Let your cup overflow: Six of Cups 🌼
Tarot reading for the week of 12/12/22 🍹Community support and mutual aid.
Here I am in sunny southern California. And here I will stay until February.
After travelling for two weeks my beloved and I arrived at his family home and have posted up. Time to secure a job. But first, take a breath. And bask in the publishing of my poems in the wonderful Boshemia mag.
After last week’s full moon, which asked us to look both forward and backward, I can feel the energy of this month waning in time with the moon. The slowing of these winter months is essential. For coming into the next year with enough energy to really take it on and because we all need a break sometimes.
This week I’ll be looking for a job to support myself while I stay here but more importantly I’ll be reconnecting with friends who I lost touch with over the course of our road trip. The card of this week symbolises this feeling perfectly.
Tarot for the week of 12/12/22: Six of Cups
Gosh, I love this card. The message, the imagery, the overflow.
I think this card balances so beautifully the importance of community care as opposed to self-care. Not that self-care doesn’t have its place, we all need to feel supported and resourced, to fill our cup first. But the six of cups reminds us that the point of filling our own cup is to eventually be able to fill the cups of others. To have enough energy and compassion to provide for them.
Cups are associated with the element of Water, they symbolise emotions, feelings, the ebb and flow of moods. The sixes in the Tarot mean the formation of a community. In the fives, we find peers and try out our mettle against them, and in the sevens we get lost in the weeds of a task, committing to it fulling in the eights. So in the flow of the numbers, six is all about building a community that not only supports you in your journey but to whom you can provide support.
The two characters in this card have childlike proportions, which suggests coming into any exchange with innocence. Not expecting anything from it. Around them are six full cups, overflowing with flowers. They are situated in the town square which also screams community to me. They are the only cups card that I can think of that are filled with such clear abundance. Other cards show cups filled with water or even items meant to trick you. But this card is so clear. Through community, we will find abundance. It also makes me think of this iconic tweet.
And that shit’s coming, or so it feels. As capitalism destroys communities and partitions off aspects of care that would be done within villages and sells them back to us, taking a step away can be vital. This is not to say that people shouldn’t be paid for their labour, or compensated for the countless jobs that are undervalued, but more that we should work on creating a world where people who do any job can survive. In creating a community, based on the empathy and compassion of the Cups, we make ourselves less susceptible to imperialist white-supremacist capitalism.
But how do we do that? How do we build bridges and forge relationships with those around us? How do we do it in a way that feels both fulfilling and fair?
We each have our own role to play in forging a new better world. Learning practical skills and offering them to those without is always good, but so is creating the blueprint for said world. Artists are needed to lay the foundation for a fairer world, creating visions that make that future more enticing by the second. And then it’s on all of us to work towards a vision, to act in this moment as if we are in that future. A fairer, more just one. If we act now as if we have abundant time and compassion, then we slowly make this future possible.
But what’s your role in it all? This card asks us to conder just this.
Finding your role in community: A Tarot Ritual
Take some time to think about what kind of community you want to be a part of.
There is much to be said for finding a community of ‘place’, building strong connections where you reside, and learning to work with others despite your differences. Other communities can for online or over-shared hobbies or interests.
Think or write about the world you want to create. For yourself, for your descendants (related or otherwise). Think of what community you need to make this happen.
As you are envisioning the community you want and the world you want to build begin to shuffle your deck. If you have an app rather than a physical deck, concentrate on this idea as the app shuffles.
Work through your deck until you find the Six of Cups. Look at the cards on either side of it.
These two cards are the two skills or driving forces you bring to the community. By harnessing and working with both of them you will be able to build what you have been dreaming of.
Write/journal/record a voice note about what each of the cards brings up for you and how you can implement their lessons.
Act on it. Build something.
I am always so interested to hear what you pull in your own tarot readings and would love to help you interpret for this one too. Leave a comment with the cards you pulled and your vision for a future community.
Speaking of community I am thinking of opening up the chat feature on this newsletter so that you can get in touch with tarot pulls and interpretations. Let me know if you think that’s a good idea.