Card of the day: Eight of Cups
What I like most about the eight of cups image is the constellation of a cup in the sky. It’s a ninth cup in the image, though it’s the eight of cups card. The constellation of course holds the symbolism of stars as literal guides by compass; but it’s also an empty cup, an outline, waiting to be filled. What is our guide at this time? What choices do we need to make to fill our cups…or have them filled?
Change involves reaching toward something new and letting go of something old. The image shows a man leaving behind his eight cups and following his star for the ninth. His path his headed straight into mountains, so there is both adventure and challenge in the change, in coming and going. The story suggests a need to say no to something, finally, whether it’s something that habitually crops up or simply that it’s not easy to say no and care for the self. Or maybe we’re ready to learn something new. But saying no won’t be easy, for the mountains are steep.
Sometimes we grieve even before we’ve actually let go or lost something or someone. In Jennifer Grotz’s poem “Staring into the Sun” she points to how though we may be letting go of something or someone, and there will be grief, what we are letting go will still be a part of who we are. She says, “Only then did we know. How it felt/to have loved to the end, and then past the end.” Though the relationship she’s describing in her poem seemed to have ended before she even left, they still held a tenderness for each other that she finally recognized at the real leaving, at the moment when she struck out on her journey. Letting go doesn’t have to be a denial of that love, but rather an acknowledgment of its truth. You can still carry it with you, just in a new way and on a new path.
There’s always an element of return when on the path of change. I’ve just spent the last semester teaching a first-year composition course where we studied the theme of the heroic journey. As it’s the time of finals, and many students have expressed how they are thinking about returning home to their “ordinary worlds,” about what has changed in them as well as what might have changed in their own homes and circle of relations. This reminds me of a song Frodo sings in The Fellowship of the Ring, chapter “Three is Company”:
Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though we pass them by today,
Tomorrow we may come this way
And take the hidden paths that run
Towards the Moon or to the Sun.
Apples, thorn, and nut and sloe,
Let them go! Let them go!
Sand and stone and pool and dell,
Fare you well! Fare you well!
Home is behind, the world ahead,
And there are many paths to tread
Through shadows to the edge of night,
Until the stars are all alight,
Then world behind and home ahead,
We’ll wander back to home and bed.
(76)
(The second stanza is perfect for this image!)
In this song, the apples and thorns, the pool and dell, are things the speaker loves that he’s leaving behind. It’s not always that we despise the things we need to let go. Sometimes the journey, the adventure fraught with challenges, is more important (and I had my students write reflectively about what they had to let go to be in college), though we may not know why we needed to go on the journey until we’ve wandered “back to home and bed.”
Gotz, Jennifer. “Staring into the Sun.” Poets.org. https://poets.org/poem/staring-sun.
Tolkien, JRR. The Lord of the Rings. 1954. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, New York. 2014.
(My Tarot deck is Llewellyn’s Classic Tarot by Barbara Moore and illustrated by Eugene Smith.)