IDS Day 48: Four and Five of Cups

I did a daily read yesterday and it went awful! I couldn't make much sense of it and I was so discouraged that I didn't bother with my deck study. A bout of insomnia had me watching television until well after 2 am, and wouldn't you know it, the universe had some advice for me! The last two shows I watched had tarot themes. One was a weird musical episode set in a tarot realm where the Fool guided our two heroines (the High Priestess and...the Empress?) through a journey. The King of Swords was there! There were cups and pentacles and wands! The Hanged Man, the Wheel, and Justice all made an appearance! And all the while the two heroines had no idea what symbolism was going on around them. Then the very next show I turned to had a subplot about a kid finding a tarot deck at a flea market (or somesuch) and learning to read with it. Thinking back on the shows this morning, I realized that what they had in common was a complete naivety about the cards and finding meaning anyway.

Lately I've started relying on other sources to help me interpret my daily spreads rather than figuring them out myself. No wonder I'm so frustrated with this study! I've become so accustomed to looking at what other people have decided a card means that I get stuck when I run into a card that doesn't fit into one of those interpretations. So this evening I read with a cup of tea and the lovely sound of the album "Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place" by Explosions in the Sky, without the aid of books or websites. It went so much better.

Four of Cups
It's warm and sunny out but the "meditative" bunny doesn't notice under his tree. He has three cups, but they don't appear to interest him. The Ace brings him a 4th cup full of possiblities, but he is unmoved. Rabbit isn't meditating, he is complacent and bored. At worst he's unobservant, but the way there appears to be a physical (albeit invisible) partition between bunny and the cups suggests it's intetional.

Five of Cups
Cloaked bunny has spilled 3 cups and she looks pretty embarassed. This card is typically about loss or strife, emotional grief. Another layer I see here though is fault and the advice not to cry over spilled milk, so to speak. So you screwed up? Two more cups are still hanging around. Tend to those rather than fretting over the 3 which are empty.