Day 95: April 5, 2018

Minor arcana: (Ace of) Cups.

(Don’t repost or delete this caption. Feel free to use, though I would recommend charging it yourself!)

Everybody loves the Cups … or do they?

I’m following along from yesterday’s post about the suit of Swords. I mentioned that I have a strong affinity for the Sword suit as a thinking sort of girl - my career is about the pursuit of intellectual awareness and understanding. I also mentioned I have less affinity for the suit of Cups - and in fact, have to work quite hard to incorporate them in a meaningful way into my life. Its intriguing to read tarot for other people who are strongly aspected in the suit of Cups - I always enjoy those readings, in the same way I’d enjoy looking at anything unfamiliar and interesting, under a microscope. Their way is not my way. It’s probably interesting to note that my work and my research {swords/cups} has been a lot about relatedness, child and adult attachment and disconnection {cups}. My brain is curious about relationship. Perhaps I can offer some {hopefully} interesting perspectives about the suit as one who doesn’t necessarily align easily with Cup energy. 

1. I mentioned yesterday that everyone likely has anaffinityfor one suit over the other, one elementover an other. This depends largely on the way we move through the world, and our primary mode of operation / M.O. It’s obviously not solely related to our elemental signs astrologically, or I’d be an expert in Earth/Water. Thinking about primary modes of moving through the world, I think it’s helpful to look at how we were raised, what the expectations of us were, and what we got “strokes” for. We need to think of our  experiences of relationship - were they places of safety, caring, nurturing and trust? How were our efforts to reach out and connect managed? Do we feel confident in our ability to engage successfully in relationship, or has our track record been less than happy and satisfying? We also need to look at how these themes have played out across our lives. With the suit of Cups its all about what we bring into our relationship with them - and often this is intuitive and only semi-conscious.

This is ,of course, it’s own challenge. How do we work with things that aren’t on our conscious radar? Some people work better than others with the unconscious, intuition and watery realms. Others like things made explicit, conscious, and out in the open, where we can readily see and appreciate them. 

2. Keywords are important, they shift the way we relate to the card’s meanings - and determine how we read them. What do Cup symbols relate to? Receptive, dreamy, watery, creative energy, emotions and our connection and relationship with others. Again, how we relate to this imagery has a lot to do with our personal and social constructions around the imagery/symbolism and keywords. 

How do we feel about feelings? Are we comfortable with our full range of feelings? Do we express them well? How about creativity? Are you creative? Is your creativity valued? Do you value creativity in others? How about your spiritual orientation? Are you connected to the idea of spirituality? How does this work {or not work} in your life? What’s your experience with people? Do you derive joy and satisfaction from your relationships with others, or is are they a bit of a strain/drain? Do you tend to be more receptive and flow with life and relationships or are you more directed and forceful? What’s your track record like with love? Are you looking for it, have you found it, are you even interested? Are you in love with being in love? Are you addicted to the “feel good” value of emotion? 

All this “emotional baggage” we drag into our relationship with Cups and directly or indirectly, the way we read them.

3. Cups aren’t all feel good, happy, happy, joy, joy, joy and celebration. there are developmental tasks associated with the suit. Quite simply, this suit is here to teach us to manage our emotionsand relationships and learn to navigatetheirdepths. Cup energy resists conflict, and unpleasantness - and when we read them, there’s a tendency to focus on the good stuff, and overlook some of the harder aspects of the suit - things like  sensitivity, passivity, procrastination, needing to balance connection with introspection, relationship with privacy, contentment with conflict, the desire to nurture, with ambivalence. 

Cups are the emotional element in ALL its glory,  intense, powerful, deep - not just love and contentment, but also jealousy, possessiveness, anger, rage, melancholy, depression, despair and martyrdom. There’s a full spectrum here, and it has to be said, that some people swim more easily in this spectrum than others. Some people are very good at managing hard emotional aspects that would make others cringe, they know how to swim where it is murky and deep. Other’s are surface swimmers, skimmers, that prefer to stay close to the warmth of the sun.  I think about this when I read Cups for myself and others, I don’t assume everyone is a surface swimmer, but conversely, and I know better than to assume everyone can navigate the depths, or wants to. 

