind mistress. None of them were prepared for the beast that was about to pick them up by the throats and shake them until their teeth rattled. 

― Melodie Ramone