February 2, 2010 - The Five of Cups

The last time I drew this card was December 20th, 2009. It is a card of focusing on all you've lost instead of what you have. This has pretty much been my reality for the past couple of years. It is a card of suffering a loss, feeling bereft, and experiencing regret. Check. Check. Check. Yep, me in a nutshell.

Now, I don't want to be one of those hopelessly upbeat people who preach making lemonade out of life's lemons. I've got a freezer full of lemon juice, enough for a year of lemonade stands. Nor do I want to belittle the true suffering of people who experience inconceivable losses one, after another, or just one, so profound, living on will always be tinged with regret. I come from a long line of long sufferers. I find I have gift for it. Which doesn't mean I wasn't hurt, badly, and I didn't suffer, which I did. But there is that fine line of seeing only lack, forgetting the world of good all around you.

In general, we humans tend to avoid change, struggle against it. I know I do. Once I get a status quo I like, I pretty much dig in my heals and work my butt off not to have anything upset the apple cart. The thing is change is inevitable, inexorable. It's the one thing you can count on. Relationships ebb and flow, jobs come and go, you love something and can't live without it one day, couldn't be bothered the next. As a Libran, I'm called to balance but it doesn't mean it's any easier for me. I need to learn that fine line between grief and despair, between "going with the flow" and waffling, changing with the time or changing just to change. It's a life's journey, balance, but essential.

In the Jane Austen Tarot, the Five of Cups depicts Elizabeth Bennett of Pride and Prejudice walking with George Wickham, who is telling her his sad story. Later we will learn that he is not the victim he presents himself to be. The astrological affiliation of the card is Mars in Scorpio, action and assertion awash in deep, intense emotions. Check. That would be me. The question is whether my response is commensurate with the experience. Yes there was loss but a life is so much more and this was not the permanent loss of child. It was the loss of love, something occurs myriad times a day, myriad times through a lifetime. It is the human condition. You grieve and you 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." p. 85