Sometimes we don’t get to choose!

4. More about developmental tasks inherent in the suit: The Cup suit 1-10 helps us explore the giddy excitement of new relationship and connection, but also helps us with the developmental tasks of working on relationship, and living in/with relationship, how to persist and staywithdifficulty and conflict in relationship, and learning to let go of and end relationships that are not in our best interests. 

The suit helps us celebrate our creativity, new creative projects and endeavors, but it also helps us learn how to develop responsibility, sticktoitiveness and work within the cycle of creative production. Cups walk us through the hard lessons of love, loss and impermanence. They teach us about developing our internal sense of self worth and self-esteem and learning that these are things that must be consciously worked on if we want to be able to maintain them.

5. Again,  depending on where you are in the suit’s journey, implies you’ve also been working with the energies in front of it - even if the cards don’t appear in the reading. And for every message a card renders, it also provides illumination about what to do with that energy to progress forward, “learn the lessons” and best actualize the developments of the suit. If there was ever a suit that demands fluency with tilts and reversals, Cups has to be it! 

Let me give an example. Everyone loves the 6 of Cups,  and the feel good vibe of equilibrium and balance of mind and spirit, and harmony. However, there are developmental tasks that needed to happen beforewe arrive here. The 4 of Cups is about developing emotional, spiritual and relational stability - about exploring how we are agents of our comfort and discomfort. It’s a self absorbed, internal focus. The 5 of Cups is about learning to realistically appraise what’s working and what’s not working for us, relationally, emotionally, creatively and spiritually. It’s got an outward, appraising sort of focus and is about learning to toss out the dirty bathwater, without losing the baby. Only when we have progressed those developmental tasks do we arrive at the 6 of Cups. We’ve got equilibrium, but only because we’ve damn well worked for it!

Yet just because we sit with say, an upright 6 of Cups, there’s a subtle undercurrent of learning. Not only is there progression through the suit of Cups - the 6 of Cups yields to the 7,  the Wheel Turns - relationships shift, things change and we must adapt. We also might notice that equilibrium is a moment by moment state of affairs, it can be changing while we sit looking at the card! We can predict change because life is about change and flow. Our ability to navigate the suit of Cups is a lot about our ability to let go and flow anda lot about persisting and sitting still with discomfort, long term and moment to moment.

Cups are hard work because we’re so invested in our connections with others, in our relationships and in our feelings about who we are and what is real for us. It’s confronting to know that every single relationship obeys the law of change, even if we remain in a relationship for 50 years , it will not be the same relationship we entered into, nor will our relationship to that person be the same. It can be very hard to open ourselves, when we already know that everything will change, morph, fade away or die. When we love we long for permanence, not change.

Cups are seldom all the way or nothing - their lessons run too deep - we can be matured and developed in one aspect of the suit, and struggling like crazy to pull it forward into another. Because Cups are about ALL relationships, with ourselves, familial, intimate, with others, with life, we’ll always be navigating the tension of creating and maintaining balance and learning to flow with. We are tasked with being patient, adaptable and persistent, think of Chinese water torture, or the way water can wear away rock. Cups are very firm teachers about learning what we can control and what we can’t and learning to know the difference and adapt accordingly.

So in conclusion, I think Cups as a suit can be challenging to work with and read, because its so easy to skim the surface of what’s happening with them and miss out on their complexity and depth.  Cups demand emotional and relational intelligence from us, as people, and as readers. We’ve got to be willing to dive in and get messy with them. To me the trick to working with Cups is to expect complexity, nothing is all the way good, or all the way bad, and everything we feel, create, believe and love is subject to flow and change, whether we like it or not.