By Sarah Taylor
We have an all-Cups reading this week, which means that there are a lot of feelings around — and a lot of feelings about love in particular, given the messages of the three cards in front of us. However you choose to define that “love” is also how you define your experience of your feelings.
It might be worth it to take a few moments to consider what you feel love is, and how you choose to live it out both as an act of self-definition, and as a means of relating to everyone and everything around you. It is this particular energy — the energy of Cups — that is prevalent. It has the ability to reveal itself in ways both subtle and concrete.
Talking of concrete, how about that structure in the central card, the Five of Cups? The Five of Cups, or “Disappointment,” is the petrification of something that was once living. It is the loss of vivacity of a feeling — here, love — that, like water itself, is devoted to movement and to the allowing of flow. Love is not something that can be bonded to one’s will. When you attempt to do that, it isn’t love that is held captive; it is your experience of love and life itself. Disappointment in love creates hearts of stone, when in fact love is a force that is anything but cold, hard, unyielding.
The Five of Cups is what happens when the path of love, and our ideas about what love should be, are at odds with each other. One of the phrases on the Five of Cups is “problematic relationship.” But “problematic” by whose standards? By love’s? Or by what you believe is happening in the moment? Where does love want to flow? Where could you be stopping that flow, or willing it to flow elsewhere?