Tarot - Eight of Cups (First Posted July 10, 2011)

To feel splendour (to feel the sensation of a peacock's tail fanning gloriously open inside you) in the suit of cups – also recognized as the “realm of water” and, by another name, as the “world of feeling” – is to detect what feeling is lost/buried/missing, to don your scarlet cape and boots and draw on the magnificence of your courage to journey deep within to seek and engage it. 

If you look deep enough, and if you are honest enough with yourself,  you will discover your full complement of feelings isn't complete until you seek, wrestle with, claim and bring to light your feeling of "despair" - the very feeling you normally seek to avoid. 

Why would this be so?  Why does setting out under the pale glimmer of the moon into the dark shadows of your inner recesses to bring forth your feeling of abject hopelessness eventually result in you feeling splendour?

It's because to dwell in the "world of feelings" is to be in the place where you feel the internal energetic and unceasing presence of your greatest hopes, your wildest dreams and your burning desires.  And so, of course, what you try to keep hidden from yourself is your feeling of despair (of ever materializing all this that feels as essential to your life as the very blood running through your veins).

So, it takes the mustering of all your courage to choose to retrieve your feeling of despair, bring it forth and allow it to occupy the space midst all you hold dear knowing it eternally threatens to sear you to the bone before knocking you to the ground and draining you of your most cherished feelings which brightly colour your existence and - greater still - give you a reason for living.

However, by deliberately exposing your hopes, dreams and desires to your feeling of despair (that they can ever be realized) you go a long way to fully claiming your citizenship in the "realm of water" which, in turn, leads to a feeling of splendour blazing across your being. 

For, in the Suit of Cups it is both your privilege and your duty to "feel it all" and grasping the thorn of despair not only provides balance (albeit through introducing suffering) it makes that which it threatens all the more precious.

Now move forward from here  ...