Five of Cups ~ No Feeling is Final

Five of Cups ~ Tarot de St. Croix by Lisa St. Croix

Late night Tarot work is the best kind of Tarot work 🌚 The house is silent and there are no calls on my attention save what's in front of me.

The Five of Cups has been following me around the past couple of weeks. I think I've pulled it four times at least. I often think of it as the 'self-pity' card but as I looked more closely at this depiction of it from the Tarot de St. Croix the triple moons on the Cups began to really stand out. Combined with the fact that we're working with the water element here which is about flow, about movement and a slightly different understanding began to emerge.

I realized that this card has to do with being so caught up in the negative that you forget that 'this too shall pass.' You forget that emotions and feelings have a season and cycle like everything else. They wax and wane just as the moon does. What this card really speaks to is nature's law of mutability and our reactions to it.

In that vein those two upright Cups across the river, with their triple moons, their nod to the ebb and flow of our emotions, their cycles, speak less to the idea that there are always blessings to be counted and more to the fact that 'no feeling is final'. And what we see in this card is a woman so wrapped up in her state that she's lost sight of this basic law, impermanence. Her contracted body cloaked in the density of black fabric, her back to us, speaks of someone utterly absorbed, holding on even, to their emotional body with their physical body. Because of course the two are intertwined. The emotions have their home in the body, in our tissue and tendons, muscle and fascia such that when our bodies move and flow freely, generously, our emotions can move and flow with the same kind of freedom and generosity.

It only requires the figure in this card to yield to the natural movement and flow that is life, to make space for it by not holding on, simply by looking up and outwards and recognizing that these difficult feelings, like all feelings, 'too, shall pass'.