Tarot Journey

Tarot journey part 3

The next card I pulled on my Tarot journey was the five of cups. In this card, a woman looks toward the viewer, clothed in royal robe, with blue pomegranates decorating her train. Three cups lay on the ground, and two remain upright. The woman stands at the top of the valley with a beautiful lake below her, a swan gliding in the smooth grey waters. A castle sits in a valley amidst rolling stone hilltops on the other side of the lake, far below and behind her. I decided to seek a spot beside water, and chose to sit by the river at our local park.

I walked along the riverbank until I found a relatively calm space in the river. Finding a comfortable place to sit in the grass, I dangled my legs over the steep rise of land perched above the rushing river. The water level is obviously higher than I remember it as a child; I used to try and catch crabs on the sandbank which used to sit below my feet. I used to run around, and sit atop, the mammoth boulder which is now only peeking above the river 100 feet from me.
The five of cups is an interesting card. It speaks of loss and regret in an emotional, as opposed to a financial, sense. The picture is sad and regretful because hopes and dreams have been broken – life does not always turn out as planned. Cups lay fallen, scattered, at the querent’s feet... but there are still two standing, and the two standing cups speak of hope rising out of the ashes.

It has been a long time since I have been a little girl running in the park. The journey has been a long one and I have had my share of pain. I learned a lot of lessons which did not seem great at the time, but which eventually helped me to consider the world with a greater understanding of the struggles in it. Life is not easy, not controllable, and not a fairy tale. Change happens, hurt happens, death happens. As Buddhists maintain, "life is suffering". Yet, a beautiful thing happens when we stop struggling against it and accept these truths. In the moment between breaths, we have an opportunity to appreciate life in a way that is not possible when life is taken for granted. When I have been able to live in the moment, to accept things as they are and not as I want them to be, I have had the opportunity to experience a peace and joy I have had at no other time.

Many years ago, I had an ectopic pregnancy, which is where the egg grows inside the Fallopian tube. When the egg gets big enough, the egg can rupture the tube, which can lead to death. I was unaware I was pregnant, and this nearly happened to me. I ended up in the ER in severe pain. Afterwards, I heard that this experience has been likened to childbirth. I maintain that it was much worse. I lay on the ER table barely able to breathe for what seemed like hours, waiting for a surgeon to be called in. I was completely consumed by my pain, or more to the point, struggling to escape the pain. I struggled for so long that I finally gave up the fight, and just accepted it. As strange as it is to say now, the next time a spasm came on, I tried to immerse myself in it - I explored how each fibre if my body was feeling, and when I found pain, I allowed myself to be present in it. I learned something that has always stuck with me. When I accepted the pain and was present within it, the experience was not so bad. In fact, I stopped even labelling it as pain. It had been the running - the attempted escape - that made the experience so excruciating.

I am forever grateful for life lessons such as these - although I would not want them repeated! It was not bravery that made me face my physical pain but a lack of options - yet I learned in that moment the importance of acceptance and mindfulness when facing pain inherent in life. The acceptance has helped me confront much difficulty in my life, and I learned that emotional pain is really not much different in this regard than physical.

When we are brave enough to face the pain that is an inevitable part of life, we find that it is not as bad as we feared.  When we sit in the present, spilled cups and all, we have the opportunity to get past the pain and move forward.

Like the castle that is the woman's home in the five of cups, the woman looks back toward home. But we can't ways go back, and even if we did, things would be different. The world does not wait for us, and too often, regret and sadness arise from our attachment to our past. The key to making it through that pain is acceptance of the present, because often, not all the "cups", our hopes, dreams, and wishes, have been spilled. With a last, backward glance, we can survey ourselves and our surroundings, and move forward with hope for the future and a peace that only comes when we accept our present.