Eight of Cups

A figure walks away from the viewer, back turned against the eight cups standing in the foreground. Some are upright, some have fallen, but all are ignored by the subject as they walk off into the distance.

The Eight of Cups is a melancholy card; it’s that moment when the growth you’ve been really wanting to not have takes root, and you move on from your old ways of being. Or that moment when you finally overcome a struggle, only to realize that your destination is not the laurels of victory, but the road ahead. It’s not necessarily nostalgia, because you realize you could not have stayed where you were; you likely don’t even really want to have stayed there. But it was good, or at least familiar, while it lasted, and that mountain ahead is a little forbidding, even if the trail is clear and the call to climb is strong.

What situations in your life are no longer tenable? What mountains do you need to climb? Which habits or ways of being are no longer appropriate to who you are? Or to who you want to become? How can you take those first steps forward toward your destiny? How do you appreciate what has come before, while still turning to what comes next?