Time in a Cup

Tarot card: Five of Cups

The painful losses that are sometimes associated with the 5 of cups is closely related to the perceptions we saw yesterday with the knight of coins.

Change is enevitable. It is the one thing in life we can true count on. It is normal, natural, and expected to regret losing the things that give us pleasure. No one wants to lose someone or something they truly love.

This card does not, in any way, chide or contradict us for mourning our losses. If anything it acknowledges and validates that normal sense of grief and mourning. There is nothing wrong with reminiscence and honoring past experiences, past feelings. There is nothing wrong with the normal mourning process. If anything, problems come when we rush or suppress that process. Some people are hardwired to work through it in an eyeblink. Others take more time to recover. Another way things can go wrong is if the process is stalled...when we become interminably inconsolable.

When the 5 of cups comes along, it also asks us to look at our mental outlook and mind-set. The knight of coins reminds us of the power we have to co-create our world through our perception of our world. The 5 of cups is a bit more specific. It looks at the unavoidable, it is a hand on the shoulder recognizing the pain being felt, and offers a bit of human sympathy and commisuration.

If the 5 of cups resonates with you today, what is it you miss, mourn or have lost? Are you allowing yourself to feel the loss, and grieve as you need? Are you wallowing in the loss, so much so that this card has come to remind you that loss is normal, natural, but can not stop us from living?

When change comes, I like to think of time - in a quantum physics sort of way. Time is a whole thing...all time exists all at once. We just experience one thread of it one moment at a time. The rest of it is still out there.

I like to think of it as spinning yarn or thread. And collapsing probability waves.

The past still exists, our consciousness has just moved beyond it, like yarn we've already spun and is in the center of a ball of yarn behind us...we don't see it, it is wrapped up and obscured by more recent events - we can't touch see or experience it, but it is there. We can touch it and experience it only through love and memory, but it is still there.

The future has infinite possibilities...many, many fibers and filaments for us to choose...the future is a whole entire field of cotton. It too exists, right now, all at once. Through our choices, we select from all the possible fibers, and spin them into our NOW. We choose, we collapse the future possibilities into the tangible present. In the next second that bit of spinning becomes part of the past, part of the yarn we have created.

The life we spin is ever changing. It is hard to move down the thread and let the past threads go, especially those we most cherish.

It is exciting to know we can spin the most beautiful yarn we can from the cotton we are given.

If we cling to old yarn, the thread becomes tangled as the new is spun...the spinning wheel never stops...so long as there is life, there is movement and change.

Loss hurts...but what is ever really lost? Material things are impermanant anyway. The memories they contain are ours forever, with our without them. The past still exists just outside our grasp, but love that is felt never fades. The golden time still exists where it was, no matter how things are now. Golden times may yet come, may yet be spun from shining new fibers.

Circumstances change. People leave. Feelings change and fade. Love may spin farther away in time and space, but it is never lost. We sense it in a different way, as it touches our heart in a different way. Different isn't lost. Different isn't gone.

How you spin, and the life you weave is up to you. The memories, the love is always yours.