disappointment
Five of Cups
The fives in the tarot are tricky. They are right in the middle of the cycle of each suit. They depict the messy middle, the unresolved. In this case, with the cups, the feeling suit, there is disappointment, regret, and sometimes grief. What it makes me consider this morning is disappointment in myself, when I don’t meet my own expectations or desires. Of late I’ve been trying to check all the boxes, get back in my groove. I haven’t been writing enough, exercising enough, working enough, cooking enough. Enough, enough, enough. I have felt like the figure above, hunched over and looking at my cups of spilled red wine. Literally.
I started drinking wine again, with some purpose, earlier this year It crept back into my home, into my daily life, after work, out to dinner. It is so easy. I’m surrounded by drinkers, my best local friends, my husband, coworkers, and I even began drinking a glass or two of wine by myself in the evenings, watching tv and knitting or scrolling social media. I thought I had dealt with my “habit” a few years ago, and was now a solid “social” drinker again, content to moderate.
I think that’s how my grandmother started decades ago. Drinking was a natural part of upper middle class Brooklyn Heights social activity. The parties, dinners, concerts, bookended by cocktails before and after. My father told me that after his father died suddenly when he was only fifteen, leaving my grandmother to finish raising him and figure out the rest of her life, the drinking got worse. It was a reaction I’m sure to widowhood and uncertainty. It is insidious. It sneaks up on you, becomes a friend, something you can count on, until it doesn’t.
It would be easy to write about the Five of Cups in a purely academic way. I can cite my sources and talk about how different decks depict this card. But the fives ask us to be personal, to take it personally. Today I do. I try not to see Kim Krans’ horse below, hanging his head in shame. I prefer to see it as regret. But both the RWS and WU Five of Cups show cups still standing. There is always hope in these cards, these fives, and in fact, all seventy-eight cards in the tarot. The RWS figure can turn around and look at the cups still standing. The horse can raise his head and look up. When I tell people there are no bad cards in the tarot I really mean it. But that doesn’t mean that the cards don’t show us the full spectrum of human experience, which includes, sadness, regret, disappointment, anger and on and on. If all the cards were “happy,” I would have lost interest long ago.
You cannot unspill the wine. That is the message of Five of Cups. But you don’t need to spill any more. You can turn around, raise your head, and see the beauty of the cups still standing. And start again. And that is enough. You are enough. That phrase has become a platitude, a cliche. But our reactions to not feeling enough, the reactions which come from being hungry, angry, lonely and tired, lead us to spill the wine. So cliche or not, this is a reminder I won’t be embarrassed to write right here right now. Unwanted habits are complicated. I don’t consider myself an addict or an alcoholic. Those terms are labels which don’t serve me. But I am a person who will be happier if I don’t drink alcohol. I come from a family who abused substances. My grandmother with alcohol, my mother with food. Whether or not it is genetic is beside the point to me. I know I learned early how to cope and soothe with substances, and that’s a tough unlearn.
My dear dear friend Erin Jean Warde says in her new book Sober Spirituality :
“Drinking has tremendous stigma around it, in part because society places so much of the blame on the individual. But in the midst of a swirl of studies, hear this: your relationship with alcohol is not in a vacuum. There’s a reason you’ve been taught what you’ve been taught, there are reasons you have needed to cope, there are core messages telling you alcohol is a necessary part of a flourishing human life, and this is not your fault.” (p. 41-2)
These fives are tricky. I am tricky. You are tricky. These cards are archetypes, but they are also personal and as the Hegelian dialectic promises, this is how progress is made. Progress over perfection, a process over a project. With these beautiful cards we look out at the world, then we look inside and receive messages. I’ll receive my own message this morning with this tricky Five of Cups.
xoHanna
mmmm, how beautiful