Day one, Ace

Today is January 1st and I pulled a tarot card to start my year off, and write about its meaning. I pulled The Ace of Cups. An ace on new years day seems fitting. The aces are the energy of the number one. Cups, the suit that fits the energy of water, of our emotions. The ace of cups relates to new emotional beginnings. The start of spiritual journeys. New relationships, springs of inspiration or intuition. I’ve had these themes in my mind lately, allowing myself to to let go of beliefs that stand in the way of my own creativity. 

The ace of cups depicts an overflowing cup. In the deck I have the cup is a golden goblet, with a heart on it. A dove is flying overhead, a coin or a button in its claws. There is a paw reaching out from a cloud (a paw because this is paw tarot after all) grasping the cup, holding it up to the sky, an offering of abundance. The cups water is overflowing into the water below, water filled with lotus flowers, lotus flowers still in various stages of bloom. 

It is a positive card. Full of hope and all the wishes we all wish for. Which feels boring to me in this moment. What is there to explore in a world of only positivity? Don’t we need adversity to grow? Why do we hold onto that pain so tight? It feels so meaningful, pain. It has shaped most of us and so letting it go feels almost like a betrayal. If I were to live the life of the ace of cups, I’d be a fraud. In a sense I would be because the ace of cups cannot exist on its own, a vacuum of new love, forever inspiration, artistic awakenings. This cannot possibly be always? Or is everything always? Everything, everywhere, all at once… 

Its reverse also exists. Trapped in the same image, just flipped. Creativity blocked. Emotions repressed. The shadow of abundance. Looking at the reversed meaning of cards shows me how mindset and perspective can operate. There is no lack of inspiration, we are constantly filled with inspiration but if we don’t feel it, it is most likely blocked, not absent. If the card is present in the reverse then its meaning is present, but observed in a different manner. 

I feel a little inept to write about this card right now. As I feel blocked. In fact today was the day I decided to free myself of that identity. Maybe that is why this card has turned up today. It is my gift for today, to explore what being blocked is, how we free our blocks and maybe even why its there and how it works. My blocks tell me I’m not creative. They tell me “Leave the creative things to the creative types”. Which is silly if you subscribe to the belief that we are a piece of creation ourselves. We grow up being told “There are creative types and non creative types”. But we do create, its like a default setting for us humans, it is this current world that has twisted our concepts of talent and made monetisation the benchmark of successful creativity, instead of allowing it to be a simple part of life. 

A vow for the New Year

Aces aren’t cards of mastery. I would see them more as cards of seeds planted. That I pulled an ace of cups reveals to me that I have planted the seeds of real emotional awareness, but I don’t recognise the tree it yet. The fruits aren’t ready for me to see. How many times in life do we begin again? Sometimes I feel like starting again is all I do. Is it because I don’t follow through? Or is it the nature of life? Constant cycles mean constant restarts. Most of the plants and trees restart every spring. Life is extremely finite here on earth and births are happening all the time. Creation appears to always want a new beginning. And here, on the 1st day of the 1st month (of our calendar) in a numerology one year, I pull a one card. And I’ve been convincing myself all my life that I’m not in tune with the world. That I’m wrong somehow. A sad concept, not only because of how dark it is to live in that place, but how ludicrous it is. We can never be separated, not from any of it. We are made of this world, literally. This isn’t a god spew, nor a woohoo ‘we are all one’ claim. It is an, actually, we are all one claim. There is only so much matter in this world, and we each hold a piece in our bodies. Our perspective holds a view of this place. Each one of us just a little drop. 

Its unfathomable, and yet, has been fathomed. All around us the impossible exists and we tremble at the idea that we are a part of it. We would rather cut ourselves off and stick to the sidelines then realise that we are as steady as the trees. We hold a place here, growing and being; just as the trees stand. We can flow like water and burn bright like flames. We exist as purely as the mountains do and came to be through the very same doors. And we go to work. Complain about bills. Bicker with and resent our partners. Because in our past, our ancestors became to afraid to live in the worlds real presence. We built systems that keep us blind to what real power is and feed us with dreams of greed, shaming us for our desires, exploiting us for our shortcomings. 

Today, on a new years day. I vow to protect this seed. To grow it and nurture it. Give it the tools and all it needs to bloom. I will use its fruit to feed the world around me and keep giving the gifts that are given to me. I do not own the seeds, I owe them. I owe it to them to grow them and I owe the gifts they give me to the world. I was a seed once myself. Grown and nurtured, I was a gift to the world. When, and why, did I stop giving?