I'm beginning to realize that it's not enough to know what I need to know but how to get there. The question "What do I need to know today...." only gets me so far. The devil, they say, is in the details, and the Five of Cups is the details. I'm developing a better sense of the depth of the Minor Arcana these days. The big picture is important. They are the horizon. But the Minor Arcana are the small, everyday acts that make up our days, they are the step by step path to get us there. The World is a lovely card, about integrating, accomplishing, healing, savoring. It is a card of blessing and of knowing it, feeling it. When it shows up in a reading it tells you that you are close to achieving your heart's desire. It represents the kind of gift that's earned, something you've worked hard for, given much to get more. It is the last card of the Major Arcana, but not really for The Fool is truly the Alpha and the Omega and frankly any place along life's path it wants to be.
In the Jane Austen Tarot, The World is represented much as it is in the Rider-Waite - a flowering circle, the four elements in each corner. The woman or androgyne in the Rider-Waite Tarot is replaced by the loving couple, Emma Woodhouse and George Knightley. In Jane's world though, a woman dancing alone would not be a happy ending, and I suppose the same is true of mine. According to Diane Wilkes, the author of the Jane Austen Tarot, "The scene depicted in this card is the wedding of two souls who have grown in harmony with themselves and with one another. The flowering bush symbolizes not just their love, but also the garden of lives in bloom, despite and because of the travails of the world."
"Great," I think. "Worldly success. Happiness. Fulfillment." The best you could ask for in a reading. Then why is it so hard to imagine where I am and how I will possibly today get to this card, the World? I'm not in "The World" kind of space. Which leads me to ask the second question, the vital one, "how do I get there?" I want to be grateful. I want to be fulfilled. I want the wholeness The World card represents, the happiness implied in the Jane Austen Tarot's interpretation.
My "how" of today is the Five of Cups. I think the representation in the Rider-Waite Tarot, that dark, cloaked figure sorrowing over the three spilled cups, ignoring or forgetting the two still standing, is pretty fitting, much more appropriate to my circumstances than the Jane Austen Tarot depiction of George Wickham recounting his "sad" story to Elizabeth Bennett. Have I been guilty of dwelling on the worst of the last years as opposed to the best? Yes. Has my grief at times bordered on the extreme? Yes. I am reminded today of my Grandmother when my grandfather died. She would be conversing with us, living her life, and someone would knock on the door, a friend come to commiserate, and my Grandmother would switch to sorrow, not just tears, but wails that wold last the visit, and then she would be back to Grandma. This was how she channeled her grief and how space was made for it in her society, something we don't really have here. I had to get on with things, to keep a stiff upper lip, to keep working, keep mothering, doing all the things I needed to do, all the things people expected of me. My tears came in the late hours, in the dark, in the shower, in the few places that were mine alone. But time has passed and I wonder if grief has becomes more habit and history, than something real and deep. I wonder if I have found my own way to my Grandmother's drama and now it's time to move on.
What Would Jane Do?
"Life, by its very nature, contains disappointments both minor and severe. A sensitive person is likely to exaggerate the former and wallow in the latter. Look at your current situation and determine if you are truly giving yourself an appropriate and necessary time to grieve -- or if your response is out of proportion to the specific situation in question. It may even be necessary to examine your own role in your current state of unhappiness; unless you wish to make bewailing your state of affairs your modus operandi, you may want to break patterns of behavior that have kept you in less than sanguine circumstances."
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