The Eight of Cups 2/1/26

This week’s card is the very complex Eight of Cups. I like this card, personally. I find it very interesting and very insistent.

The Eight of Cups is all about your truth and reflecting on your life as it is in the present. That can seem a bit daunting, but it’s actually quite freeing.

The figure in the card is on a journey. The mountains in the distance cut by a body of water that he has just crossed, leaving eight cups standing on the opposite side of the stream. Why would he leave those cups behind? They look to be of value, yet he has set them carefully on the shore and walked away.

This card can be taken as losing something of value, but I don’t see it that way. I look at this card as something of a sorting. The figure hasn’t dropped them, he’s been careful in how he leaves them. That’s because he’s evaluated each cup individually and decided that they no longer serve him.

As we begin to see the beginning of Spring on the horizon after a long and dark winter season, it’s time to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going. We need to look at each cup and decide…

“Do I really need this now? Or have I moved on from what it holds? Does carrying this cup serve me?”

When we do this, we lighten our own load. We carry only what will aid us on our journey. If you’ve ever gone on a hike, you know that you don’t take as much as possible. You take what you really need. What will truly help you make it to the end of the trail.

This is also a truth telling card. We need to tell ourselves the truth about our journey. Where we’ve been. What we’ve seen. What we want to learn from those things and what we don’t need to remember. What things do we carry that we should have set down years ago? Or maybe yesterday.

Imagine your backpack on this life journey. What do you have in it? Old pain? Old joy? Remembrances of those who went before you? People that are no longer in your life that only hurt you? Or the ones who lifted you up when you most needed it and that memory gives you courage?

Look at the path in front of you. It may be very easy right now, but it could become rougher, more strenuous. You know that you can’t carry the weight of the world. You need people and things that make life easier or offer you help when you need it.

You can’t carry the horse you loved as a kid, but you can carry a picture of it and feel the joy you felt while riding. The person who left you in tears and devastation doesn’t need to be there, dragging you down and forcing you to relive that pain, over and over again. But you can take a few of the petals of the flowers that your best friend brought you to cheer you up and remember the caring and love flowed easily from that friend to your broken heart.

We all have many cups we carry. Some with good things in them, and some not so good. There are some we should never leave behind. The containers that hold the memories of those who went before us and the loved ones we lost should never be left behind. They molded us in so many different ways.

But the grief that we felt at first can be left. Grief never truly goes; it transforms into something precious. But the intense grief we felt at first, that grief that left us broken and bereft, can be. We felt it, it changed us, it no longer serves us to hold onto it.

Keep the lessons learned, let go of the ones that no longer need to be used. We don’t need to relearn that stoves are hot. We need to remember that heat can fire our passion or burn our fingers; that we must use it carefully and wisely.

There is a need to accept endings and change. We need to gracefully walk away from that and accept closure. Look into those cups and seek the deeper meaning they offer. Then let go of the cups we no longer have to carry. It allows us to stop dwelling on the depths, to look up and see the light ahead. The Sun and The Moon shed their light on your journey, follow that light. Much like The Star told us last week, there is light ahead and we must focus on it and only carry what we truly need.

Be honest with yourself. What do you really need? It’s tough, but the results are so freeing.