The Strength card is a symbol of inner fortitude, which helps us prevail in the face of life’s challenges. Strength is something that needs to be reinforced every day. Just as muscles need to be continuously used to maintain their power, so too does inner-strength need to be habitually exercised.
Environmental philosopher, bush dweller and guide to the more-than-human world
If Strength belongs to anyone, it belongs to those who discover that true resilience is not about domination but relationship.
Val Plumwood spent much of her life challenging one of our oldest assumptions—that humans stand apart from nature. She argued instead that we are participants in a living community, woven into relationships with animals, plants, rivers, weather and place. We are neither masters nor spectators, but fellow inhabitants.
Living in the bush near Braidwood, New South Wales, Plumwood cultivated a life of close attention. She was as interested in the particular as the universal: this creek, this bird, this patch of forest. Her philosophy grew from lived experience rather than distant abstraction.
In 1985, while canoeing in Kakadu National Park, she survived a near-fatal attack by a large estuarine crocodile. The experience profoundly altered her thinking. Rather than interpreting it solely as a personal tragedy or triumph, she recognised it as a shattering reminder that humans are not outside nature. For a terrifying moment she became prey rather than observer, confronting the illusion that we occupy a privileged place above other living beings.
From this emerged one of her most enduring insights: strength lies not in conquering the world but in learning how to belong within it.
Plumwood encouraged us to abandon the fantasy of human supremacy and cultivate what she called an ethic of mutuality—meeting the living world with respect, reciprocity and humility. She invited us to see places not as resources to be mastered but as communities to which we belong.
The Strength card echoes this quiet revolution. Its power is not force, but presence. Not control, but attentiveness. Like the patient naturalist, Strength listens before it acts and understands that flourishing depends upon finding one’s habitat rather than competing for another’s.
Perhaps the greatest gift Val Plumwood offers is a new question.
Instead of asking, How can I master this place?
She asks,
How can I learn to dwell here well?
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