Tarot Card for Today: Six of Cups reversed
Two children in springtime surrounded by abundance. Flowers are blooming everywhere, the grass and trees are rich green, and it’s a bright day. Behind them sits a cozy cottage with a soldier nearby guarding some fenced in area—there is safety here. Some things are simply off limits to this space. The boy is giving the girl a cup, one of the six cups, and it’s full of white lilies. They are both calm and happy. It’s safe. Nostalgia wafts out of this card.
Although the story depicted suggests one of generosity—giving and receiving—it’s also about childhood. Our memories of former times and our relationship with those memories. How do we treat those memories? Do they keep us from acting in the present? Are we stuck there? Or do they enrich our lives?
As the card is reversed, this leads me to think about relationships with the self and how we think about ourselves in the present based on the past. This seems to be a theme coming up with all these reversals (maybe this is my own lesson I need to learn: attend to the self). How are we generous with ourselves? Are we open to those moments of sweetness? Do we let them enrich our present? Our lives moves so fast these days and we tend to go on autopilot, mindlessly completing tasks just to get them done. Maybe there are moments in our days that are full of generosity but we’re missing them because we’re failing to be open to them in the present.
The Midwinter season can be a troubling one. Many struggle with the lack of light and many of us are fraught with tumultuous memories, good and bad mixed together. Many of those memories are from our childhood when Midwinter was most impressionable to us. For me the memories are mostly the feeling of something that I find myself yearning for now. But I can never exactly place where that feeling came from—what was going on to cause that feeling to well up in me? This leaves me feeling lost and searching, as if there was once something there, a fullness, that leaked away without my realizing it and now it’s just absence. An empty cup.
Rilke’s poem “Childhood” speaks to this fullness and absence. He cautions to “give much thought” before finding the words that would explain this loss (line 1). He says,
“back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures” (lines 9-12)
Our childhood is full of these images, the crush of the beauty of the world such that we “brim” with it. But now we are “lonely as a shepherd,” he says, and having to move on from those images is bewildering (line 13). Bewildering because we rein in our feelings and our emotions. And we must have no uncertainty. And everything Must Have a Purpose, usually a utilitarian one.
I’m remembering now last winter when my husband and I put up our first tree together. We’d sort of had one before but it was given to us last minute and we left for a week afterward, and subsequently didn’t decorate it upon return. Then the winters after that we had a kitten who would have knocked the tree over. Finally we dared to put one up, and, thinking back on it now, I have a similar impression of the lights and the dark as I do from my childhood. And it’s because I remember it in images, in the way I remember my childhood. He and I sat with the tree and the lights in the dark, let the lights flicker, and we did nothing. And I simply let myself be awed by it.
Perhaps this is something to give much thought, how we experience the world more deeply through images.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Childhood,” trans. Edward Snow. All Poetry. https://allpoetry.com/poem/8505757-Childhood-by-Rainer-Maria-Rilke.
(My Tarot deck is Llewellyn’s Classic Tarot by Barbara Moore and illustrated by Eugene Smith.)