Finding the Spring Sun
Many days, I pull tarot cards. Usually, I don’t even have a pressing, specific question and I’m not turning to the cards for guidance or answers: it’s more like a tool I use to prompt myself to think about topics that might not come up naturally on their own, or dig down deeper into areas I am already mulling over. It starts me on a journaling journey, or gives me something to focus on during a meditation session, or just a vibe to come back to when I need to ground myself at moments throughout my day.
Yesterday for the Equinox, I thought I would pull some cards and used a spread from a creator whose spreads I have often found to be gently awakening in a good way. I pulled from the Heartscape Tarot, a deck I often work with when I don’t want my interpretations to be entirely driven by people and faces, so that they feel more loose and abstract. This combo did not disappoint, and gave me plenty to think about.
The card I ultimately focused in on was the 6 of Cups, partly because it seemed to fit the feelings that had emerged as I refreshed my altar for the arrival of Spring. Partly because it didn’t quite match the flow of the other cards as I interpreted them together. And partly because, well. It is a card that references grief.
If you’re familiar with the tarot, and you subscribe to the idea that the tarot cards within each suit can be read as a sort of journey—that each card builds on or is related to the cards around it—then maybe you already know that the 6 of Cups can be interpreted as referring to the joy available to a person who has gone through a very hard thing, when they start to see the world with new eyes. If you are a person who has experienced the death of a loved one, for instance, when you start to return back to community and see the world with those eyes, the magic in the world might become more clear, more bright, more colorful. People who have experienced the profound grief associated with an especially impactful loss often talk later about how losing that loved one helped them to understand how beautiful life is, how to better appreciate all that they have and experience, and not take those things for granted.
I could not stop thinking about how this card felt like a beautiful analogy for the emergence of Spring itself. If winter is the hard thing—the death—then the first, delicate and precarious days of Spring can be thought of akin to that moment when a mourning person first starts to see how the death they have experienced colors their everyday life with new, vivacious light.
Winter is a time when we seek comfort: we drape ourselves in cozy blankets, put a little extra butter on our toast, and seek quiet or solitude, or maybe just to only be in the company of those we love most and who see us the most clearly. This is true also for grievers: many seek comfort, solace, quiet. We bring them casseroles and soups and feel inclined to wrap them in our arms and lend them our warmth. And, to me, this is also like the soil. Keeping animals safe in their underground burrows, protecting the seeds buried there until the weather is hospitable to growth, filled with the potential for nourishment and life—for renewal. A beginning again of ancient cycles that are so deeply ingrained in the seeds and the roots that they don’t even think about it.
Spring is an emergence from the cocoon of Winter. The seeds shed their hard coats and push their way into the light, delicate and vulnerable but resilient and driven to live. Grief too, is a cocoon. It seems so cliché, that phrase, but there’s a truth to it. It changes you over a period of time, turning you into something soft and malleable, rearranging your parts into something that looks and sounds like you but might be very different on the inside. And when you emerge, all in due time, you are renewed, just like the seeds emerging in the spring. You might seek the light to remind you what it feels like to live, to have purpose and drive. And just like the seeds, or even Spring itself, you are vulnerable and delicate—subject to cold blustery days and late unexpected frosts, hailstorms and flooding. Still needing a bit of comfort—a greenhouse or a row cover, or extra light from an artificial source.
So this new growth happens in fits and starts, and that’s ok. Because just like the rest of the natural world, we too are beings that are always somewhere in a cycle—evolving, learning and processing. Each experience, both good and bad, welcomed or abhorred, is a mechanism by which we learn lessons from the world around us, so that we can get through the remainder of our days with a little bit better an idea of what, exactly, we are doing here. Having to re-learn the world after a major loss is no exception to this. It takes weeks, months even, for the brain to re-wire itself when something suddenly isn’t where we expect it to be—people included. That internal rearranging takes energy and time. It’s not to be hurried, is instead to be nourished with grace and understanding.
When Spring first emerges, there’s no hard boundary between it and the preceding Winter, just as there is no hard line between a period of immediate grief and it morphing into the rest of your life. Winter and Spring blend together for days and sometimes weeks on end, fighting with each other so that only gradually do we fully trust that sunnier days are here to stay for a while.
This is where the 6 of Cups comes back in. It’s a card that reminds us to eventually find a balance between feelings of grief and experiences of joy. It asks us to give ourselves grace during a vulnerable time, to allow a little light in here and there, and when the time feels right, to shed your hard seed coat, to wake up from hibernation, from re-calibration, to emerge from your grief cocoon and test out your new eyes. Use them to look for moments where the magic of the world is evident, is on full display, and begin to celebrate the life you still have ahead of you—each and every precious day of it. It’s not asking you to forget what you have endured, forget the experiences of the past that have changed you and marked you, but instead to look on those moments with that new set of eyes, to give yourself the space and time to see them as an integral part of who you are now, to let them be incorporated into yourself in a way that allows for the possibility of something beautiful growing from the soil.
I want to close by asking: How can we let ourselves grow this Spring? So many of us are experiencing a time of deep grief: for losses or changes in our own lives, and for what we collectively are losing to climate disruption, systemic violence, and multiple genocides happening in front of our eyes. Our communities are under threat and in the midst of upheaval, with an accompanying loss of safety for so many of us and our loved ones and neighbors.
How can we emerge from the soil, the hibernation of Winter having rearranged us in a way that allows us to see moments of joy and beauty, and also gifts us with a renewal of purpose, driven by a desire to live and thrive—not just survive in the darkness? How can we let the sun wake us up, and imbue us with a new drive to build something better and effect real change, having learned from the experiences of our collective past?
