(Five of Cups, Rider Waite Smith Tarot – pictured by moi, in my garden on a Spring day)

This card is actually my favourite card in the whole entire Tarot deck.

When I first started to read, it spoke to me in a way that words could not.

When I first saw this card, I felt it’s message resound within me.

This is a card about grief.

A Minor Arcana card – this grief is by no means insurmountable.

The name of this card in the Thoth Deck, is Disappointment, and that is exactly what we see depcited.

The figure in the card is looking towards 3 spilt cups, whilst two stand behind him upright, and we assume full.

It is reminsicient of the phrase:

“No use crying over spilt milk”

His body is shrouded in a cloak, a symbol in Tarot of not wanting to be seen by others.

This man is going through a dark time, a time where he wants to be alone and in seclusion, how many would feel facing a bereavement and/or dealing with depression.

Today however, the message I receive is one more closely tied to its title of Disappointment.

I always read this card as one of past energy, something in the past has disappointed or hurt us, or we are grieving a death of a person, or end of a relationship that has already happened.

Sometimes it is even less drastic, sometimes it is simply that we did not get the job we were after, or missed out on that parking spot at the supermarket.

This card is symbolic of feeling let down in some way. Left, abandoned, hard done by.

Yet the man in the picture has a choice, whether he will turn around and pick up the two cups standing, or whether he will continue to look back at the past.

One emotion tied closely to grief is anger.

Often times we can be angry at the dead for leaving us on some level, we can also much more openly acknowledge the anger we feel when a romantic partner leaves or disappoints.

There is also anger present in this card, a kind of slow burning rage that threatens to overcome and destroy this figure from the inside out.

The only way that this anger can be resolved is through forgiveness – forgiveness of ourselves for feeling this way, and forgiveness of others and their portion of responsibility.

This is a hard energy to handle. The ‘fives’ in tarot often are.

Numerologically the 5 is about change, that uncomfortable moment of instability.

So this week we are being asked to look for ways in which we can forgive ourselves and those around us for present, but also past deeds, past circumstances, past energies.

We are being asked to face all the ways in which we are holding ourselves back by being unwilling to face and work through natural feelings of anger.

There are things in all of our pasts that we need to address.

I’m not sure why this is an important step for us right now, though I suspect it has much to do with the upcoming New Moon which I will be posting about shortly.

An often unwelcome fact of life is that we can not move forward until we have made peace with the past in some way, shape or form.

This week can you start to do that?

Much love always Txx