January 14, 2010 - The Eight of Teacups

Again and again this image comes up in my readings. The message is clear -- seek your personal truth and move on. Yes, there's an aspect of low energy, weariness, loss and lack of hope. But mostly it seems this is a card of moving on, finding my way, to where ever I need to be. The question is where do I move on from. Is it the life I'm living now? The life I dreamed of, maybe still hope for? I have no sense anymore of the direction I need to go. I flow like a river these days, drawn by natural forces I have no control over. And maybe this is always the way we are, the belief we choose, we make our way merely that, belief.

I do know that people are beginning to push me to do things, be things, that no longer call to me. I also know I won't do them, be them. I try to nicely dissemble, dissuade, but when I can't, I am resolute. No. Maybe this is where I need to be. It certainly is where I am.

In the Jane Austen Tarot, this card is depicted by Fanny Price leaving Mansfield Park. She is being punished for refusing the proposal of Henry Crawford, a charming young man but too easily swayed, too lacking in depth, for one as thoughtful and moral as Fanny. The carriage she is in is taking back to her childhood home, a place of poverty, a place she never truly fit in and certainly doesn't now, after years of education and experience at Mansfield Park.

Here's what Diane Wilkes writes about this card: "The growth you will experience on every level is necessary for your development now, even if it includes sacrifice and loss....Life is a series of paths and transitions. Each choice we make, each new path we take, involves giving up at least one thing in order to create room for something else, something greater, something that will expand our worldview. When we have achieved that necessary and new knowledge, it will be time to take another journey, forge a new path. Sometimes, as in the case of Fanny, it seems a return to the known; Fanny does make her way back to Mansfield park. But she is not the same girl; the new Fanny has gained much in the way of self-confidence and self-understanding. She is more appreciated than she had been before, and, when she marries Edward Bertram, she becomes a permanent and true denizen of Mansfield Park."

May it be so.