The Page of Cups

It's time to listen to the message of your intuition. Listen, not with your mind, but with your heart and your gut. It's time to find the magic we stopped looking for. This gentle page of cups tells you to do what you need to do to go to the other side, to bring back what you find there and build something beautiful with it. Take this as you will. Be vulnerable. Cry. Laugh. Be inspired. Listen to your child within. Be gentle with your heart, because, even if you are old, it may be young and inexperienced. This is what I’m learning. This is how I am healing.

Losing my mother and friends to cancer and surrender has 'three-of-swords' torn me open to let the light in. But it's a painful rendering. Like so many humans who have beat down their emotions (often, like me, into an auto-immune disorder) an overwhelming loss becomes an opportunity for our hearts to say f*** it and finally start to acknowledge all that was pushed away or in. I've lost many people in my life, either to my parents' dramatic love lives or to death. From when I was almost four until high school I lived in a different house every year and had to make friends (or not, as I occasionally decided) at a different school. Every 3 years either my mother or father would remarry or get serious with a partner and I would be forced to integrate into a new family with new step siblings. I was known for staring at them suspiciously, often from a tree or hidden on a roof. I was the watcher. And then I would get attached, and love them, and then they were gone again. And I didn't cry. I was OK. The okay child. The people pleaser. The one you didn't have to worry about. The one who came to you after your boyfriend or mother or father hurt you. When my first older step sister left my life I didn't cry. When my older half-sister died in her early thirties I didn't cry. When my much loved step-father died while I was living in Asia at 19, I didn't cry. When his daughter vanished I didn't cry. When my fathers 6th wife, who was like my grandmother, died, I didn't cry.

All that time, starting at three years old, I built my shell around me, layer by layer. This is not good or bad. There is no good or bad. There is what you do with it and how you use it or let it control you or don't. Jonathan Koe (aka Nate Qi) on the Between The Worlds Podcast (on the page of cups ) suggests, how do we reclaim our childish ways, who were we as a child that we never got to explore? "...and how do we retrieve those parts of us that we've left behind in order to survive?" I did slowly start dismantling my walls as an adult, through the love of my partner and family, and real friends. But what is left of my shell has now completely cracked open and all those tears are gushing out, an ocean of the salt life waters. I'm like a hermit crab naked and shell less, so vulnerable. My body isn't happy about this. My chronic auto-immune gut condition flared up and won't rest even with the usual methods. The sorrow can't be tucked back in. I can only move forward, crying for everyone I've lost, even friends who have just moved on in life, as I move back through my heart through time. My emotions are innocent like the page of cups and I am careful to soothe her. I am reaching back to myself. Remembering the little me, roaming the ranch singing songs, rounds with the breezes, feeding wild grapes to the sweet goats with their strange rectangular pupils, dancing barefoot in the fields with the ladybugs. I am staying grounded for my young page of cups. And slowly I am healing.

Now I am no longer afraid

of the magic liminal space

between dreams and reality.

Now I am the lotus blossoming

On the flooded waters of this body.

Rooted down below the onslaught

Of emotions, overwhelming all thought.

Now I am the ok child seen by herself,

remembering the perfume of naked ladies,

lining the flooded road, pink arrows

pointing the way to memories,

from dream to awake and back again.